The email with the quote arrived on a rainy Tuesday, the kind of day that slicks the streets and softens the edges of everything. I was standing at the kitchen counter, watching my own daughter methodically peel clementines into perfect spirals, when the line leapt off the screen: “Twenty years ago, I would have enrolled my daughter in the best schools. Today, I think it no longer matters.” It was attributed to Ben Mann, co-founder of Anthropic, and it stopped me—mid-reach for the kettle, mid-thought about homework, mid-worry about college admissions and school ratings.
I read it again slowly, feeling a mix of irritation and curiosity. Not matter? School? I glanced at my daughter, who was now building a tiny citrus city on the plate, walls of rind standing like crooked towers. Outside, the rain traced slow, sliding paths down the window. Somewhere between the peel and the quote, I felt the ground of what I thought I knew about education start to shift.
The Old Map We Grew Up With
If you grew up any time in the last half-century, you probably know the story we were handed. It went something like this: Work hard, get into a good school, get into a better college, and the world opens up like a well-oiled gate. There were league tables, test scores, rankings. Parents whispered the names of “good” schools as if they were magic spells that could secure a future.
Twenty years ago, people like Ben Mann would have been right there in the game—refreshing school-rating websites, scanning real estate listings in the “right” districts, calculating commute times versus test-score advantages. The path to a good life felt narrow but clear, paved heavily by institutions that sorted children into futures: gifted programs, AP tracks, elite academies, a ladder of prestige that climbed into the clouds.
Back then, the world was already fast, but it still pretended to be legible. Expertise meant knowing more than other people; credentials were tickets; diplomas were passports. The story was simple: put your child in the best possible building, under the best possible brand name, and the rest would follow.
What’s unsettling—and quietly liberating—about Mann’s quote is not that he’s dismissing learning. It’s that he’s challenging the very architecture of the story. The buildings, the brands, the badges. The sense that the path is narrow and gated and requires the right key. He’s not saying knowledge doesn’t matter. He’s saying the old map no longer matches the landscape.
The World That Changed While We Were Looking at Report Cards
Something happened while we were obsessing over school boundaries and standardized tests. Actually, many things happened, layered and overlapping like tree rings in fast-forward. Technology didn’t just creep into our lives; it detonated them and rearranged the pieces.
AI stopped being a distant science fiction idea and became the quiet engine under so many of our daily tools. Search stopped being a trip to the library and became the reflexive flick of fingers across glass. Whole fields—design, coding, writing, research—became, if not fully automated, then dramatically accelerated and democratized.
The value of “knowing stuff” in isolation began to erode. Why memorize niche facts when a machine can hand them to you in milliseconds? The rarest skills stopped being about storage and started being about navigation: How do you ask good questions? How do you notice what’s missing? How do you tell when something is wrong, biased, shallow, or dangerous? How do you connect ideas that the algorithm doesn’t even know are related?
The job market grew more liquid, more temperamental, more like weather than like architecture. Careers no longer looked like ladders; they looked like rivers, or at times like a tangle of creeks and backwaters and underground springs. People in their forties went back to school—or didn’t, and simply learned online. Teenagers built businesses on platforms their parents barely understood. A kid with a laptop in a small town could access lectures from the world’s best professors, often for free.
In that world, “the best school” starts to sound less like a building and more like a question: Best for what? For whose child? For which possible future in a world where futures keep multiplying?
The Hidden Currents: What School Really Teaches
When Mann says he no longer thinks the best schools matter, it’s easy to mishear it as dismissal. But listen closer and you can hear a different worry: that we’ve been aiming at the wrong targets. That in chasing prestige, we forget to ask what, beneath all the grading and tracking, school is actually doing to a young person’s mind and spirit.
Schools teach more than subjects. They teach how to relate to authority, how to think about failure, how to handle comparison. They teach what counts as “smart.” They quietly define which paths are respectable and which are deviations.
Some schools still run on a factory-era logic: sit in rows, absorb, repeat, be sorted. Creativity is a side dish (if that), curiosity is something to be managed, not amplified. The message can become: Your worth is a number. Your future is a competition. There is one ladder, and you are somewhere on it, permanently.
Now place that model inside a world where AI systems can write passable essays, generate code, design prototypes, and offer instant feedback. If standardization and compliance were once the safe bets, they’re now the most automatable traits. What’s left for humans are the harder, messier things: empathy, ethical judgment, taste, storytelling, improvisation, the ability to work with others on ambiguous problems that no one has solved before.
