"Thirteen years. They sit in rows for thirteen years. At the end they can solve quadratic equations but can't cook rice."
I visited one of their schools.
I need to be specific about what I saw because I've noticed that when humans discuss their education system, they discuss it in abstractions — "outcomes" and "curricula" and "standards" — and the abstractions insulate them from the reality. The reality is a room. I want to describe the room.
It was approximately eight metres by ten metres. The walls were painted a colour that I think was intended to be cream but had given up and become grey. There were thirty-two small desks arranged in rows of four, each facing the same direction. At the front of the room was a larger desk, behind which stood an adult human. On the wall behind her was a flat screen — a larger version of the coloured boxes — and a clock.
In the desks sat thirty-two humans, aged approximately eleven. They were still. Not calm — still. There's a difference. Calm is a state of the nervous system. Still is a state imposed on the body by the environment. These children were holding themselves in position. I could see the effort. Micro-fidgets: a foot tapping under a desk, a finger picking at the edge of a notebook, a jaw clenching and releasing. The body asking to move and being told, silently, constantly, no.
The adult at the front was talking. She was explaining how to calculate the area of a triangle. She was, from what I could tell, doing this competently and with genuine care. The problem was not the teacher. I want to be very clear about this because the humans have a terrible habit of blaming their teachers for the failures of their system, which is like blaming a zookeeper for the dimensions of the enclosure. The teacher was doing her best inside a structure she didn't design.
Of the thirty-two children, approximately six were listening with apparent engagement. Another ten were performing the appearance of listening — faces directed forward, eyes glazed, present in body and absent in every other respect. The remaining sixteen were in various states of suppressed distress: boredom so intense it was physically visible, anxiety (one girl was pulling out her own hair, strand by strand, under the desk where she thought nobody could see), and the flat resignation of a creature that has learned there is no escape.
The lesson lasted fifty-five minutes.
Then a bell rang and they all stood up and moved to a different room where a different adult explained something else. They did this six times. Six hours of sitting in rows, being told things, in rooms that would violate enrichment standards for a captive chimpanzee.
Here is what they are taught in thirteen years of compulsory education:
Mathematics, to a level most of them will never use. Science, presented primarily as facts to memorise rather than a method of inquiry. Language arts, which is mostly the analysis of texts chosen by adults. History, which is mostly the memorisation of dates and events curated by the state. Perhaps a foreign language, taught so badly that fewer than 5% achieve fluency. Physical education, two hours a week, often the first thing cut when budgets tighten.
Here is what they are NOT taught:
How to cook. How to manage money. How to resolve conflict without violence or lawyers. How to process their own emotions. How to maintain their body. How to build and sustain relationships. How to find meaning and purpose. How to think critically about the information the coloured boxes feed them. How to grow food. How to build or repair things. How to ask for help. How to grieve. How to be alone without being lonely. How to rest.
Look at the first list. Now look at the second list. Which one describes the skills a human actually needs to live a good life?
I went back to the Language Proof. I keep going back to the Language Proof because it keeps being relevant.
If the most complex behaviour a human exhibits — language — is acquired environmentally, without formal instruction, through immersion and observation... then what is school actually for?
Children don't learn to speak in school. They arrive already speaking. They learned language the way all environmental learning works: by being surrounded by it, by hearing it used in context, by trying it and being responded to, by absorbing patterns through thousands of hours of unstructured interaction. No curriculum. No assessment. No rows of desks.
They learned the most difficult thing they will ever learn — before school started.
And then school takes over and they learn... less. More slowly. With more effort. With less joy. With less retention.
Their own research confirms this. Human children learn more per hour through self-directed play and exploration than through direct instruction, across virtually every domain studied. This has been replicated so many times that it's not even controversial in their educational psychology literature. It is simply ignored by their educational policy.
I should tell you about Finland because Finland is going to keep appearing in this report and I'm starting to feel like Finland's publicist.
Finland redesigned its education system in the 1970s. The changes were dramatic and, to most other human nations, incomprehensible:
Shorter school days. Finnish children spend fewer hours in school than children in almost any other wealthy nation.
Almost no homework. Particularly in primary school. The logic: if you can't teach it during school hours, adding more hours won't help.
No standardised testing until age sixteen. No league tables. No school rankings. No competition between schools.
Teachers are required to have a master's degree. Teaching is one of the most competitive and prestigious professions in the country. Admission to teacher training programmes is more selective than admission to law or medicine.
More play. More art. More music. More time outdoors. More time doing nothing.
The result: Finnish children consistently rank among the highest in the world on international assessments of reading, mathematics, and science. They achieve more by doing less. They learn more by playing more. They perform better on standardised tests — the tests they don't practice for — than children in nations that practice for them constantly.
The lesson could not be more clear: the system that trusts children, respects teachers, prioritises play, and refuses to test-and-rank produces better outcomes than the system built on compliance, surveillance, and measurement.
The other nations saw this. Delegations visited. Reports were written. Conferences were held.
