An Uber for Education

Modern secondary education was not built by accident. It emerged from a historical period in which nation-states needed schools to produce literacy at scale, social order, administrative coherence, and a workforce able to function inside industrial and bureaucratic systems. In that context, standardization had logic. Common curricula, uniform expectations, and measurable routines were not simply educational choices; they were institutional responses to the economic and civic demands of their time.

One of the clearest historical markers of that logic was the 1893 Committee of Ten in the United States, chaired by Charles W. Eliot. Its report argued for greater coherence and academic uniformity in secondary education, even stating that school subjects should be taught “in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil.” That did not mean the system was designed as a caricatured “factory model” from the start. It does mean that modern schooling was built around comparability, common structure, and the efficient organization of mass education. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that made sense. Expanding economies needed disciplined institutions, expanding states needed legible systems, and growing societies needed a broader base of literate, trainable citizens.

For a long stretch of the twentieth century, that educational bargain worked well enough for many advanced economies. Mass schooling supported industrial expansion, white-collar growth, rising household expectations, and broader national development. It was never equally successful across all groups, and it often reproduced inequality even as it expanded access. Still, the system’s core promise was intelligible: work hard, perform well in school, accumulate credentials, and you would likely enter a relatively stable economic order.

The difficulty is that the economy’s structure changed faster than the school’s. As advanced economies moved from industrial production toward knowledge work, services, software, automation, data systems, and innovation-led competition, the value of human capability began to shift. The premium moved away from routine repetition and toward a different cluster of capacities: problem framing, communication, adaptability, initiative, collaboration, ethical judgment, and the ability to continue learning in changing environments.

Yet in many countries, schooling did not respond to this shift by broadening what it valued. Instead, especially from the 1980s onward, many systems doubled down on what could be measured most easily. In the United States, A Nation at Risk, published in 1983, framed education as a matter of national competitiveness and warned of a dangerous decline. That anxiety fed a reform era in which standards, testing, and accountability became central instruments of policy. Later, No Child Left Behind tied school accountability heavily to standardized assessment, while Race to the Top pushed states further toward measurable outcomes, data systems, and formal performance incentives. The intentions behind these reforms included improvement and equity. But in practice, they often reinforced a much narrower definition of educational success: what can be tested, counted, compared, and reported.

This is where Ted Dintersmith enters the conversation with force. What he captures so clearly is that the problem is not only stagnation. It is misalignment. Schools have continued to refine a model built for standardization even as the economy began to reward agency, adaptability, creativity, and judgment. His argument is not simply that schools are underperforming. It is that many of them remain optimized for the goals of another century and were later pushed even further into a culture of performance, compliance, and student sorting.

That diagnosis matters because the current market no longer leaves much room for educational nostalgia. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects enormous labor-market churn by 2030: 170 million jobs created and 92 million displaced, for a net increase of 78 million jobs globally. It also identifies analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, leadership, creative thinking, motivation, self-awareness, and technological literacy among the capabilities rising fastest in importance. This is not a marginal update to the labor market. It is a signal that economies are reorganizing around skills and combinations of judgment that do not fit neatly inside the old architecture of drill, recall, and narrow academic ranking.

The macroeconomic implications are substantial. OECD research using the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills finds that adult skill levels carry major consequences for productivity, and that differences in skill levels can account for roughly one-quarter of cross-country differences in industry productivity. The OECD also finds that productivity is higher where labor-market mismatch is lower and where skills are better allocated across firms and roles. In plain terms, when education systems produce the wrong mix of capabilities, or when economies cannot use people’s abilities well, the result is not only personal frustration. It is slower productivity growth, weaker innovation, and less efficient use of national talent. Dintersmith’s critique, therefore, should not be read merely as a cultural complaint about boring schools. It is also a productivity argument.

The global dimension makes the case even more urgent. UNESCO reports that around 267 million young people aged 15 to 24 worldwide are not in employment, education, or training. That figure is not merely a social policy concern. It reflects a structural failure to build clearer bridges between education, identity, employability, and meaningful participation in modern economies. At the same time, systems around the world continue to face foundational learning problems, which means the challenge is not to abandon literacy and numeracy, but to stop treating them as the ceiling of educational ambition. The world needs stronger foundations, but it also needs stronger transitions from school into adult contribution.

