How traditional school became obsolete in the AI age, and why your teenager needs a completely different approach to learning.
Hi, I'm Diveej, and I need to tell you something that might be uncomfortable: the education system your teenager is in right now is setting them up to struggle.
I'm not saying this to be dramatic. I'm saying it because I've watched this problem unfold for nearly two decades, and it's only getting worse.
Here's the thing - I realized traditional school was broken back when I was actually in high school.
That was about 18 years ago, when Google was first becoming popular and everyone was saying the word "Google it" all the time. You could search for information very easily online instead of having to pull open an encyclopedia or go to the library.
I was fascinated with this new technology. And you know what I noticed? I was smarter than all of my teachers when it came to computers. They failed to adapt to that trend, and that trend continued. It didn't get any better.
Schools improved by maybe 1% every year while the whole world improved by 100% every year. So now? Schools are very, very far behind.
Let me be clear about what's actually happening right now.
AI is the biggest trend of this decade. And it's fundamentally changing two critical things that directly impact your teenager:
1. Entry-level jobs are disappearing
You need less and less people to accomplish the same result. In our own company, we can now accomplish the same amount of tasks as we could if we had 4 times the number of team members.
What this means for your child is that there are fewer and fewer entry-level opportunities. They're going into college hoping to secure a degree that lands them job security with skills that the workforce needs, but the skills that the workforce needs are changing very rapidly.
Students are going to have to compete globally, which puts them at a huge disadvantage. If there's a startup company that doesn't have a lot of money, they can hire from other countries rather than hiring someone who has completely no skills, no work experience. It's making it more competitive.
2. Kids are using AI to cheat (not to learn)
The whole school system needs to be changed because now kids are given homework, they come home, they open up ChatGPT or any other AI app, they enter in their homework assignment, they get the answer, they put the answer in the homework and they move on to playing video games all night.
They're using AI as a way to cheat and shortcut the learning process.
This is really bad because it's like going to the gym and then using robots to lift the weights for you. That makes no sense.
The point of school is to get smarter, to be able to contribute as a member of society and make the world a better place - maybe not in the sense that Elon Musk does, but in our own small way.
It became even more clear to me during the lockdowns. I had one of my family friends reach out asking me for an internship at the company Robbie and I were building.
I had a conversation with them and learned that they were not learning anything useful. Now that the world was all digital, they didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to make themselves productive, they didn't know how to find opportunities. They didn't know anything aside from watching YouTube videos.
YouTube is great, but it's also a jungle of information and it's easy to get distracted and go down the entertainment path. And it doesn't build true skill because they don't get to practice what they learn. Most of the time you forget everything unless you actually do something with it.
Let me tell you a quick story about when I graduated college.
I applied to maybe 50 or so positions, and I only got called back for a few interviews. I had no idea what it was like being a hiring manager at the time.
Here's what I didn't understand then: for each job that's open, there are probably 100 or 200 applicants trying to secure that position.
When I say your teenager is competing, they are literally competing with other applicants. They're trying to come out on top. They're trying to be the person that can solve the business problems for the job that's being hired for.
I got my first job as a Texas Instruments sales associate. That job meant reaching out to clients and selling them electronic components. I needed to know about circuit boards, which products to recommend, which components to recommend for the products they were trying to build.
When hiring managers are looking for that person, they want people who they don't have to train from ground zero. They want people who already have the basic knowledge and understanding, and then they take that person and kind of mold them to fit the job.
Yeah, I studied for it. College did help with that, but what I learned in college was mostly theory. I learned more on the job than I did in school.
And that's what's happening with new graduates now. A lot of them are kind of baffled when they actually enter the workforce.
I think schools spend too much time on core subjects like math, science, English, history. Those are super important, but by the time you get into 9th grade, you need to have an understanding of how to use the computer and understanding industries and the work that people are actually doing in day-to-day jobs inside of those industries.
Traditional schools are still focused on: Can I memorize a set of information? Can I do this theoretical formula? Can I get the answer? There's only one right answer.