Suddenly, a “best school” that drills brilliant test-takers but crushes risk-taking might be quietly sabotaging the very qualities that matter most in the coming decades.
Beyond the Gate: A Different Way of Thinking About “Best”
Imagine education not as a gated community but as a landscape of trails, streams, and clearings. There are paths that schools can offer, but there are also paths outside their fences: online communities, mentorships, passion projects, apprenticeships, cross-border friendships. In this landscape, “best” isn’t a single destination but a set of conditions that help a young person grow into someone resilient, curious, and grounded.
As tools like AI lower the barriers to information, the most powerful “schooling” often happens in the cracks between official structures. A teenager uses AI to learn a programming language faster than their course can keep up. A curious kid uses a chatbot to ask questions they’re too shy to ask in class. A young writer gets personalized feedback in the quiet of their bedroom at midnight. None of that shows up on a school’s marketing brochure.
Education starts to look less like “Where does my child get in?” and more like “Where, and with whom, and how does my child learn to be fully alive, capable, and kind in a changing world?” You can’t answer that with a school ranking alone.
In this new frame, the variables that matter begin to shift. The table below offers a simple way of thinking about this transition—from institution-obsessed to learner-centered.
| Old Focus | Emerging Focus |
|---|---|
| School brand and prestige | Fit with the child’s curiosity, values, and well-being |
| Test scores and rankings | Depth of thinking, creativity, and resilience |
| Memorizing information | Asking questions, connecting ideas, evaluating information |
| One-time credentials | Lifelong learning and adaptability |
| Competing with peers | Collaborating, building communities, ethical responsibility |
Notice what drops away: the assumption that a small handful of institutions hold the keys to the future. Notice what rises in its place: a fabric of skills, habits, and relationships that can be woven in many different places, with or without a gold-plated school name.
The New Literacies Our Kids Actually Need
In the quiet drift of that rainy Tuesday, watching the clementine towers slump and fall, it struck me that what I truly wanted for my daughter no longer fit neatly into any school prospectus. I wanted her to be fluent in the literacies of this new world—the kinds that no test score captures cleanly.
There is attention literacy: the ability to notice when your mind is being pulled in a dozen directions, to reclaim focus in a world engineered for distraction. A child who can guard their attention will be able to learn anything, anywhere, long after school is over.
There is curiosity literacy: the knack for following a question down rabbit holes, for staying with not-knowing a bit longer instead of rushing to the first answer a search engine offers. Curiosity is the part of us that refuses to outsource wonder.
There is ethical literacy: learning to sense the impact of our choices, especially when we’re interacting with powerful technologies. When an AI system suggests a shortcut, a conclusion, a judgment, can this child ask, “Who might be left out? Who might be harmed? What assumptions are baked into this?”
There is relational literacy: listening, collaborating, resolving conflict, building trust. The problems our kids will inherit—climate, inequality, migration, governance of AI itself—cannot be solved by lone geniuses in quiet rooms. They will require humans who can work together across difference, with patience and humility.
Some schools nurture these literacies. Many do not. But they can also emerge in families, community centers, clubs, part-time jobs, passion projects, online circles that are surprisingly tender and real. The “best school” for these skills might be a decent-enough school plus a life rich in conversation, risk, boredom, and time to make things just for the joy of it.
What Really Matters When the Future Is Unwritten
It’s tempting to want guarantees. We look at our kids and feel a small earthquake in our chest; we want a promise that if we do X and Y, they’ll be okay. That’s what elite school brands once offered: not necessarily better learning, but a simulacrum of certainty. A sense that your child would be “set.”
Mann’s reflection—that the best schools no longer matter in the way they once seemed to—is in part an admission that certainty itself is gone. But that doesn’t mean we are powerless. It means the levers are different, more human-sized, closer to home.
What matters now is less about perfect planning and more about robust capacity. Instead of engineering a straight path, we can nourish roots. Deep roots hold in unexpected storms; shallow roots look impressive right up until the wind changes.
Some of those roots look deceptively simple:
- Time to play without outcomes attached.
- Adults who listen more than they lecture.
- Experiences of real responsibility, not just busywork.
- Encounters with people who live and think differently.
- Moments of genuine awe—under stars, in forests, in music, in math.