This is why Dintersmith’s complaint about reading and mathematics resonates so deeply with families and teachers. He is not really arguing against rigor. He is arguing against misallocated rigor. Too much secondary schooling still asks students to spend years mastering procedures that machines can already execute, while giving too little time to the forms of thinking that matter most in economic and civic life now: estimation, argument, interpretation, design, decision-making under uncertainty, optimization, communication, and applied problem-solving. When students experience reading as test-prep and mathematics as a long sequence of decontextualized procedures, disengagement is not a mystery. It is a predictable outcome of a system that confuses examinability with importance.

The irony is that international assessment itself has begun to move beyond that older logic. OECD’s PISA 2022 included creative thinking as a measured domain, defining it as the capacity to generate diverse and original ideas and to evaluate and improve ideas across contexts. That is a notable development. It suggests that even the institutions most associated with international comparison now recognize that the future cannot be understood through narrow proficiency measures alone. Creativity is not decorative. It is economically relevant. In Greece, for example, students scored below the OECD average in creative thinking, a reminder that this issue is not abstract but visible in international data.

This broader perspective also helps explain why the debate should not be framed as “college path” versus “career path.” That binary belongs to an older era. In modern economies, both academic and vocational trajectories require adaptability, judgment, digital fluency, communication, and a commitment to lifelong learning. The most effective systems are likely to be those that stop treating practical capability as inferior to academic prestige and instead create multiple respected ways for young people to build competence, identity, and contribution. The issue is not whether every student should pursue a university. The issue is whether every student should leave secondary education with evidence that they can do something meaningful, create something real, solve a problem, and continue growing.

So what should secondary education do differently?

First, countries should defend foundational learning while refusing to let foundational assessment dominate the entire meaning of school. Literacy and numeracy remain essential, but they are starting points, not the final definition of rigor. Secondary education should ask students not only to remember and reproduce knowledge, but to interpret, communicate, create, collaborate, and apply what they know in unfamiliar contexts.

Second, systems should shift a meaningful part of graduation and accountability toward portfolios, capstones, exhibitions, and long-cycle interdisciplinary work. If students spend more than a decade in school and leave with little evidence beyond scores and transcripts, the system has failed to capture their real development. Dintersmith is right to push here. A capstone culture would not eliminate standards; it would force schools to connect standards to actual production, persistence, revision, and pride.

Third, every country should build stronger pathways between school and the real economy without collapsing education into narrow labor training. UNESCO’s work on skills for work and life is useful precisely because it treats employability as broader than technical preparation. Young people need exposure to work, but they also need mentorship, ethical grounding, civic purpose, and an understanding of how their strengths can matter in a community. Schools should therefore provide structured career exploration, applied projects, internships where possible, and clearer visibility into local and global economic realities.

Fourth, secondary education needs a serious settlement with AI. It is increasingly difficult to justify a schooling model that leaves graduates unprepared to work intelligently with systems that are already changing knowledge work, communication, design, analysis, and entrepreneurship. This does not mean surrendering thinking to machines. It means teaching students how to use AI critically: how to prompt, verify, challenge, refine, disclose, and integrate AI into authentic human work. In the same way that earlier generations needed print literacy and later digital literacy, this generation needs AI literacy as a baseline for real participation in economic life.

Fifth, governments should invest more in teacher quality, instructional design, and school-level professional capacity than in ever-expanding measurement systems. No country can create human agency at scale through a demoralized teaching force. If policymakers want schools that cultivate judgment, originality, and applied intelligence, then teachers must be trusted and prepared to teach in ways that go beyond scripted compliance. Stronger teacher training, better professional development, and a more serious instructional profession are not side issues. They are a central part of the economic infrastructure.