That sort of thinking is very different from the type of thinking we do at work, because at work, there are multiple right answers. You have to pick the best solution for the problem, and you have to know how to actually implement the solution.
Here's a real example:
If I have a task to reach out to customers who have previously purchased, there are many ways to do it. I can email them, call them, or text them. What is the best way?
Well, if you call them, it takes a lot of time and you probably end up in their voicemail most of the time, so that's probably not the best solution.
Emailing them is good, but if you choose that solution, you need to understand how to get someone to actually open up an email that you send them, how to make it relevant for them, how to follow up with them, how to create a system of following up so that the follow-ups are being done automatically so you don't have to remember 100 different people to follow up with.
Or maybe you choose a text-based system, which then you gotta worry about how to prevent people from being mad that you're essentially sending them texts without their permission, which is a form of spam.
Once you do choose that best solution, you got to understand how to increase the likelihood of that previous customer actually taking your email seriously and responding back in a way that you want.
That's just one example of real-world problem solving.
When I say the words "computer skills," most parents don't understand how deep that topic actually goes.
Using a computer, there's 10,000 tools. Each tool does something different. Knowing what goal that tool accomplishes is really important, and how to use the tool and how to judge if what you did was actually adequate and good enough to launch with.
The skill of understanding the "why"
Being able to identify and understand the goal and why it's trying to be completed - the why of the task, how it contributes to the overall goal of the organization or your department, and how to optimize it.
Maybe the first time you launch something, you don't do the best job and the results aren't what you want. For example, if you send out a bunch of emails to previous customers and no one responds, well, you got to change the contents of the email. You gotta understand more deeply how to get people to respond.
When I say computer skills, it's such a loaded topic because there's 10,000 things that you can do with a computer and schools only touch maybe 5 of those things - maybe like PowerPoint slides, typing, maybe some Canva for graphic design, maybe a very little work in spreadsheets.
But it doesn't touch on:
•App design
•Automation
•Social media
•Coding
•Project management
•Outbound marketing
•Inbound marketing
•Product development
•Connecting with suppliers
•Reaching out and getting contact information from suppliers
"But isn't that what college is for?" 🤔
You would think so, right? We like to believe that college is the training ground for those more advanced skills.
But here's the truth: college is basically in that same position as high school. Professors are in that university for years and years and years, and they're not up to date with what people are actually doing in the industry.
The best way to learn is by looking at what people are actually doing at their jobs and then understanding what goals that person or department or organization is trying to hit, understanding how it fits into the bigger picture, and then understanding what detail needs to be accomplished to achieve those goals and how to actually do it.
So like choosing the right tool, understanding what the minimum viable solution is - what is an approved solution that looks ready to test - and then working backwards and actually getting to that minimum viable solution.
Let me give you another example aside from reaching out to customers.
Real example: Marketing Starter School
Our goal is to get the word out and educate parents about all this that I'm talking about here. How do I do that?
Well, I could go knock on doors all day and night. That doesn't sound like a good solution.
I could get a megaphone, go downtown, and just start shouting stuff. That doesn't sound like a good solution.
The best solution nowadays is using a computer, using social media, using the internet, showing up on Google.
How do you show up on Google? Those are the questions that someone needs to answer. How do you get in front of people who need to hear about this and who want to hear about this? How do you create a compelling message? What's the difference between a compelling message and a message that doesn't get any responses?
You gotta test those things by actually getting to that final result and seeing if it actually works and how many people it gets the attention of.
Just because they land on your page and learn about it or watch your video doesn't mean that they're gonna do anything. How do you get them to take the action that you want, which is signing up?
You gotta be able to get to that output and measure the results. So you gotta test possible solutions to see which one works best.
The iteration process
For example, I record a video, I post it on YouTube, and now it's a waiting game. You gotta wait for the results. Are people gonna watch the video? You can see the data. How much of the video are they watching? Are they watching the whole thing or are they watching only 5 seconds and then going to another video?
Well, if it's only 5 seconds, you know that the video that you created wasn't that compelling and most people aren't finding it entertaining or useful in the first 5 seconds such that they want to continue watching it.
