‍THOUGHT: The Babysitting Hypothesis
TREND: Nobody Told Her It Was Impossible
TOOL: The Anti-Answering Machine

The Babysitting Hypothesis

Naval Ravikant makes a provocative claim: Schools exist primarily as daycare and "prisons for college-aged males who would otherwise overrun society."

It's an extreme take. But it's worth analyzing. Schools spend zero time on life skills like nutrition, cooking, relationships, or managing money. We teach kids to wait for permission instead of building things, and spend twelve years on standardized test prep for jobs that might not exist.

The counterarguments are many: schools provide structure, socialization, foundational knowledge. Fair. But when kids can learn calculus on Khan Academy at 11 (more on that in a moment), you have to wonder whether we're optimizing for education or convenience?

The real curriculum, Naval says, should be simpler: Learn basics across all fields. Master them through repetition. Go deep only in what you love.

We can get along with that.

Watch the full video

Nobody Told Her It Was Impossible

Hannah Cairo learned calculus on Khan Academy at 11. By 14, she'd taught herself graduate-level mathematics from textbooks alone, homeschooled in Nassau, Bahamas.

"Mathematics was another world I could explore," she told Quanta Magazine. "A world that was not confining."

At 15, she enrolled in Berkeley's concurrent enrollment program—a way for exceptional high schoolers to take college courses. By 16, she'd talked her way into graduate seminars. Her professor gave his class a warm-up problem: a simplified version of the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, which mathematicians had wrestled with it for 40 years.

Cairo went to work, and at 17, she disproved the conjecture.

This echoes George Dantzig's story (which we covered with 1517 Fund's Michael Gibson). In 1939, Dantzig walked into class late, and ended up solving two problems from the board (thinking they were homework).

When Cairo applied to PhD programs, six universities rejected her outright on the grounds that she had no bachelor's degree.

Maryland and Johns Hopkins were the only schools that would take her straight to doctorate. When she graduates, it'll be her first degree ever.

The Anti-Answering Machine

Some kids use ChatGPT to cheat. Others use it as a thinking partner.

MathGPT helps the latter. Instead of answering questions directly, it asks them. When you're stuck, it guides rather than solves.

Penn State, Tufts, and Liberty University are implementing it this fall. Professors control when students access AI help. They set attempt limits. They can require work uploads to verify authenticity.

Even ChatGPT recently added a "study mode" that similarly avoids direct answers.

AI makes cheating trivially easy, but also incredibly expensive. Not in dollars, but in lost ability to think independently. The students who resist the temptation to outsource their thinking are the ones who'll thrive when everyone else is dependent on machines.

Cost: $25 per student per course.