I spent a little more than ten years as a teacher, and I came to the work already holding strong opinions about how learning actually happens, opinions I then spent a decade testing, revising, and chasing through the research. I worked with many different populations, including neurodivergent students and children with significant behavioral needs: the students a conventional classroom is built to serve least well. That work was the best education I ever received. It taught me that behavior is a form of communication, that a child who cannot sit still, or who refuses to comply, is almost always telling you about an unmet need rather than simply misbehaving. It taught me that no one learns well while they are dysregulated, unsafe, or unseen, and that nearly every child rises when the conditions are right and stalls when the conditions are wrong. Underneath all of it sat the question I could never put down: how do human beings actually thrive, and why does so much of what we do to children seem to work against it?
Then it came time to enter my own child into the school system, and the question stopped being academic. We started her in Montessori, and I loved it, partly because I had already borrowed from it in my own classrooms. Especially in my later years, I ran stations: a child could be self-directed, choosing which work to take up and following their own path through it, and even when a given block offered no choice, they cycled through under their own steam rather than waiting to be marched along. The aim was always the same: a child moving with purpose, working at the edge of their own ability, owning the path instead of being dragged down it. Montessori took that instinct and made it a whole environment, and watching my daughter flourish in it confirmed what I already believed: children are not empty vessels to be filled on a schedule. They are agents, and they learn fastest when they are treated as such.
After that we looked at a private school. A friend said, "Hey, there's this private school, let's take a look," so we toured it and we liked it. Smaller class sizes. They grouped kindergarten and first grade together. It was an old building, so the facilities weren't much, but it seemed great. We attended for a while, and then it turned out there was a girl who was bullying my daughter and some of her friends. We noted it, and we brought it to the administration when the girl physically harmed my daughter and showed behaviors I recognized immediately from my background working with alternative populations. When I raised it, the administration was completely clueless about how to handle those behaviors. They had a disciplinary system in their handbook but none in practice. They lacked all of the training I had taken for granted when I became a teacher, and they simply did things however they pleased. It turned out to be a nightmare, so we withdrew her.
We moved her to public school. Socially the transition wasn't bad. She had friends; it was just something new. But her class had twenty-six other kids in it, and the delivery of the material was very slow. She had already worked through and mastered most of that content in Montessori before she ever walked in the door, and we noticed she wasn't really progressing. So we took it on ourselves. We started tutoring her at home, giving her the time and the challenge she needed, and we began to treat school mostly as a social event. Peer groups matter enormously to child development, so in that sense it wasn't wasted time, but the content delivery simply wasn't sticking, and she began to tell me school was boring. She said she spent her time on worksheets. They were the same worksheets I had abhorred as a student.
Then came the budget cuts, and they kept coming. The librarian's position was cut, which meant the children would no longer go each week to browse and borrow books the way they always had. The intervention specialist, the very role I used to hold, now has to be funded every single year by a parent fundraiser, which means families are reaching into their own pockets just to keep a basic support position alive, and this on top of property taxes that already run well over ten thousand dollars a year for us, on a modest home. The PE teacher was cut too, replaced with twenty minutes of running around instead of any real, structured physical education. Resource by resource, the things that make a school a school were being taken away, and everyone was being spread thin. And now, as I write this, the district is closing campuses, shuttering "underperforming" schools and redistricting. Its latest proposal would pull my daughter out of the school she only just settled into, with all her friends, a school rated nine out of ten, and reassign her to one rated one out of ten, located across a busy road. What, exactly, is going on here? For a great many families, at exactly this level, it is already a crisis.
And here in Texas, the money is being pulled out of the public schools and handed to parents as a "choice." Under the state's new Education Savings Account program, families can receive about ten thousand dollars a year per student toward private school, and roughly two thousand dollars a year for homeschooling, which, in my opinion, is biased toward private over home. But the deeper problem is that we're all being spread thin because there is no good solution. Parents are disillusioned. There's school violence in the public system, so people decide public schools are too dangerous and that the answer must be private. But private schools don't follow the same laws. Their teachers don't carry the same "highly qualified" requirements. They aren't trained in student safety and behavior the same way, so in a real sense they're the Wild West. They're an alternative, but they're not the solution.
The crisis is bigger than one family
What my family ran into is not really about my family, and it is not only about Texas. It is a national crisis, and on one point, it became unbearably personal.
I graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. On February 14, 2018, a nineteen-year-old former student who had been expelled walked back into that school and killed seventeen people, students and staff, several of whom died shielding children, in one of the deadliest high school shootings in American history. Another devastating one happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, about an hour from where we now live in Texas. I will not pretend to write about any of it calmly. I feel it strongly, as so many do, and I have written elsewhere in sharper terms about what we are and are not doing to keep our children safe.
But here is what I cannot un-see, looking at it through the behavioral lens I spent a decade developing. The warning signs were there, years of them. They were documented by therapists, reported to authorities, even posted in plain sight. What failed was not a shortage of information; it was the absence of any coherent system to see that information, make sense of it, and act on it. A dozen agencies each held a fragment, and no one was responsible for the whole child. And too often, when a system like that fails, our instinct is to dismantle it rather than redesign it. If that sounds familiar, it is the same failure I met in miniature at my daughter's private school, where the administration had no grasp of atypical behavior at all and simply did whatever it pleased. We have built institutions so large, so fragmented, and so impersonal that the children inside them can become invisible, including the ones who are crying out to be seen.
That is the deeper meaning of the word crisis here. It is not only that schools are being defunded and our tax dollars spread thin because we have no good solution. It is that we are failing the human beings in our care: both the bored child who mastered the material a year ago, and the troubled child sliding toward catastrophe. And there is no shortage of ideas about how to fix it. We have endless conferences, white papers, and passionate arguments. What we lack is action, and any unified plan to carry it out. We do not need more opinions. We need a coherent design, and the will to build it.
Why are we still running an antiquated machine?
When I turned those same behavioral tools on the question of why the system fails so consistently, the answer kept leading back to its origins. We are running, with only cosmetic updates, a machine designed for a world that no longer exists.
The thing most of us picture when we say "school" is not timeless or natural: the age-graded classrooms, the standardized curricula, the bells and periods, the children sorted and conveyed along an assembly line of grades. Horace Mann, often called the father of American public education, came home in the 1840s deeply impressed by the Prussian model he had studied, with its emphasis on order, uniformity, and social cohesion, and much of that structure was imported wholesale. As the country industrialized, the system was shaped further to serve an industrial society, and the great industrial fortunes were intimately involved in that shaping. The foundations built by Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford poured enormous sums into standardizing American education; Rockefeller's General Education Board alone channeled well over a hundred million dollars toward it. By 1913, educators were already publicly alarmed at how aggressively these philanthropies were steering the nation's courses of study. The very way we still measure a high-school education, in standardized "credit hours," is a leftover invention of the Carnegie Foundation from that era.
I want to be fair about this history, because fairness is the entire point of what we teach. The cartoon version, that public school was a deliberate conspiracy to manufacture obedient, interchangeable workers, is too simple, and serious historians rightly push back on it. The truth is more human, and more useful: these were real reformers solving the real problems of their age, and much of what they built was genuinely good. Universal literacy, a shared civic culture, a ladder out of poverty for millions of children: those were achievements, and I don't want them forgotten. The problem is not that the design was evil. The problem is that it was built for the passage from an agrarian to an industrial world, optimized to produce a reliable workforce for the factory floor, and we simply never redesigned it. We did not redesign it for the information age, and we are nowhere near designing it for whatever comes next.
Other nations, meanwhile, kept redesigning, and many now outperform us, not because they discovered a magic curriculum, but because they built coherent systems: well-supported teachers, mastery-based progression, and far less of the test-driven churn we mistake for rigor. Singapore's concrete-to-abstract approach to mathematics, which Green Life builds directly upon, is one small example of what deliberate, evidence-based design can produce. The lesson is not to copy any one country. The lesson is that conscious design works, and drifting does not.
So that is what got me thinking: what is the solution? I started by writing a book about social design and behavior, pouring the ideas into a work of historical fiction. A story turned out to be the right first tool. It let me build a working model of a society and watch the principles play out, the way an architect builds a maquette, a small scale model, to test a design before a single wall goes up. When the story had shown me what held together, I went deeper and began a nonfiction book on those same behavioral principles and how they govern the design of institutions. And that road led, almost inevitably, to education, because education was always where my heart had been, and, like most teachers, I had already poured everything I had into trying to make the existing system work from the inside. If institutions can be consciously designed, I kept thinking, then why not the one that shapes all the others, the one that makes the people?
