I don’t like to rant. I always want to keep things as nuanced as possible. I’m the good cop (my dear friend Paul is often the bad cop). But now I need to write a third rant about Alpha School (check here and here for the first two). But this time it’s not about the cost or about the AI. The reason I’m fuming is this post by Benjamin Riley.

At first, I thought: this can’t be right. Benjamin is exaggerating. No way in hell would a school actually make children do this. A bootcamp where one of the exercises is to keep your heart rate calm while listening to criticism from your parents? Really? Is this Scientology or a school?

And then I checked Alpha School’s own website… And then I discovered that Alpha’s own material confirms the most extraordinary parts of Riley’s account. Btw, this site is brand-spanking-new and popped up after Riley broke the news!

And there is plenty more! Take the assignment that requires students to clean toilets, muck out horse stalls, or scrub restaurant kitchens while recording themselves. The main reasoning behind this, apparently, is that learning to work hard means demonstrating that you can do unpleasant work without using what the school calls “victim language”? My own sons were assigned community service for school today, but trust me, it’s quite different.

One exercise was already known by quite a lot of people (pun intended) because that was the assignment. The teenagers have to build an audience on X and acquire 100 genuine followers.

And last but not least, because Alpha School so enthusiastically invokes the science of learning, something close to my professional heart and work, so perhaps my personal favourite: students are given five days to teach themselves an AP unit, without a teacher, textbook or study guide, using AI and whatever they can find on the internet. Bruner called; he wants his discovery learning back.

I did not have an expensive AI school enthusiastically rediscovering minimally guided instruction while invoking the science of learning on my 2026 bingo card. No, I had. I know. But I didn’t think this school would bring together the worst of team-building and old Japanese game shows and call it education.

Because this is where the joke stops being particularly funny. Because none of these examples come from a hostile reconstruction of what Alpha School might be doing. Alpha High School now describes these challenges itself. It calls the eight-week programme a Bootcamp. It says students need to pass objective tests. It describes the programme as a “deep bonding experience”. And it explains that one of its aims is to reset students’ expectations so that they come to believe that “massive acceleration is possible”.

There are plenty of legitimate discussions to be had about conventional schooling. Schools can waste time, or let students feel this is the case. Students can be insufficiently challenged. Technology can help. AI may well offer useful opportunities, although PISA yesterday suggests we’re not there yet. We can always think about how we organise education.

But being “different from a normal school” is not an educational theory. Nor is discomfort automatically learning. Misanthropy as an educational theory was abolished some time ago, I hope. Measuring something does not automatically make it scientific. Calling something a life skill does not demonstrate that your intervention develops or stimulates it. Making a test “objective” does not establish that what you are testing is worth developing. And attaching a heart-rate monitor to a teenager does not magically transform an activity into evidence-informed education.

Most importantly, the science of learning is not a decorative label you can stick on whatever collection of practices happens to fit your preferred vision of human beings.  And perhaps that is what bothers me most about Alpha School.

Behind all the talk of optimisation, acceleration, mastery, grit (oh wait), high-performance cultures and AI sits a remarkably specific idea of what education is for and what a successful young person should become. Think about the vision this ‘school’ has about what a human being and our society should look like.

Fast. Productive. Resilient. Entrepreneurial. Publicly visible (be it on Twitter). Comfortable with constant measurement. Able to take criticism without showing too much physiological response (be a robot!). Able to perform unpleasant tasks without complaining (be a robot?). Able to build an audience (of robots?). Able to use AI to get somewhere faster (I wonder where this could be).

Ok. But that is a kind of philosophy of education.

It is not the science of learning, nor the science of teaching.