I was homeschooled for the last years of high school, back when that meant faxing my assignments. Both my parents were in education, which is an important part of the story. They were progressive but never ideological about it. Pragmatic, mostly. At fifteen they let me do what I actually wanted to do, and they did it from a place of opportunity rather than rebellion – not getting me away from something, but pointing me toward more of it. It's the difference between raising a child in reaction and raising one in possibility.
So when I say I'm homeschooling my kids for a future world, understand that I'm the second generation doing this. My parents gave me room to move on it early. I'm doing the same, probably with a clearer view of what's coming, because now it's my job to watch where technology goes.
I've never had a career, not in the sense most people mean. I've built businesses, run a software studio that built the digital side of other people's businesses, bought and sold companies, worked in the grey areas where nobody hands you a title or a ladder. I've never once applied for the next rung. There wasn't a ladder. There was a series of things worth doing and the nerve to do them without permission. Two decades of that has taught me the conventional path is optional, and I've been proven right often enough to trust it.
I should say now that I dislike the word "homeschooling." It's a can of worms the moment it leaves your mouth. Say it and people file you somewhere on a spectrum that runs from the fully unschooled to the quietly understimulated, and you, dear reader, can already tell I'm not baking sourdough and churning butter all day. We are not a relaxed lot. The word is also just wrong for what we do. I believe in rigorous academics – my kids are on three separate maths programmes. I've simply not found a better word. "Independently schooled" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
What I'm not training them in is the old syllabus of school – punctuality, obedience, repetition, the reflex to produce the standard answer on demand. Those were virtues for a world that needed reliable clerks. A machine is a more reliable clerk than any child will ever be. Drilling my kids to win on that ground is teaching them to lose.
~~I spend my working life making bets. Most of them are about businesses, and most of the time the betting doesn't bother me. It bothers me when the stakes are high. And betting on the future my children will walk into is the highest stake I've got. That's the one that keeps me up at night.~~
Here is what I think is true, and I hold it firmly enough to raise them on it. The cost of thinking is collapsing. Analysis, writing, coding, diagnosis, the whole apparatus of clever cognitive work – a machine will do it faster, cheaper, and often better than a trained human. Not in some distant year. My kids will grow into it the way I grew into broadband, and I grew into broadband from a house with a fax machine.
The tempting conclusion is that cognitive skill is now a waste of a childhood. Why drill mental arithmetic, why labour over an essay, why struggle through a hard proof, when the machine does all of it on request? Outsource the thinking and free the child for something else.
I think that conclusion is exactly wrong, and getting it wrong would cost them the one thing the new world actually rewards. So let me lay out what I'm doing instead.
What I'm actually preparing them for
Essentially a person needs agency, contribution, mastery and connection. Some people find this in a career, others as a stay-at-home parent without a salary. So does a serious amateur, a volunteer, a person deep in a craft or a faith or a community. What I'm preparing my children for is the ability to build those four things themselves, in whatever shape the world ends up taking. That's what the rest of this piece is about.
I should be clear about one thing before I go further, because it's the part I care most about. None of this means I'm closing doors. I want my children to be able to walk into any university they choose, if that's what they want. Every option open, none quietly taken off the table by a mother's worldview. I distrust is conformity – doing something because it's the path, not because it's right for the person on it. Deciding for my kids that university doesn't matter would be its own conformity, just to a different crowd. So I keep every door open. It's for them to choose. That's exactly what my parents did for me, from a place of opportunity, and it's the part I most want to pass on.
So what does it actually take to do well in the world I can see coming? Here's my honest answer, and none of it is about a job.
The thing the machine can't take
It starts, strangely, with making them think harder than they'll ever strictly need to.
If the machine can think, why make a child think hard? Because of what the thinking builds on the way through.
Watch the people getting the most out of these tools right now. The ones who use them well aren't the ones who never learned to think. They're the ones who did the hard cognitive work for years and can now tell the difference between a good answer and a plausible one. They have taste. They have judgment. They know what they're looking at.
You cannot get there by shortcut. Taste is not a thing you're handed – it's residue. It's what's left in you after you've made a hundred things badly and slowly learned why they were bad. Judgment is the same. It's the deposit that hard problems leave behind once the problem itself is long forgotten. Take away the struggle and you take away the sediment. You get a child who can summon any answer and can't tell a true one from a confident lie.
The scarce human skill is discernment – knowing what's good, what's real, what to ask for and what to throw away. And discernment is manufactured entirely from the cognitive labour everyone now wants to skip.