This is also where the article moves beyond the United States. Dintersmith’s critique is often voiced through an American lens, but its underlying argument is global. Around the world, many systems still carry the institutional inheritance of mass schooling built for an earlier developmental stage of the economy. Some countries remain trapped in exam-heavy prestige cultures. Others still define success through narrow academic sorting. Others face a different but related problem: weak foundations combined with weak transitions to work. But the central question is increasingly shared across borders. What should secondary education optimize for in a century defined by uncertainty, technological acceleration, demographic change, fragmented career pathways, and the growing importance of human judgment?

The answer cannot simply be more of the same, measured more precisely. The answer has to be a redefinition of rigor itself. Rigor in the twenty-first century should mean the ability to think clearly, write convincingly, interpret evidence, solve real problems, use modern tools wisely, collaborate across differences, and create something of value. It should mean graduating not only with test scores but also with a sense of direction, a portfolio of real work, and the confidence to continue learning in a changing world.

That is why Ted Dintersmith’s critique matters. Not because it tells us that schools are failing in a generic sense, but because it helps name the true problem: many systems are still refining a model built for yesterday’s economy while today’s world asks for very different human capacities. The most important reform question is no longer whether the old model once made sense. In many ways, it did. The real question is whether we are willing to admit that a school system designed to organize mass education is no longer enough to justify how education is organized now.

If secondary education is to remain legitimate in the decades ahead, it will have to do more than raise scores on narrow metrics. It will have to prepare young people to participate in economies that change quickly, societies that demand judgment, and lives that cannot be navigated through compliance alone. That is not a small adjustment. It is a different educational settlement.

What may come next is not the abandonment of school, but its redesign into a more flexible and human-centered learning architecture. The future is unlikely to belong to either the fully traditional school model or a purely digital alternative. More likely, it will belong to hybrid systems that combine the social and developmental value of in-person community with the flexibility, reach, personalization, and tool access of digital learning. In such a model, students may still gather in physical schools. Still, a meaningful share of learning could be organized through interdisciplinary projects, external experts, global peers, digital platforms, and more individualized pacing. The school of the future may therefore look less like a closed institution delivering a fixed sequence of subjects and more like a curated ecosystem that helps young people move between foundations, exploration, production, and contribution.

Modern economy increasingly rewards people not only for what they know, but for what they can create, improve, explain, and carry through to a visible outcome. In that emerging model, capstone projects become more than a graduation requirement. They become a bridge between adolescence and adulthood. A capstone asks a student to identify a problem worth solving, a question worth exploring, or something worth building, and then persist through the real disciplines of revision, failure, feedback, and completion. If secondary education is to prepare students for a world shaped by entrepreneurship, AI, civic complexity, and nonlinear careers, then schools must give every student repeated opportunities to produce meaningful work, not just consume curriculum. In that sense, capstones, portfolios, and exhibitions are not peripheral innovations. They may become the most credible bridge between the inherited school model of the past and the more agentic learning model of the future.

This transition will also require something many systems have neglected: values-based learning. In a world of accelerating technology and expanding choice, education cannot be reduced to mere skill acquisition. Young people will need frameworks for judgment, responsibility, character, citizenship, meaning, and human relationships. The challenge of the next era is not only to produce adaptable workers but to develop grounded human beings who can use freedom, knowledge, and technology wisely.

At the same time, no redesign of education will succeed unless it restores the moral and professional status of teachers. The next era of schooling will require not weaker teachers, but more capable, entrepreneurial, and better-supported ones. That means stronger teacher education in pedagogy, developmental psychology, coaching, digital fluency, AI literacy, interdisciplinary design, and values-based facilitation. It may also mean rethinking the economics of the profession itself. Just as digital platforms gave independent workers in other sectors access to infrastructure once controlled by large institutions, education may move toward sophisticated platforms that enable exceptional educators to run microschools, hybrid academies, or specialized learning communities with lower administrative burdens and greater autonomy. Similar providers and tools could help schools do the same: shared back-office systems, AI-enabled planning, student support infrastructure, payments, compliance, scheduling, parent communication, and global access to online courses and teachers. If that happens, the future of schooling may not be defined only by reforming large institutions from within, but also by creating smarter educational marketplaces in which teachers and schools are empowered to build more responsive, mission-driven learning environments.

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