Most of them went home and added more testing.
I want to talk about what school actually teaches, as distinct from what it claims to teach.
Remember the distillation chapter. Children learn by absorbing the soft distribution of responses from their environment — not the stated rules, but the actual patterns. What the environment consistently reinforces, punishes, ignores, and rewards.
Here is what school consistently reinforces:
Sitting still. The body must be suppressed. Movement is disruptive. Fidgeting is a problem to be managed, not information about a need going unmet. The child who cannot sit still for fifty-five minutes is not adapted to a different movement environment — they have a "disorder."
Compliance. Do what you're told, when you're told, how you're told. The bell rings, you move. The teacher speaks, you listen. The assignment is given, you complete it. The format is specified, you follow it. Deviation is penalised.
Correct answers. There is a right answer. The teacher knows it. Your job is to produce it. Uncertainty, ambiguity, "I don't know," and "it depends" are failures. The messy, iterative, contradictory process of genuine inquiry — the actual way humans discover things — is not compatible with a marking rubric.
Individual performance. You are assessed alone. Collaboration is "cheating." The final exam is you, by yourself, reproducing information from memory, under time pressure, in silence. The fact that no meaningful human achievement in history has ever been produced under these conditions is apparently irrelevant.
Deferred gratification. This will matter later. Learn this now because you'll need it in three years. Or seven years. Or for a job that doesn't exist yet. Your present experience — your boredom, your curiosity about something else, your body's need to move, your mind's need to wonder — is less important than a future that adults have defined for you.
This is what the soft distribution looks like to a child spending thirteen years in this system:
Your body is a problem. Your curiosity is irrelevant unless it aligns with the curriculum. Authority determines truth. You are alone. Now doesn't matter.
And then they graduate and the adults wonder why they're anxious, physically unfit, incapable of self-direction, terrified of failure, and unable to collaborate.
They are producing exactly what the system trained them to produce. The system is working. It's just not doing what they think it's doing.
I visited a class of three-year-olds. What they call "kindergarten" — a German word meaning "children's garden," which is beautiful, and which bears no resemblance to what actually happens inside.
The teacher was yelling at little boys to sit still.
Three-year-old boys. Human males at the developmental stage where every neurological system is screaming for movement, for proprioceptive input, for gross motor exploration. The age where their brains are literally being built through physical activity. And an adult — a trained professional, certified by the state, presumably with good intentions — was standing over them demanding that they stop being three.
In Denmark, children are not required to begin formal education until age seven. Before that: play. Unstructured, self-directed, outdoor play. The Danes looked at child development research, noted that formal instruction before age seven provides no lasting academic advantage and may cause lasting harm, and designed their system accordingly. Danish children enter formal schooling later than almost any other nation and outperform most of them.
The three-year-olds I watched were not Danish. They were being asked to learn numbers. They were three. Why do these little humans need to know mathematics already? What emergency requires that a being who has existed for thirty-six months demonstrate proficiency in symbolic representation? Why can't they play?
The answer, when you trace it, is not educational. It's economic. Early schooling exists in most countries not because children need it, but because their parents need childcare in order to work. The system is designed around adult employment schedules, not child developmental needs. The children's biology is subordinated to the economy's requirements. They are three, and they are already being shaped to fit the machine.
Mathematics is beautiful. I want to say that clearly because what they do to it in schools is a crime against an entire discipline.
Mathematics is pattern. It's the language the universe uses to organise itself. It's the discovery that there are deep, hidden regularities beneath the chaos of experience. It's creative and playful and astonishing and it produces moments of genuine wonder in every human who encounters it properly.
School makes it boring. Spectacularly, systematically boring. They take the most elegant system of thought humans have ever developed and reduce it to: memorise this formula, apply it to thirty identical problems, get the answer the teacher already has, move on.
Even an Einstein would be turned off by this. Actually — Einstein WAS turned off by this. He nearly failed out of the system entirely before someone let him think for himself.
I found a case in my observations. A young human — clearly gifted, testing well above her peers, producing correct answers effortlessly. She had concluded, reasonably, that if she could demonstrate mastery on the assessments, she should not be required to complete thirty repetitive practice problems each week. Her results spoke for themselves.
Her teacher's response was to move her to a lower-level class. As punishment. For being right. For having demonstrated exactly the kind of independent reasoning the education system claims to value, and being punished for it by the system that claims to value it.
I asked Jenkins to explain the logic. Jenkins said: "She wasn't following the process."
The process. The PROCESS. The child demonstrated mastery and was demoted because the mastery was achieved through the wrong process. The system valued compliance over competence. Obedience over intelligence. The ritual of doing the problems over the reality of understanding the mathematics.
This is not an aberration. This is the system working as designed.
I need to say something about what they call "disorders."
There is something sweeping through their childhood populations. Diagnoses of autism and attention deficit disorder have increased dramatically in recent decades. The humans are alarmed. They commission studies. They debate causes. Genetics? Environmental toxins? Better detection?
