We have experienced firsthand the powerful liberation humans experience when they are allowed to be unrealistic and the intense frustration they experience when they are told to be realistic.

So often it is easier to stay in the box, to adhere to reality than to try to be the ones creating new realities. These new realities can only happen if we have humans being unrealistic enough to dare to be vulnerable and brave enough to face failure.

So many of us have a personal story related to the flaws of an education system. If it’s not our own personal story it is one related to our kids, our friends or family. By the age of 20, we have spent 80% of our most critical forming years in a system designed to teach humans primarily how to conform. 

If you try to recall the most memorable moments of schooling, it’s rare to hear anyone say “I loved the curriculum” or “I loved being forced to turn up on time” or tests or sit straight or stay quiet……it’s mostly friendships, relationships, moments of growth, the playground, recess. When you say to someone “you know how the education system is broken, old fashioned, restrictive and kills curiosity”…everyone, literally every person agrees, nods and says “yeah...I know.”

This is not to say teachers are terrible, this is not to say school is terrible, this is not to say we don’t need a way to load the enormous amounts of knowledge we generate as humankind into our brains. What we are clearly acknowledging with the Unrealistic Foundation is that our current systems are not as good as we can make them and the systems are not flexible and agile enough to adjust to the needs of humans.

One of the problems is the sacredness of school, we often feel sorry for the poor teachers who don’t get paid enough, we feel like it’s good enough for being public and free, we often cut the system slack by saying they have 30 kids it’s hard to manage that many, effectively we find the problem but we always find a reason to excuse it and not do anything about it.

Here’s the clincher. The education system is the system that rules them all. All other systems we use to organise ourselves as societies (economic systems, democratic systems, the judicial systems) are ruled by the education system given it produces the raw materials, the humans that form the system. Fix the education system and start to fix multiple systems.