29 Apr 26
Reimagining education: if the system stays the same, what future are we locking in?
In March, we explored why the future is built by communities, not by ideas alone. This month, I want to go upstream of communities, of leadership, of work itself, all the way to the system that shapes every one of those futures before they even begin.
Education.
Not the most fashionable topic. Not the one that trends on LinkedIn. But the one I keep returning to, because nothing we say about leadership, AI, employability, or social mobility will matter if the system that prepares the next generation is broken.
And it is broken.
That is why I am holding one central question this month:
The girl who stopped wanting to go to school
A few months ago, I sat with MacKenzie Price , a Stanford-trained psychologist who co-founded Alpha School in the United States. She told me a story I cannot get out of my head.
Her oldest daughter, halfway through second grade, came home one day and said: “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow. School is boring.”
MacKenzie’s reaction was not maternal frustration. It was forensic. “In two and a half years,” she" told me,
"This system has taken a kid who is tailor-made to do everything that is asked of her and has wiped that passion away."
That sentence stopped me. Because it is not one mother’s story. It is a global pattern.
We have built an education system at industrial scale that is, by design, a sorting machine. It groups children by age, moves them at the same pace, tests them on the same day, and tells most of them, gently or not, that they are average. Then we are surprised when, twelve years later, they show up to work without curiosity, without agency, and without the soft skills the AI economy is now begging for.
My personal thread: SKEMA Business School , Live for Good , and the question that haunts me
I do not write about education from the outside. I am Chairman of the Board of SKEMA Business School . We educate students across France, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Dubai, China. A genuinely global student body, exposed to a job market that will be reshaped by AI faster than any curriculum committee can update a syllabus.
As President of the OpenClassrooms Mission Committee, I see the proof of what education can become when it is designed around the learner, not the institution. OpenClassrooms removes barriers one by one, from orientation to admission, from graduation to employability through a powerful combination of human mentorship and AI that personalizes every step. This is not incremental improvement. It is a fundamentally different contract between education and the people it is supposed to serve.
And for more than ten years, through Live for Good , I have worked with young social entrepreneurs from very diverse and modest backgrounds. What I have learned from them is humbling: their hunger to learn is enormous. Their access to the right learning, often, is not.
First, employability is not a bonus outcome of education. It is the moral contract. If a young person leaves the system without dignity, agency, and the ability to earn a living, the system has failed them, regardless of what the diploma says.
Second, assessment is the real bottleneck. As long as a report card is the proxy for success, we will keep optimizing for the wrong thing. “A report card is no longer a sign of how you’re actually doing,” MacKenzie told me. She is right. And every leader who hires young talent already knows it.
Hard facts: the gap between what education delivers and what life demands
The data is uncomfortable.
The half-life of professional skills has collapsed. What used to last a 30-year career now lasts about five years for many roles, and as little as 2.5 years for some technical fields. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report estimates that 39% of core skills will change by 2030, with 92 million jobs displaced and 170 million new ones created. A churn of roughly 22% of all jobs in five years.
Meanwhile, the World Bank’s measure of “learning poverty” found that around 70% of 10-year-olds in low and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story. UNESCO counts 250 million children out of school worldwide. And in the OECD’s most recent PISA results, average math scores fell at the steepest rate ever recorded.
Two trends, one collision: the world is demanding more capability, faster, from more people. And the system designed to deliver that capability is producing less, slower, for fewer.
This is not a curriculum problem. It is a design problem.
Three Positive Leadership Podcast episodes that bring this theme to life
The Guest: Sal Khan (Founder, Khan Academy)
Listen to the episode: Sal Khan — Revolutionizing Education
Sal reframed for me what most education debates miss. The bottleneck is not access to information. It is access to personal attention.
"If you’re Alexander the Great, you had Aristotle as your tutor," he said. "Two hundred years ago, we had to make a compromise. We can’t give everyone a personal tutor. Let’s put students in batches of 25. That trade-off is now obsolete."
His argument is structural: with AI, we can finally deliver what education has wanted for two centuries but could never afford. Mastery for every learner, not sorting for the average.
- The Education Trap to Reject: “Personalization at scale is impossible.”
- The Story to Tell: “With AI as a teaching assistant, mastery learning becomes universal, not elite.”