That is the whole reason I created Green Life. So let me say what I've come to believe education is for. Education is our opportunity to create our future. If we are not satisfied with the present, then we have to figure out how to consciously sculpt what comes next, and that is done by training the next generation in the right way. By helping them remember what we have failed to remember: the mistakes we've made, the lessons of history, a clear sense of why we're here and what our purpose is. At the most basic level that purpose is human happiness, and ultimately it has to be about the survival of the species. That is our primary driver as human beings.
Look honestly at where we've been. We move through ages and revolutions, from the agrarian world into the industrial revolution and most recently the information age, and we've followed that arc to its end. We owe ourselves an honest assessment of where it has actually gotten us. Were these conscious designs, or did we arrive here haphazardly? And are we capable of conscious design? I believe we are, especially now, with all the science we have accumulated. That body of data and evidence, gathered across the entire age of information, is precisely our potential. And now that information is being synthesized into large language models that can understand it nearly as well as we can.
So what does that lead to? I think it leads us to the Age of Understanding. We should consciously pivot toward it. We should figure out how to harness what we already have and deliberately design an Age of Understanding and wisdom out of our histories, by asking what can be learned from where we've been, and what we can bring into the present to make a better world.
What we need to establish is an institution that embodies the Mentor. It is an age-old idea; the name comes down to us from Homer's Odyssey, nearly three thousand years ago, where Athena, the goddess of wisdom, takes the form of a man named Mentor and speaks to young Telemachus, telling him he carries his father's greatness in him. That is the whole move in miniature: a wise presence sees a young person's latent capacity and names it aloud, and the naming becomes a scaffold the child can climb into. Modern science first caught it in the classroom. Rosenthal and Jacobson's 1968 study, Pygmalion in the Classroom, found that teachers led to expect more of randomly chosen children changed those children's measured trajectories, and the effect has since been replicated far more rigorously in the field: Dov Eden's meta-analyses of seventeen "Pygmalion in management" experiments, with a mean effect size around d = 0.51, and McNatt's review of seventeen studies and nearly three thousand people, showing performance gains on the order of forty percent. But the honest finding is sharper, and better, than the popular slogan. It is not naive optimism that works; generic praise does nothing. It is accurate perception of real capacity, named with specificity. The seeing is the giving. We need an institution built to do exactly that: to see the best in each child clearly, name it, and scaffold it, generation after generation.
It is not naive optimism that works; generic praise does nothing. It is accurate perception of real capacity, named with specificity. The seeing is the giving.
That is what underlies all of this. From there we get into the nuts and bolts: critical thinking. The whole idea behind my curriculum is to teach critical thinkers, to teach children, not merely information, as we've been doing so insistently by teaching to the test and measuring success in ways that have not, in fact, succeeded. Instead, we give students the tools to understand how learning itself works, how perception is formed, how thought and memory operate. We give them, above all, the tool of metacognition: thinking about thinking, which the research literature rates among the most powerful of all learning levers. In one synthesis drawing on more than eleven thousand findings, it carries an effect size of about d = 0.69, stronger than socioeconomic status, class size, and many measures of intelligence. In plain terms, that is enough to lift a typical student roughly twenty-five percentile points, from the middle of the class to about the top quarter, which is on the order of one and a half to two years of academic growth in a single year. With that tool, children can understand at a deeper level, and regulate both themselves and their own learning.
The essence of true learning begins with Socratic humility, the recognition that we do not really know anything. This is the spirit of the elenchus, Socrates' method of honest questioning, and I see it mirrored in the purity of a child's mind asking its first questions: the mind ripe for understanding, the mind that acts as a sponge through its developmental levels. We need to harness the power of those developmental levels, and doing so will lead directly to raising well-rounded humans who live up to their potential, which will, in turn, lead us to live up to our potential as a culture.
That conviction is the whole reason Green Life exists. I did not set out to start a school or to write a curriculum; I set out to answer a question that had become unbearable: what is the solution? And the answer kept insisting on being built. What that answer actually looks like, in the room, in the day, in the hands of a child, is its own story, and I tell it elsewhere.
