Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani & Erik Torenberg

Joe Liemandt (0:00)

Are you willing to redesign your school day so kids love it more than vacation? With cognitive science and learning science, plus the advent of LLMs, you can build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster.

Gagan Biyani (0:12)

The shift that I think you've been able to make is the believability of it. Pretty soon people are going to ask, why would we ever do it any other way?

Joe Liemandt (0:19)

I want this next generation to be the ones who are optimistically capable with AI and saying we're going to build an awesome future. That's what our job as educators are, is to go build that world.

Gagan Biyani (0:31)

What would you say to the parent who's saying, I'm sending my kid to Ivy League school. I know it's not perfect, but this is a new institution. Why should I take a risk?

SPEAKER_3 (0:42)

So if AI can help students learn the traditional curriculum dramatically faster, what should they do with the rest of their education?

In this episode, I sit down with Alpha School founder, Joe Liemandt and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder Gagan Biyani to talk about what school should look like in the AI era.

Joe has spent years building Alpha around a radically different model. Students spend roughly two hours a day on core academics, then use the rest of their time developing skills like teamwork, entrepreneurship, communication and leadership through real world projects. We talk about what Alpha has learned from K through 12 education and how those lessons change when applied to college age students at HAA. That includes why motivation matters so much, why students should be building alongside people operating at the frontier, and why learning can increasingly happen in service of solving a real world problem, rather than simply passing a test. And ultimately, we make the case for a different way of preparing young people for AI. Not by trying to predict which careers will survive, but by giving them the agency, relationships and tools to help build what comes next.

Erik Torenberg (1:49)

Joe, welcome to the podcast.

Joe Liemandt (1:51)

Thank you very much.

Erik Torenberg (1:52)

So we've had the luxury of spending some time together this year in touring the schools, and what you've built with Alpha is just incredible. And it's inspired us at HAA. We're grateful to have your involvement. And for people who are unfamiliar, why don't you just briefly describe what you think of as the essential innovations or what you've really brought to the space with Alpha.

Joe Liemandt (2:09)

Sure. So we're reinventing how K-12 school is, the school day, right? How kids spend their six or seven hours that they're in class, or in a school building, what is that like? And sort of the first part that you have to understand and buy into is that instructional design and delivery hasn't changed for a hundred years, right? We throw a teacher in front of the classroom and what's the right way to do this? And now, if you look over the last couple decades with cognitive science and learning science, plus the advent of LLMs, you can build a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster, right? And so, as soon as you have that ability where kids can learn 10 times faster than they could the last hundred years with the teacher in front of a classroom model, the question is, what do you do with it?

And so, that's what we're doing at Alpha, which is how do you reinvent the school day? And so, in our model, we make three commitments to the kids, which the first is they love school. And I just got the surveys back last week. Ninety-some percent of our kids say, I love school. Fifty percent of the kids at the school said, I would rather go to school than go on vacation.

I actually have one campus where it's at sixty-five percent of the kids are like, I'd rather go to school than vacation. And so, build a school where kids love it if you're going to be there for 12 years. But then the second part with this engine, what we do is the kids learn twice as much in two hours a day as sitting in class for six and doing homework. And so, it's two hours a day of the academics and they learn more, which if you're compounding and learning twice as much as you would at your other school, you're going to get to top 1%, sort of no matter where you start, given time. And so, the kids crush it. On standardized tests, we're the best academic performing school.

And then, the second and sort of the third commitment is, well, what would you do the rest of the day? And I think that's the whole thing of what we're talking about now. I believe now every school, and it doesn't matter, K-12, university, has to say if the traditional way and the traditional curriculum is now 10 times faster, what do you do with the rest of the day?