A World-Class Education in Two Hours a Day?
How AI is re-inventing education (and what to do about it)
đHello, my friend. Last week, if you made it all the way to the end of this newsletter, you saw me practically begging you to check out the Colossus profile of Joe Liemandt, McKenzie Price, and Alpha School â a next-generation private school based in Austin thatâs rethinking education from the ground up.
The central idea? That with the right use of AI, kids can receive a world-class, personalized education in just two hours a day.
If you didnât read or listen to the piece yet â itâs okay, Iâm not mad. Just disappointed. đ
But hereâs the great news: this week, Colossus dropped a new 2.5-hour podcast conversation with Liemandt himself â his first interview in 20 years â and itâs fantastic. If the article piqued my curiosity, the podcast sent my mind into overdrive. This is what Iâve been thinking about all week â and what I want to dive deeper into here.
So letâs do it!
What if school only needed to take two hours?
It sounds too good to be true, right?
But the numbers coming out of Alpha are real. Kids are:
Scoring in the top 1â2% nationally
Able to catch up on concepts missed in prior grade levels in weeks instead of months or years
Loving school â as in, choosing it over summer camp or vacation (What?!)
Hereâs how it works:
Two hours of academics per day delivered via AI-based, hyper-personalized instruction
Guides in the room, not traditional teachers â they come from various backgrounds, are paid well ($100K+), and their role is to support rather than instruct
The rest of the day is for life skills, project-based learning, and student-driven exploration
This isnât a vision of kids zoned out in front of screens. Itâs kids excited about learning, building real things, and gaining confidence that they can learn anything.
And if you're like me, you're thinking: How do I get my kids access to this type of learningâ like, yesterday?
Personalized mastery: the real magic
What makes Alpha different is that the AI isnât just teaching â itâs diagnosing.
The underlying technology platform (called TimeBack) figures out what your child knows and what they donât, and creates a personalized lesson path to fill in the gaps. Then it keeps testing them until theyâve mastered the concept â not 70% mastered, not âgood enough to pass,â but fully understood.
This is where the model diverges hard from traditional education.
Right now, schools are mostly age-based. Youâre 13? Great, hereâs 7th-grade math â whether or not you mastered the concepts from 6th grade. And if you didnât? Too bad, weâre moving on.
Thatâs how kids fall behind. Itâs also how they start thinking theyâre ânot smart.â
What Alpha is doing is saying: no â you can learn anything. You just need the right tools. And if you missed something earlier? You can catch up â sometimes multiple grade levels â in weeks, not years.
That part is huge.
Itâs not just about performance on tests. Itâs about restoring a kidâs confidence. Helping them believe theyâre smart. That learning isnât some mystery they werenât invited into.
That idea is one of the most exciting and powerful parts of this whole thing.
If this works at scale⌠what happens next?
If this model can scale â and I really hope it does â it raises a lot of questions.
1. What happens to teachers?
This could be both scary and exciting. Alpha replaces traditional âteachersâ with âguidesâ â highly capable adults who support kids rather than deliver academic instruction from the front of a classroom. These guides could come from education, sure, but also from completely different career paths.
Could this model open up education as a career path to people who never considered teaching â maybe retirees, entrepreneurs, or people looking for meaningful work outside of finance or tech?
Or â on the flip side â could this displace huge swaths of the current teaching workforce?
Maybe both. Very hard to predict at this stage.
2. What happens to the rest of the school day?
Letâs be honest: school isnât just about academics. For many families, it functions as a glorified daycare â a place to send kids while parents work.
If academics only take two hours, what fills the other six?
At Alpha, the answer is projects, public speaking, business building, and creative exploration. Some high school students are spending years building their capstone projects â one student is working to launch the first Broadway musical created by a teen.
Sounds utopian â and maybe it is. But the idea of giving kids the time, space, and resource to work on projects that are actually meaningful and exciting to them is very interesting â especially compared with a conventional school model thatâs historically forced kids to focus on everything except what theyâre actually interested in.
3. What happens to expensive private schools?
Hard to say! If the education part of school can be delivered better, faster, and (eventually) more affordably via technology⌠it raises some uncomfortable questions for private schools.
Now, before we get ahead of ourselves, itâs worth noting that Alpha costs $40k/year (and more in places like NYC & San Francisco). So itâs not exactly cheap.
And letâs consider the mentality of a private school parent. They probably had to jump through some serious hoops to get their kid into school in the first place â would they pull them to try out an âexperimentalâ school like Alpha? Unclear.
Maybe thatâs too much of a leap. Maybe the more likely path is that parents â both public and private school â get smart on the fact that these tools exist and begin applying more pressure on schools to integrate them. Joe Liemandt says that TimeBack should be available as a product for sale in the next 12 months.
4. Whatâs the real rollout timeline?
This is where my impatience kicks in. Iâve got a 5-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 14-year-old. And if the way we deliver education is about to get way better, I really donât want my older kids to miss it.
Alpha is opening schools across the country at a rapid pace. One just opened this fall in Charlotte, NC where I live â just K-3 to start.
But again, if the tools are available. And my kids can possibly be educated in a way that is more efficient, more effective, and instills them with more confidence, I donât have a lot of patience to wait around for it.
Wait⌠can I use this?
Iâm not joking. One of the things Patrick OâShaughnessy mentioned on the podcast â and I was thinking the same thing â was:
âCan I get access to this as an adult?â
I want that. I want an AI tutor to show me what I know, what I donât, and help me truly understand complex topics. I want it both to clean up things I should have learned along the way (damn you, 7th-grade math class!) but also to master new skills and topics.
And by the way, in this article Iâve talked about Alpha School because theyâre making some incredible advances â but Iâm sure there are armies of entrepreneurs tackling this or similar problems and we should expect a coming wave of tools that are going to massively change (and hopefully improve!) how we learn and so much more. Itâs exciting.
Takeaway
Weâre still early â but things are changing rapidly. There are concerns to work through â safety, access, socialization. But the core idea here â that we can deliver high-quality, personalized learning at scale â is incredibly exciting.
If weâre still living in the Industrial Age of education right now, this feels like a shot across the bow. A signal that something new is coming â or maybe, as the quote goes â that the future is already here, itâs just not evenly distributed.
This is a topic Iâm going to be spending more time on. If youâve listened to the podcast or read the profile, Iâd love to hear your take. Are you excited? Skeptical? Worried?
Let me know what you think.
â Greg
Content Diet
đ§ Podcast: Joe Liemandt â Building Alpha School and the Future of Education (Colossus)
đ Article: Joe Liemandt: Class Dismissed (Colossus)
đ° Local spotlight: Axios Charlotte on Alpha Schoolâs expansion