There's a sister skill to discernment, and it's noticing. Seeing the thing everyone else walked straight past – the odd detail, the pattern no one has named, the question that hasn't occurred to anyone in the room. It comes from a mind that observes for its own sake, and that kind of attention is going to be scarce. Scrolling kills it early: the world arrives pre-chewed, and a mind fed that way forgets how to look. So I protect the looking. I let them stare at things. I ask what they noticed before I tell them what I noticed.
So I make my children do the hard thing. Not because they'll need to do it by hand as adults – they mostly won't. Because the doing is what installs the judgment, and the judgment is what lasts. Which brings me to what that actually looks like on a Tuesday.
What I actually do
You'd expect a mother preparing her children for an AI world to fill the house with more technology. I've gone the other way. Screens come last, after everything that actually makes a person: a body that can do hard things, the ability to sit with a difficult feeling without bolting, the nerve to try the thing that might not work, the stubbornness to stay with it when it does, friendships that take years to build, plain physical health, and the curiosity, taste and judgment I've already gone on about. Get those in and the technology takes an afternoon to learn. Get them wrong and no amount of technology puts them back.
First, skills are lego blocks, and more blocks is always better. They live in a world where creation sits at the centre of everything, so we let them create. Imagine and make, whatever shape it takes.
Creation over consumption and the ability to critically think means no social media. No short-form anything, and I mean anything. Long-form only, from reading to films. A child raised on real literature picks up ethics, philosophy and empathy with no lesson ever labelled as such – you learn what a life costs by living a hundred of them on the page. And I err toward the inspiring: what the world could be, what happens when humans come together. Not the endless Netflix parade of dysfunctional families and collapsing societies. This is needed to support the rest.
Then the non-negotiables. Maths and language arts. One instrument. One international language. Learn to speak in public. Learn to draw, because it's how you communicate without words. And be fit.
The rest is mostly setting problems and getting out of the way. Six mechanical mechanisms run the world – learn one a week, then build me each of them. I give them the fundamentals and turn them loose.
I like game theory. But I hate the idea of children not being plugged into reality. So three game options capped at 15 minutes a day. One world-building simulation, one for brain puzzles, one for meditation – and no more. We like a good Synthesis camp where kids are dropped into complex team games where nobody tells them the rules or what to think. They have to make sense of the chaos, get aligned with children from all over the world, make a plan, watch it fail, and correct course with the clock running. Mistakes aren't punished. They're the material.
This doesn't teach answers. Or test-taking. It teaches them to hold their nerve inside a problem they don't understand yet, with people they didn't choose, and find the way through together. That's not a school subject. It's the shape of every hard thing they'll ever do – build a company, hold a marriage, raise their own kids, fix something nobody has fixed before. The machine can hand them any fact. It can't hand them the composure to stand in the confusion long enough for a plan to appear. That has to be practised, and practised young.
I let them be bored, because boredom is where a mind learns to generate rather than consume. I let them get things wrong and sit in the wrongness long enough to feel it, rather than rescuing them into the right answer. I ask them what they think before I let them look anything up. I make them finish hard things – the maths that resists, the piece of writing that won't come out right – because finishing is where the deposit forms.
And I keep them close to the physical, un-automatable things. Creating, building, imagining. Real relationships with real friction. A body that can do difficult things. Time outdoors, time making, time with people who aren't optimised. And present – actually here, in the room and in their own attention, rather than scattered across a dozen feeds. Presence used to be the default setting of a childhood. It's becoming a discipline, so we practise it like one.
Look back at all of it and it's really just those four needs again, taught directly instead of borrowed from a job. Agency, from making real choices young. Contribution, from work a family actually needs. Mastery, from finishing the hard thing. Connection, from people rather than screens. A career would have bundled them up and handed them over. I'm teaching my children to build them with their own hands, so they never need the bundle.
If I had to keep one and burn the rest, it's agency – the settled belief that you can work a thing out for yourself, that not knowing yet is a starting position rather than a wall. That's the line between the child who builds and the child who scrolls, and if I'm honest everything else here is really in service of it.
That's a bet too. But it's the one bet where I already know how the technology plays out. The machine takes the thinking. It can't take what the thinking made of you.
That's the part I'm building. Quietly, at a kitchen table, one resisted answer at a time.
What is missing from this
- handwriting - neuroscience - strong writing and storytelling skills - boardgames
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