Last night, Tesla unveiled a new Roadster that drove upside down, briefly flew, and performed a kickflip over a row of cars. A car. Doing a kickflip.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see one on the road, much of the coverage led with some version of: “Gasp, it’s not street legal!” That misses the point.
Someone didn’t just look at a car and ask, “What if we could make it fly?” Someone looked at a car and said, “Let’s make it happen.”
There’s a big difference between imagining what’s possible and deciding to make it possible. It’s the difference between a teacher or a mom saying, “I don’t simply want something better. I want something different,” and actually starting a microschool.
Then comes the hard part. Roads weren’t built for flying cars, and big systems aren’t built for innovation. They’re built to protect what already exists.
Take Kainos Microschool in Indiana, which has a 1,000-square-foot lunchroom where 40 kids can eat, socialize, and take indoor breaks. Teach those kids math there, and suddenly the room needs a new building classification, an architect, and costly modifications. Same room. Same kids. Apparently, fractions threaten structural integrity.
As the founder put it: “Welcome to our lunchroom. No learning allowed.”
The late Clayton Christensen, who spent his career studying why established institutions miss what’s next, said of schools back in 2008: “The schools as they are now structured cannot do it.” Eighteen years later, a lunchroom proves his point.
And the same instinct is at work in Ohio. This week, an appeals court ruled that EdChoice, which serves about 180,000 students, violates the state constitution’s common schools requirement, describing it as “a competing system of uncommon schools.”
Uncommon is the point. The program continues while the case proceeds, but the uncertainty for families is real.
We don’t need a system that decides which new ideas are allowed to exist. We need one where educators are free to try, parents are free to choose, and families decide what works. Nobody knows if that Roadster will ever hit a road. We don’t know what the next great school will look like either. And that’s the point.
We need a future where educators are free to create, parents are free to choose, and families decide what works. Not bureaucracies. Not institutions protecting the status quo.
The future of education shouldn’t require permission from the past.
A version of this post originally appeared on The Frend a Way.