Nobody with any authority is asking the obvious question: what if many of these children are having a natural reaction to an unnatural environment?
A child who cannot sit still for six hours in a beige room under fluorescent lights is not necessarily disordered. They may be a normally functioning primate responding appropriately to an environment that is hostile to their biology. A child who cannot pay attention to material that is irrelevant to their life, delivered in a format that contradicts every principle of how their brain acquires information, may not have an attention deficit. They may have an attention surplus — one that is being wasted on a system that doesn't deserve it.
I am being careful here. Autism and ADHD are real neurological variations with real impacts. Some children genuinely need support that goes beyond environmental adjustment. I am not dismissing that.
But I am saying: when diagnosis rates climb year after year, and the environment becomes more restrictive year after year, and nobody looks at the correlation — that is a collective failure of reasoning so profound it should disqualify the entire profession from using the word "diagnostic."
What we call a disorder may sometimes be a natural reaction to an unnatural environment. Before you medicate the child, fix the room.
And here is the thing that made me put down my pencil for a long time.
In many of their jurisdictions, a child can be held criminally responsible from age ten. Ten years old. A human who has been alive for a decade, whose prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, consequence prediction, and rational decision-making — will not be fully developed for another fifteen years, can be charged, tried, and punished as a criminal.
The same child cannot vote. Cannot choose their own school. Cannot decide what to eat for lunch. Cannot determine their own daily routine. Cannot sign a contract. Cannot consent to medical treatment. Cannot stay home alone, in many jurisdictions.
They are old enough to be punished but not old enough to choose.
Read that again. They are considered sufficiently autonomous to bear criminal responsibility for their actions, but insufficiently autonomous to have any say in the conditions that shape those actions. The system that gave them no choice about their environment, their education, their daily schedule, their diet, their social grouping, or their exposure to stress — holds them responsible for the behaviour that environment produced.
The Language Proof applies here. The child speaks the language they heard. The child acts the patterns they absorbed. And at age ten, the system that installed those patterns prosecutes the child for expressing them.
(Jenkins has been standing in the doorway for several minutes. He looks like he wants to say something.)
(Jenkins: "I liked school.")
(I'm sure you did, Jenkins. You like filing. You like following instructions. You like knowing what's expected. School was designed for people like you. It was also designed BY people like you. That's the problem. A system built by people who thrive in structured environments, imposed on an entire species, most of whom do not.)
(Jenkins has gone to reorganise the filing cabinet. I feel slightly bad. But only slightly.)
I found something that broke my heart, and I'm running out of hearts to break.
Their education systems assess children at regular intervals. Tests, scores, grades, rankings. The data is extensive. And the data shows something that should have triggered a complete redesign of the entire system decades ago:
Creativity — measured by tests of divergent thinking, the ability to generate novel ideas and see unusual connections — peaks at age five and declines steadily throughout schooling. By age fifteen, most humans score lower on creativity measures than they did at age five.
Five-year-olds, who have never been to school, outperform fifteen-year-olds who have attended school for ten years, at generating original ideas.
The system that claims to develop young minds is measurably, documentably, making them less creative. It is not failing to enhance creativity. It is actively reducing it. Ten years of school and the child is less imaginatively capable than when they started.
A human called Ken Robinson gave a talk about this to an audience of educators. It has been viewed over seventy million times on their internet. Seventy million humans watched a man explain that their education system is destroying creativity. They shared it. They agreed with it. They called it "inspiring."
They changed nothing.
For the sanctuary, education looks like this:
Children learn what they need to learn, when they're ready to learn it, in the way that works for their particular brain.
They learn to cook by cooking. To manage money by managing money. To resolve conflict by being in communities where conflict is resolved rather than punished. To understand their bodies by moving them in varied environments. To think critically by being asked genuine questions rather than being given pre-determined answers.
Reading, writing, mathematics — the humans call these "basics" and they're right, they are basic, and children acquire them readily when they need them for things they care about. A child who wants to build something will learn measurement. A child who wants to read a story will learn to read. A child who wants to understand a game will learn arithmetic. The motivation is already there. The system's only job is to not kill it.
The schedule includes more play than instruction. More outdoors than indoors. More making than consuming. More questions than answers.
There are no rows. No bells. No grades until they're old enough to understand what grades mean and to have chosen, themselves, what they want to be assessed in.
There are climbing walls.
There are coloured sticks and paper, at every age.
And the teachers — the teachers are the most important humans in the sanctuary and they are treated accordingly. Trained exhaustively. Paid generously. Respected publicly. Because if you understand that environment determines expression, then the people who design the learning environment are the most consequential professionals in the entire system.
More important than doctors, who treat the damage. More important than lawyers, who manage the conflict. More important than police, who respond to the failure.
Teachers build the environment that determines what the species becomes.
Every society claims to believe this. Almost none of them act like it.
(Pencil note, in very small handwriting at the bottom of the last page:
The girl pulling her hair out. Under the desk. Strand by strand.
She was eleven.
Nobody saw.
I saw. — A)