But the why is this: we are not stuck with the institutions we inherited; we are not stuck with the schools as they are and have been for so long. Education is the one lever long enough to move the future, and it is ours to design on purpose. After everything I have seen, as a teacher, as a father, and as a graduate of a school whose name became a national symbol of how badly we can fail our children, I am no longer willing to leave that design to drift. Neither, I suspect, are you.
Notes & Sources
This essay is a personal account; the factual and empirical claims below are sourced here. Green Life's full evidence base is documented in The Engine of Trust manuscript (Leaders and Educators editions) and its accompanying research pro forma, where each claim carries a study, a sample, an effect size, and an evidence grade.
Texas school-choice funding. Senate Bill 2, signed May 3, 2025, created Texas's Education Savings Account program (the Texas Education Freedom Accounts), launching in the 2026–27 school year: about $10,000 per student per year toward private school (up to roughly $11,500 for a student with disabilities) and about $2,000 per year for homeschooling, with a $1 billion first-biennium cap. (KUT/NPR; Texas Education Agency; Texas Comptroller.)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas / Parkland. February 14, 2018; 17 people killed and 17 wounded, among the deadliest high school shootings in U.S. history. Multiple official reviews (the MSD Public Safety Commission; the FBI) documented warning signs that went unacted upon.
Uvalde. Robb Elementary School, May 24, 2022; 21 killed (19 children and 2 teachers).
Horace Mann and the Prussian model. Mann's influential 1843 study of Prussian schooling shaped the American "common school": age-graded classrooms, standardized curricula, and the training of teachers in "normal schools." (Historians caution against the oversimplified "factory model conspiracy" narrative; the influence is real, the cartoon version is not.)
Industrial philanthropy and standardization. John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board (chartered 1903) directed well over $100 million (ultimately about $180 million) into shaping American schooling; at the 1913 NEA meeting, educators publicly objected to the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations' efforts to "standardize our courses of study." The "credit hour" (Carnegie Unit) originated with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, around 1906.
The Mentor / Pygmalion effect. The name Mentor comes from Homer's Odyssey (roughly the 8th century BCE), where Athena, in Mentor's form, tells Telemachus he carries his father's greatness. The teacher-expectancy ("Pygmalion") effect was introduced by Rosenthal & Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968). The stronger evidence is the workplace replication: Eden (1990/1992), a meta-analysis of 17 "Pygmalion in management" field experiments (mean d ≈ 0.51 on objective performance), and McNatt (2000), 17 studies and 2,874 subjects, performance lifts of roughly 45%. The key, honest finding: in classrooms the teacher-expectancy-to-outcome correlation is modest (about r = 0.13 to 0.22) and is driven mainly by accurate perception of real capacity, not optimism; generic praise produces no effect, while specific, accurate naming does. Related lineage: Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development; Markus & Nurius (1986), "possible selves." (Canonically developed in The Engine of Trust, Leaders Edition: "Pure Insight / The Mentor's Gaze.")
Metacognition. Teaching students to monitor and direct their own thinking is among the highest-leverage practices in the research literature; effect size ≈ 0.69 (Hattie synthesis; Wang, Haertel & Walberg, 1990, drawing on 11,000+ findings), stronger than socioeconomic status, class size, and many measures of intelligence. On Hattie's scale, about 0.40 represents roughly a year of growth (his "hinge point"), so 0.69 is on the order of one and a half to two years, roughly a 25-percentile-point gain.
Testing vs. real learning. Formative, low-stakes assessment woven into instruction produces effect sizes of about 0.40 to 0.70, outperforming standardized testing as a driver of learning (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Tangible rewards and points reduce intrinsic motivation (about −0.40; Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999, meta-analysis of 128 studies).
Hands-on, project-based, and embodied learning. Project-based learning ≈ 0.44; with cooperative learning ≈ 0.59; physical movement integrated into content up to ≈ 0.94 across 83 studies (Mavilidi et al., 2022). Programs that combine multiple proven practices produce 60 to 70 percent larger effects than any single practice alone (Durlak et al., meta-analysis of 213 programs).
Singapore mathematics. The concrete → pictorial → abstract (CPA) approach Green Life builds upon is the basis of Singapore's internationally high mathematics performance.
(Effect sizes above are drawn from the Engine of Trust and Green Life research pro forma and are discounted there for implementation reality; consult that document for full citations.)
Chief Academic Officer, Green Life Guardian · Author of The Engine of Trust