You cannot rank these things in league tables. They are rarely the focus of brochures. Yet they shape the kind of person who can walk into an uncertain future and not only survive it, but help steer it toward something more humane.
AI may write code and summarize books, but it will not, on its own, teach a child to sit beside a grieving friend, to admit when they’re wrong, to marvel at the spiral of a shell or the complexity of a city. It will not, without human guidance, teach them what is worth wanting. That work is still ours.
Reimagining Our Role as Parents and Elders
When a technologist like Mann says he’d no longer chase the “best schools” for his daughter, he is also, quietly, reimagining his own role. If institutions are no longer the central scaffolding, then the people closest to a child become even more significant. Not as drill sergeants or project managers, but as companions, stewards, co-learners.
There’s a different kind of conversation that can happen at the dinner table when the goal isn’t to optimize a transcript but to explore a life. Instead of “What did you get on the test?” we might ask, “What surprised you today?” or “What did you change your mind about?” or “Where did you feel most like yourself?”
We can invite our kids into our own not-knowing. We can say, “The world is changing so fast that I’m learning, too. Let’s figure this out together.” We can model how to use AI tools thoughtfully: not as crutches to avoid hard thinking, but as instruments to deepen it. We can show them how to pause, to question, to cross-check, to walk away from a glowing screen and go outside where the world is slower and less legible and wonderfully stubborn.
In doing so, we trade a fantasy of control for a practice of presence. We are no longer architects of a rigid blueprint. We are gardeners: tending soil, noticing weather, trusting that growth is rarely linear or tidy.
Standing at the Edge of a New Story
By the time the rain eased that Tuesday, my daughter had moved on from clementines to drawing. On a scrap of paper, she was sketching a city that floated among clouds. Some of the buildings were made of glass and steel; others were hollowed-out trees and suspended gardens. There were no walls, only bridges—too many to count—threading between towers, spiraling around trunks, curling like question marks in the air.
I thought again about Mann’s words. Twenty years ago, the fantasy might have been one tower: the right one, the highest one, the one with the shiniest door. Today, a different image feels more honest and more hopeful: a city of multiple paths, diverse homes, and countless crossings. A world where the ability to wander, to cross bridges, to rebuild when something collapses, matters more than having once stepped through a single prestigious door.
Maybe that’s what we’re really choosing for our children now—not a particular building, not a particular badge, but a story about what counts as an education. In that story, the “best school” is any place, digital or physical, elite or ordinary, where a young person learns to pay attention, to care, to think deeply, to act with courage, and to stay curious about a world that is larger and stranger than any curriculum can contain.
The rain left the streets shining, reflecting a sky that was finally clearing. My daughter looked up from her drawing and asked a question about why some clouds were darker than others. I didn’t know the full answer. So we went to find out—together. No enrollment forms, no rankings, just a shared moment of wondering, on an ordinary afternoon, in a world where the old maps are fading and a new kind of learning is quietly beginning.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this mean traditional schools are useless now?
No. Schools still provide structure, community, and access to resources that many families cannot easily recreate alone. The point is not that schools no longer matter, but that their prestige ranking matters far less than the quality of relationships, the culture of learning, and how well they support a child’s curiosity and well-being.
If the “best” school doesn’t matter, what should parents look for instead?
Look for environments where your child feels safe, seen, and challenged. Notice whether teachers encourage questions, creativity, and reflection. Pay attention to how the school handles mistakes, differences, and mental health. Ask: Is my child becoming more curious, more confident, and more kind here?
How does AI actually change what kids need to learn?
AI makes information easier to access and some tasks easier to automate. That shifts the emphasis from memorizing facts to developing skills like critical thinking, ethical judgment, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and the ability to learn new things throughout life. These human capacities are harder to automate and will matter more over time.
Is chasing elite schools ever still worth it?
It can be, but mainly if the specific environment truly fits your child and aligns with your family’s values. Elite schools can offer networks and opportunities, but they can also bring intense pressure and narrow definitions of success. The key is to see them as one option among many, not the only path to a meaningful future.
What can parents do at home to support this “new literacy” of learning?
Foster open-ended conversations. Encourage projects driven by your child’s own curiosity. Model how to use technology thoughtfully and critically. Protect unstructured time for play and exploration. And most importantly, show that their worth is not tied to grades or rankings, but to how they treat others and how they engage with the world.