AI is exposing the weakness of old schooling. A courageous minority is ready to respond.

On April 6, I posted an invitation to join The Courageous Minority: A One-Year Global Teacher Community to Reimagine Learning With AI. The response was heartening: more than 80 educators and leaders from about 20 countries expressed interest.

Because participants came from many time zones, we held two online information sessions, on April 30 and May 1, U.S. Pacific Time.

For those who are ready to move forward, the next step is simple: complete the application form by May 20. We will review the applications and make decisions about the membership of the core team before May 25. Then we will begin the real work with the core group.

So what did the sessions reveal?

First, educators around the world know something is wrong. They may work in different systems and roles, but they are seeing the same problem: AI is making it much harder to pretend that traditional schoolwork still makes sense.

For too long, schools have treated essays, summaries, routine problem solving, and polished presentations as evidence of learning. Now AI can often produce these quickly and fluently. Yet instead of asking whether these tasks are still worth assigning, many schools are asking how to police students more effectively.

That is the wrong question.

The problem is not simply that students use AI. The problem is that schools still assign too much work that AI can easily do. When students use AI to complete those tasks, they are not merely breaking the rules. They are exposing how little educational value many of those tasks had in the first place.

Not surprisingly, many current responses are weak. Teachers use AI to make old routines more efficient. Students use it to finish old assignments faster. Schools experiment with bans, restrictions, and detection. None of this addresses the real issue. It only helps preserve an increasingly obsolete version of schooling.

That is why this initiative exists.

The goal is not to bolt AI onto the old system and call it innovation. The goal is to rethink learning itself.

Another theme in the sessions was frustration. Many participants described schools that know change is needed but remain stuck. Some face skeptical colleagues. Some face fearful leaders. Some work in communities that want to reject AI altogether. None of this is surprising. Schools are built to preserve stability, protect familiar signals, and reassure the adults who depend on them.

That is precisely why waiting for whole-system change is usually a mistake.

The idea behind The Courageous Minority is that meaningful change rarely begins with everyone. It begins with a few people willing to act in the spaces they actually control: a classroom, a project, a unit, a portfolio, a program, a partnership.

Not because that is all that matters, but because that is where action is possible.

The sessions also returned repeatedly to the educational vision behind the program. It rests on three ideas.

First, learning should help students become uniquely great, not merely standardized. Personalization is not about helping all students reach the same endpoint more efficiently. It is about helping young people discover and develop their own strengths, interests, and directions.

Second, learning should help students create value for others by identifying and addressing real problems. School should not be dominated by artificial tasks for grades. It should help students do meaningful work that matters beyond the classroom.

Third, education should move beyond meritocracy toward human interdependence. The point is not to rank everyone by the same criteria, but to help people develop different strengths and contribute to one another. Difference is not a defect. It is a resource.

These are not minor adjustments. They imply a different purpose for education.

The sessions also made one other thing clear: this will not be a talk shop. The core group is expected to act. Not admire ideas. Not merely discuss change. Act. The scale may differ, but the work must be real.

We also discussed the structure of the program: a core group for those ready to do the work, and an observer group for those who want to learn alongside it without the same level of commitment. Monthly meetings will allow participants to share designs, receive feedback, and learn from one another. The point is not simply to discuss the future. It is to build it, however imperfectly, inside the constraints of the present.

In the end, despite all the discussion about AI, the deepest issue was not the technology. It was the poverty of imagination in schooling. AI simply makes that poverty harder to hide.

This initiative is not about doing the same things faster. It is about creating forms of learning that are more personal, more meaningful, more human, and more worth doing.

That is why I left the sessions both realistic and hopeful. Realistic, because the barriers are real. Hopeful, because change does not need permission from everyone before it begins.

It only needs a courageous minority willing to start.

Those who registered their interests earlier will receive an email with the Application Form link soon.

Application deadline: May 20
Decisions announced by: May 25
More information: https://www.yeeeducation.com/