When “Smart” Becomes Cheap, Our Schools Look Even More Broken
For almost ten years, a small group of us pushed to open a free school called Ideas College.
The vision was simple and, in hindsight, painfully ahead of its time: take the “rough diamonds” the system was about to discard, and give them an education built around creativity, EQ, real‑world problem solving and the skills they would actually need in a world of AI and automation.
We weren’t trying to game league tables.
We were trying to build the kind of school many of us wish we’d had.
And yet, after years of effort, we’ve had to dissolve Ideas College.
Not because the idea was wrong, but because the system around it made it almost impossible to bring to life. Funding structures, regulatory hurdles, risk aversion, politics – piece by piece, they squeezed the oxygen out of something designed to serve the kids everyone else had quietly given up on.
An Education System Built for the Wrong Game
Listening to Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, talk about why kids shouldn’t bother learning to code in the traditional way, it’s hard not to feel the gap widening between the world outside and what happens in most classrooms.
His point (stripped of the headlines) is this:
AI is turning basic “IQ tasks” into a commodity.
Programming languages will increasingly be replaced by human language interfaces.
The real value will sit with people who can think clearly in a domain, ask the right questions, and work creatively with these tools.
Whether you fully agree with him or not, the direction of travel is obvious.
If your entire value is “I can memorise content” or “I can do basic, repeatable tasks” – human or digital – you’re going to be automated away. The same adults telling kids to buckle down, cram facts and chase grades are also the ones breathlessly implementing AI systems that make that kind of “smart” cheaper by the month.
Our education system is still largely optimised for:
Standardised testing over original thinking.
Individual performance over collaboration.
Compliance over curiosity.
In other words, the exact opposite of what this next era is going to reward.
What We Wanted Ideas College To Prove
With Ideas College, we wanted to test a different hypothesis:
That the kids being labelled “difficult”, “disruptive” or “not academic” might actually be the ones best equipped to thrive in a complex, AI‑enabled world – if you give them the right environment and expectations.
The core ingredients were always:
Creativity and making – not as “extra”, but as the main event.
Emotional intelligence – understanding yourself and others, working in teams, handling conflict.
Critical thinking – questioning, reframing, connecting dots across disciplines.
Real‑world briefs – problems from outside the school gates, with real constraints and consequences.
We weren’t anti‑IQ.
We just didn’t worship it. Academic ability still matters. But on its own, it isn’t enough – and in an AI world, it’s certainly not the differentiator it once was.
The tragedy is that the very kids who could benefit most from this kind of education are the ones least likely to get it, because their lives don’t fit neatly into the boxes the system understands.
What Jensen Huang Is Really Pointing At
The viral framing of Huang’s message is that “smart is about to become worthless.” The more nuanced version is that average smart – the kind schools have traditionally selected and rewarded – is losing its magic as an economic advantage.
If AI can:
Write the first draft.
Debug the basic code.
Summarise the document.
Solve the standard equation.
…then what’s left for humans?
Plenty.
But it looks a lot more like:
Defining the problem in the first place.
Bringing lived experience and context.
Spotting nuance and unintended consequences.
Creating, persuading, leading, caring.
These are not “soft skills”.
They are the hardest skills to scale and automate, and they are exactly what so many young people never get a structured chance to develop in school.
A System Not Fit for Purpose – And What Comes Next
So here we are in 2026.
AI is accelerating. The gap between what we teach and what the world rewards is widening. And a nine‑year attempt to build a different kind of free school for rough diamonds has had to be wound up, not because there was no need, but because the system couldn’t or wouldn’t flex enough to let it live.
It would be easy to stop there, with bitterness and a post‑mortem.
But that’s not the point of this piece.
The real question is: where do these ideas go now?
If the formal system can’t move fast enough, then maybe:
Businesses need to step in with serious, long‑term investment in alternative pathways – apprenticeships, labs, creative academies.
Communities and charities need to double down on spaces where young people can experiment, make things, fail safely and find their voice.
Those of us who’ve spent years inside innovation and intrapreneurship need to bring that same energy to education, even if it never fits in a neat box.
Ideas College, as a structure, may be gone.
But the kids it was built for are still here. The AI wave is very much here. And the choice in front of us is simple:
Carry on pretending the old definition of “smart” will save them.
Or…
