“I Turned Out Fine” Is Horrible Rationale For Education

Just because your education was exceptionally average doesn’t mean your kids’ has to be.

“I went to traditional school and I turned out fine” is perhaps the most ludicrous defense that exists for education, and I'll tell you why.

“Fine” is the pasta primavera you’ll never order again. “Fine” is the lukewarm compliment from your husband that sends you racing back to your closet to change your outfit. In all other areas of life, “fine” is not good enough. But for whatever reason, “fine” is the apex of our educational expectations. I myself am a product of public school education (and yes, look, I turned out fine!), but that doesn’t mean I can’t ask questions, can’t raise my expectations.

That’s why I’m writing to you today. To raise your expectations. Because “fine” is not the summit. It is the unremarkable plateau where we’ve set up camp and have forgotten there is an entire mountain left to climb.

Just because something is normal doesn’t mean it’s optimal

First, a question: why do we defend systems we know to be flawed? Simple. Because we grew up inside them. This is what cognitive scientist Dan Lortie calls the “apprenticeship of observation.” Thousands of hours spent in a classroom, absorbing the squeak of an expo marker, the clamor of lockers, the fluorescent glare of buzzing overhead lights. These experiences taught us more than just algebra or grammar — they taught us what school looks like, what education itself is meant to embody.

But just because something is normal doesn’t mean it’s optimal.

For example, homework. Believe it or not, homework is not an essential part of education — understanding a concept is. Homework is simply one mechanism to help students understand a concept. The tool, not the essence, if you will. But because homework was embedded so deeply into our school experience, we believe it to be an indispensable part of education. This is the trap of the familiar: believing what’s normal is what’s best. And that, my friends, simply isn’t true. Students at Alpha don’t do hours of homework each day. Why? They spend their afternoons applying what they’ve learned in real-time. It makes the knowledge stick better than a worksheet ever could.

See? There are countless mechanisms to success.

Aren’t you curious to know them?

The mythology of school

The tricky thing about school is that it’s not just a system, it’s a mythology. Think of all the movies that act as educational lore in American culture: The Breakfast Club, Mean Girls, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dead Poets Society. Myths, as we know, are sticky. They cling to us, not because they are accurate, but because they are nostalgic and evocative.

If I close my eyes right now, I can smell the hallways of my childhood — some strange concoction of lemon cleaning solution and sweaty gym shoes. I can hear the shrill squeal of the whistle at P.E., feel the splintery ridges beneath my desk where another student carved their name into the wood — permanent proof that TYLER WAS HERE. These are not memories of an efficient system. They are simply the relics of growing up. Beautiful relics, maybe. But mile-markers of a high-quality education? Certainly not.

Maybe you feel pride in having "overcome the system." I know I do. That doesn’t mean our kids have to endure the same struggles. Why do we enroll kids into a system we know they’ll have to overcome? Why not seek out a system that works with them, instead of against them? It’s a valid question that very few of us ask.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, but it tends to romanticize the past. Education isn’t a rite of passage or a test of resilience. It is not trauma-bonding lore like the movies say. It is a tool to unlock our kids’ potential. And it’s time to start trying. The past is not a blueprint for the future. It is a culmination of valuable lessons — but what is a lesson worth if we don’t learn from it?

I’ll let you answer that one.

Status Quo Bias

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has a name for our extraordinary bias to the familiar: “status quo bias.” It’s when we associate what we know with what (we think) is safe. Basically: “if I know something, it can’t hurt me.” The unknown is where things get dicey.

Because of status quo bias, conventional schools possess a kind of default legitimacy. They’re assumed to be better because they’re widely used, and they’re widely used because they’re assumed to be better. Alternative options — like mastery-based learning — are viewed as “experimental,” despite the piles of research that suggest otherwise.

I know what you’re thinking: So, what? Parents are clinging to familiar schooling options for their kids. What’s the issue? There are far worse things happening in the world, right?

Here’s the irony: the system that feels the safest — because it is known — may actually be the most dangerous — because it is known. Factory-style education does not adapt. It does not innovate. It simply persists. And in its persistence, it stagnates. If conventional schools guarantee stagnation, and the world around us guarantees growth, then this guarantees our kids will be left behind. Clinging to “safe” out of fear of failure actually increases the risk of failure for our kids.

Unless.

Trying to succeed is far more effective than trying not to fail

You spent over a decade in classrooms. Years of your life. Should the result of that time be “fine”? Shouldn’t it be exceptional? Shouldn’t it be transformative?

This isn’t an essay about despair, but an exciting call-to-action, an invitation for you to think differently, to expect more, to get curious about what the view looks like from the mountaintop rather than the valley.

It’s okay to want more for our kids. We should want more for our kids. But to do that, we must first break free from the patterns and habits we follow that we don’t even understand why. That’s exactly why we do what we do at Alpha School, GT School, Next Gen Academy, Texas Sports Academy, and all the other schools that use the two-hour learning model.

Because “fine” is not the goal. The goal is to unlock the full potential of every child, so that one day, our kids don’t feel the need to say, “I turned out fine,” but they can confidently declare, “I turned out extraordinary.”