This article is republished from Science and Culture Today.
Consider Alpha School. Founded in 2014 and refashioned under tech entrepreneur Joe Liemandt, Alpha School represents a radical experiment in K–12 education — an AI-driven, mastery-based model that compresses core academics into just two hours a day. Backed by $1 billion of Liemandt’s own funding, Alpha’s TimeBack system uses adaptive AI tutoring, personalized pacing, and focused time management to accelerate learning.
Alpha School students are said to advance an average of 2.6× faster than peers on nationally normed MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) tests and frequently score in the 99th percentile. The remaining hours focus on life skills such as entrepreneurship, leadership, and communication. Teachers, called “guides,” earn salaries starting around $100,000 and function as mentors rather than lecturers. Tuition runs from $40,000 to $75,000 annually — the high end being charged in places like San Francisco, where the cost of living is high.
Alpha is at once a luxury brand and a highly disruptive educational model. It vastly reduces the time spent on learning academic subjects. It completely restructures traditional schooling. And it justifies such disruptive changes by claiming stupendous increases in academic results. Obviously, its cost puts it out of reach of most students and their families. But even though early adopters are paying premium prices, this educational model may in time become affordable and widely available.
Affordable and available
Actually, a model similar to Alpha’s that is affordable is already available. It’s not as deluxe as Alpha, focusing instead strictly on academics, and thus, at least for now, lacking Alpha’s life-skills amenities. Victoria Garmy, founder of StudiaNova.org, created this model (see the in-depth interview with her on this Substack). She draws inspiration from her upbringing in a one-room schoolhouse, her background as a mechanical and aeronautical engineer, and her passion for eliminating inefficiency in education. Applying an engineer’s precision to education, she has designed a “microschool” model that maximizes learning intensity while minimizing waste. Her approach reimagines the one-room schoolhouse for the digital age — lean, high-tech, and yet personal — allowing students to achieve mastery in a fraction of the time consumed by conventional schools.
In Garmy’s model, students attend for just three hours a day in concentrated learning sessions. During that time, they work independently at computer stations, moving through carefully sequenced online courses while a teacher-supervisor circulates to answer questions, provides one-on-one help, and monitors progress. Garmy’s school runs like a modern office. Like employees, students begin work by logging into their workstations. They then move through rich, interactive courses complete with videos, eliminating the need for live lectures or Zoom calls.
This “white-collar” classroom ensures that every minute serves a learning goal. The short day is enough, Garmy argues, because it eliminates non-instructional time: no cafeteria meals, no hallway transitions, no lengthy assemblies, and no distractions from unfocused instruction. The result is sustained intellectual engagement — three hours of genuine learning intensity, surpassing the diluted six- to eight-hour grind of traditional schools.
Her business model is as streamlined as her pedagogy. A single storefront equipped with twenty desks and repurposed Linux computers can accommodate forty students — twenty in the morning, twenty in the afternoon. With each paying $3,600 for nine months ($400 per month), annual revenue comes to $144,000. Studia Nova’s tuition cost is a small fraction of Alpha’s, making it widely affordable.
A single educator can, according to Garmy, operate such a self-sustaining one-room schoolhouse without grants or bureaucracy, making the model easily replicable nationwide. Garmy finds that total revenue of $144,000 is enough to cover rent, utilities, insurance, and an educator’s salary. The startup cost for laptops and desks is minimal. This is a lean operation. No cafeteria or food costs. No sports. No frills.
Outcomes have been striking
Students quickly reach grade level within a year, even those arriving multiple years behind. After that, the sky’s the limit. For students way behind in their reading level, reading while listening to the text being read combined with a writing exercise in which they give chapter summaries has proven remarkably successful at bringing readers up to speed. Three other features stand out:
- the model’s adaptability, enabling personalized pacing and mastery learning;
- its simplicity — Garmy has built a model any committed educator or parent can reproduce, restoring both efficiency and excellence to American K–12 education;
- its incentivization of good behavior and engaged learning because students themselves much prefer a short three-hour work day versus the typical six to eight hours at a traditional school—they don’t want to jeopardize having to go back to the old model.
The compressed study time at Alpha and at Studia Nova contrasts with the long hours that Harvard economist Roland Fryer, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, found was important for learning in traditional public schools. KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), a network of charter public schools, also emphasizes long hours, adding two hours to the typical public-school workday.
Which of these approaches is better for a sound education — short hours or long hours? Long hours have the advantage of allowing more time for students to socialize, play sports, do extracurriculars, etc. Students who attend microschools (or homeschools) may be able to participate in these activities at a local public school while foregoing its academics, but arranging that will require some additional effort by students and parents.
A Question Now Arises
How many of the long hours spent at traditional schools are spent doing intense concentrated mental work that delivers significant learning outcomes? In posing this question, we need to keep in mind that people can sustain intense, deliberate focus for only so many hours per day before cognitive fatigue sets in, leading to sharply diminishing returns in productivity and output. This limit arises from the need for recovery (periods of rest or diversion) to maintain high-level attention and performance, as excessive effort beyond this threshold triggers errors, reduced creativity, and burnout. It seems, then, that Alpha and Studia Nova have found a way to make the learning experience much more efficient than conventional schooling.
Victoria Garmy’s Studia Nova is attempting to spur an educational movement across the U.S. and beyond that builds and empowers microschools at a vast scale. For now, however, her efforts remain fledgling. Yet there is a thriving educational option whose schools are even smaller than microschools. Those are the homeschools. Homeschooling in the U.S., at the time of this writing, educates about 4 million K–12 students, or about 7 percent of the primary and secondary school population. Started in the late 1970s by persons dissatisfied with traditional schooling, the homeschooling movement grew from 10,000–15,000 students in the early 1980s to millions by the 2000s, achieving legalization in all states by 1993.
Homeschooled students often outperform public-school students on standardized tests, excelling in self-directed learning. Homeschooling leverages technology extensively, using LMSs (learning management systems) from their inception in the late 1990s, online curricula like Khan Academy, and AI tools like ChatGPT to personalize learning, enabling efficient, mastery-based education akin to models like Studia Nova’s three-hour daily sessions. On average, homeschoolers spend about 4 hours per day on focused academic work, varying by age and curriculum, with younger students often at the lower end closer to 2 hours and high schoolers closer to 6 hours. Like Alpha and Studia Nova, homeschooling avoids the inefficiencies of traditional schools’ longer hours, fostering high achievement while avoiding, through parental oversight, the pitfalls of AI misuse.
With the wise use of technology, students can learn much more efficiently than past generations of students, greatly accelerating their education. In particular, the wise use of technology avoids so much wasted time and busywork that burdened academic life in the past. Need a journal article? Find it instantly online as a pdf. Compare that to me finishing a book in 1998 and needing to spend half a day visiting a university library that had a journal article I needed, driving there, finding it in the stacks, photocopying it, driving back home, and then transcribing by hand any quotes from it. All this activity was necessary back then for me to finish the book. But it was not edifying — I did not become an intellectually more able scholar because of my library visit.
Next: What we can learn about schooling from baseball
Here’s Part 1: A Non-Transhumanist Vision for AI in Education Bill Dembski describes this new approach as amounting to edification rather than enhancement. AI should be used as a way of honing students’ skills and knowledge, helping them learn more effectively than before.