The Guest: MacKenzie Price (Co-founder, Alpha School )
Listen to the episode: MacKenzie Price — Reimagining Education in the Age of AI
MacKenzie did something rare. She did not just critique the system. She rebuilt it from a house with sixteen children. Two hours of personalized academic learning per day, powered by adaptive AI. The rest of the day spent on what machines cannot teach: grit, public speaking, entrepreneurship, teamwork.
The result, measured by NWEA MAP assessments: students performing in the top 1% in all subjects, while loving school.
“The 12 years children spend in school shouldn’t be like eating your spinach,” she told me. “Good for you, but you don’t like it.”
- The Education Trap to Reject: “More hours in the classroom equals more learning.”
- The Story to Tell: “When kids are met at their level and pace, learning accelerates. The time saved becomes the space where character is built.”
The Guest: Pierre Dubuc (Co-founder & CEO, OpenClassrooms)
Listen to the episode: Pierre Dubuc — Lancer une entreprise à mission
Pierre and Mathieu Nebra started OpenClassrooms when Pierre was eleven years old, building free programming courses for people who had been told they did not belong in tech. Today, OpenClassrooms is one of France’s first entreprises à mission. Their metric is not enrollment. It is the number of students placed in employment.
“La mission pour nous, c’est une aide à la décision,” Pierre told me. “Ça doit être utilisé dans les réunions pour prendre des décisions.” Mission is not a wall poster. It is a decision-making tool.
For Pierre, employability is dignity. A learner who finishes a program and finds work has not just gained a skill. They have gained agency. That is the real outcome education must deliver.
- The Education Trap to Reject: “Education is about credentials.”
- The Story to Tell: “Education is about employability, agency, and the dignity of being able to build a life.”
Five principles to redesign education for an AI-first world
If we accept that the system is no longer fit for purpose, what do we redesign around? Five principles, drawn from these three guests, from forty years inside a global tech company, and from my work at SKEMA OpenClassrooms and Live for Good.
- Mastery, not sorting. Every learner moves forward when they have understood. Not when the calendar says it is time to move on. AI now makes this possible at scale. There is no longer a budget excuse.
- Two hours of academics, four hours of being human. The MacKenzie Price insight: when academic learning is personalized, it is faster. Use the time you save to teach what AI cannot. Curiosity, courage, public speaking, ethical judgment, collaboration. The “soft skills” that are, in fact, the hardest skills.
- Employability as moral contract. A diploma without a path to dignified work is a broken promise. Measure schools by who they place, who they include, and how their graduates adapt over a lifetime. Not by who they reject at the door.
- Lifelong by design, not by accident. The half-life of skills is now shorter than a career. The institutions that survive will be the ones that follow learners across decades, not the ones that release them at 22.
- Assessment is the lever. Move it first. As long as we measure what is easy to grade, we will keep producing what is easy to grade. Move assessment toward demonstrable capability, applied projects, and real-world outcomes, and the rest of the system will follow.
The leader’s responsibility
If you lead a company, you are an education stakeholder, whether you signed up for it or not. The talent you hired five years ago is being reshaped by AI right now. The talent you will hire in five years is being formed today, in classrooms most of us have stopped paying attention to.
Three questions worth holding this month:
- In your own organization, are you investing in lifelong learning the way you invest in technology, or are you treating it as a perk?
- When you hire, do you reward credentials, or do you reward demonstrable capability?
- In the schools, universities, and learning programs around you, are you a critic, or are you a builder?
Because reimagining education is not someone else’s job. It is the most strategic act of leadership available to us.
A challenge for May
Identify one young person in your orbit. An employee, a niece, a neighbor’s child, an aspiring entrepreneur, anyone whose trajectory is being shaped right now by the system we are debating.
Ask them one question: “What is the one thing school is teaching you that you wish it would stop teaching, and what is the one thing it is not teaching you that you wish it would?”
Then listen. Do not coach. Do not correct. Just listen.
Their answer will tell you more about the future of work than any report you will read this year.
The future is not built by a curriculum committee. It is built by every leader who decides, today, that the next generation deserves better than we received.
Be that leader.
Warmly,
Jean-Philippe Courtois
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