So now you gotta go back to the drawing board. How do I change the first 5 seconds so that they at least get to the meat and potatoes of the video that I recorded?
And then you just kind of iterate. You launch the video, you see how much people are watching. If people aren't watching a lot of it, you change the part where people are dropping off and you try to optimize.
The Japanese have a good word for this: Kaizen. It means constant improvement, a philosophy meaning changing for the better, focusing on small incremental steps for ongoing betterment of the result that you're trying to accomplish.
I see a lot of comments during webinars about AI being scary, not safe, concerns about security and sharing information.
I think that's just a lot of not knowing how it really works that's making parents hesitant.
You gotta think about artificial intelligence like a person who knows a lot that's always with you 24/7. You can ask it any questions and it can help you achieve whatever goal you have.
It's no different than using an excavator to dig a hole. Would you rather dig the hole with a shovel, or would you rather use machinery to help dig the hole faster, dig a bigger hole?
In this case, artificial intelligence is a teammate that is always available that can help you dig a bigger, wider, deeper hole.
But here's the key:
Teenagers can't really use AI effectively unless they have a goal that they're trying to accomplish. And this goes back to executive thinking and mental models - how do you create a goal? Why are you even setting that goal? You can use AI as a thinking partner to achieve that goal.
AI is really a tool that helps you accomplish your goals faster.
We're designing education at Starter School so that students are using these new computer technologies in order to achieve a goal.
We give them a set of goals across different industries. Students have to learn the tool, know what the goal is, accomplish the goal, and submit their work.
These projects aren't so simple where they can just ask AI and do all the work. They actually have to use AI as just a small piece of the whole puzzle, and they have to do the work. There's no shortcutting the work and getting to that final result which we require them to turn in.
Project-based learning
A lot of people in the traditional education community talk about this - it's project-based learning. That's how we get smarter in an AI age. You got to have a complicated goal to hit and work towards hitting that goal.
For example, in the app design course inside Starter School, we give them an app design for a payment app kind of like Venmo or Cash App or PayPal. They have to design each screen for the user that they would see inside of an app.
Apps don't get built magically. Every step of the way, there's been a human being - or nowadays, even an AI - that helps you understand what screens are needed.
Students have to figure out:
•What color should it be?
•What should the buttons say?
•What does the login screen look like?
•What does the sign up screen look like?
•What does the dashboard look like?
•What should we show in the dashboard?
•What's the best way to type in a person's username to send to?
•What about the confirmation page?
•What about the transaction history?
Students have to design each one of those screens, thereby working on a project that requires them to think deeply about many different parts of the overall goal, which is to build the app designs for a payment app.
If you're concerned about your teenager and you want them to find their passion, to learn high-quality things that help them transition into adulthood, to find careers that fulfill them, here are the three most important skills:
1. Computer skills
They've gotta have computer skills. This is number one.
2. Goal-oriented thinking
They've gotta have goal-oriented thinking - understanding the why behind what they're doing and how it connects to bigger objectives.
3. Measuring and improving
They've got to understand how to iterate, measure whether the goal is being accomplished, and then come up with ways to optimize and get better results.
If you rely on schools and what I call government education to keep up with everything, your teenager - or millions of other teenagers across the world - are gonna go into adulthood without any skills that people are willing to pay them for.
Which puts them at the lowest tier of opportunities, which also means lowest paying, which means they might not be able to move out of your home, which means they might not be able to enjoy life to the fullest.
Maybe they have to work two jobs. Maybe this prevents them from working on passion projects. Maybe this prevents them from finding their purpose in life. Maybe this prevents them from enjoying their free time because now they have this worry about money, because they're not able to grow in their skill set as quickly as someone who has that foundational knowledge.
Competition is really tight, especially with AI.
A great starting point would be to check out Starter School and what we're building here. There are many different plans that you can choose from.
Your teenager needs experience working inside of projects that we've created, because these are the skills that are most important in today's modern day and age.
The world has changed. Education needs to catch up. And your teenager can't afford to wait.
