Forget Screen Time. Our Kids’ Future Is the Real Question.

School is a funny word, and it carries a lot of cultural weight. We all have a vision in our heads when we say it. The structure of the traditional school day has a very specific purpose. Around 100 years ago, that purpose was to make sure the wheels of capitalism were provided with lots of lubrication in the form of compliant workers.

Well, now the world of work doesn’t need those compliant workers. They have robots now. The often tenuous link between school and the real world of work has never really confronted the full challenge of the AI revolution.

A few years ago, on a hot summer afternoon, I taught an ethics class to a very talented and engaged group of Year 6 students. The class was “Can I be mean to a chatbot?” Maybe it was my enthusiasm for teaching AI, or the strange calm Sydney gets before an afternoon storm. Either way, as soon as they heard it was about AI, there was an abject and complete silence. That’s always unnerving for any teacher. Is my fly undone? Have they found something on my social media?

I wanted to check I wasn’t over-egging the omelette, so I said, “I guess you’ve done lots of lessons on AI so far, so let me know if you’ve heard all this before.” Complete silence.

It was in the space of that silence that a new direction was born in my life. I knew what I had to do. I had to help these kids, and by extension all kids, be prepared for the world that was coming.

Schools and universities, much like the law, do their best to keep up with the speed of societal change. I had much the same experience as these kids when I did my teaching degree. Universities were in denial about AI use. In 2024 and 2025, you could do literally anything with AI and get away with it.

But denial and silence, and everything that goes with them, create dissonance and frustration. That includes the hushed tones in staffrooms, where no one wants to talk about AI. It might be drawing a long bow, but I have some empathy for those who want to move through the denial to an open, transparent recognition of the issue, and then a discussion of how to resolve it.

So I looked around to see what anyone else was doing about it. I found Alpha School, which at that point was a small, bespoke idea. But there’s something very attractive in its recognition of where AI is taking us. It gives its students a chance at a future where their uniquely human attributes will be valued more than any content knowledge they could gain from years of schooling. These are students who will never apply for a job, write an email or argue with the bank without AI in the room.

Most schools’ position was to look out the window and hope it would go away. We’ve tried this before. We tried it with calculators, and with the internet. I’m fairly sure someone tried it with the biro.

I live near the beach in Sydney. We teach our kids to swim, then we teach them about rips, and we stand on the hot sand sweating with nervousness. But we don’t avoid what happens at sea.

So I made my own model. It’s not so much based on winners or leaderboards. It’s firmly rooted in our national instinct to gently take the mickey out of someone until they get back in line. It’s far more relaxed, with far more of a sausage sizzle vibe.

So AI school isn’t about more screen time. That isn’t really the point. Hopefully, it’s how we give our children their childhood back.