Education is considered the exclusive domain of experts—seasoned professionals with degrees and years of experience. It's not something for amateurs. And perhaps that's exactly the problem. The system hasn't fundamentally changed in over 500 years—since it was designed not to foster independent thinkers, but to produce obedient factory workers for the industrial revolution and disciplined soldiers willing to die in wars they didn’t start and never benefited from.

But in the centuries since that system was born, the world has changed—dramatically.

Today’s children are sharper, more connected, more informed, and far more technologically savvy than most of their teachers.

And the mission of modern life is no longer simply to survive by working just enough to pay bills. We now raise generations who expect meaning, independence, success, and personal fulfillment—far beyond the life of a factory worker or a rule-following soldier.

So what made me—someone with no formal education—invest decades of thought, passion, and personal resources into transforming education? Ironically, it’s the fact that I was expelled from school at a very young age.

I'm not a professor. Not a doctor. I never even finished high school. I have no academic diploma to hang on the wall for my mother to be proud of. Her dream was for me to at least earn a high school certificate so I could get a secure job—maybe as a clerk in city hall.

But her dream and my path turned out to be very different.

What got me expelled was a single moment. Our main teacher proudly introduced a renowned mathematics professor who had volunteered to teach our class. She asked us to be grateful for the honor. He walked in, lit his pipe—yes, back then teachers could still smoke in class—and began by explaining why mathematics was superior to subjects like history or literature, because it was, in his words, "absolute." He said, “In mathematics, there is no doubt. One plus one is always two. Two plus two is always four. It’s the most precise science.”

I couldn’t help myself. I said out loud for the entire class to hear: “If that’s the professor everyone was so excited about, then he’s an idiot.”

The boys laughed. The girls stared. The professor turned red with rage. “Excuse me, mister?” he asked.

I didn’t stop. I said, “I’m not impressed by your smelly pipe, and what you just said proves you don’t understand math. One plus one is not always two. Two plus two is not always four. Only an idiot says that. If that’s what you’re teaching, you should go back to your university. We’re not idiots.”

That was too much. He kicked me out and took me to the principal’s office. There were several teachers there, my homeroom teacher, and a senior representative from the Ministry of Education visiting the school that day.

They all scolded me, insulted my ignorance, and demanded an explanation for my “disrespect.”

So I explained, nervously but clearly: “He said math is absolute, but that’s not true. One drop plus another drop doesn’t make two—it makes one. Two glasses smashed together with another two don’t make four—they can make four hundred shards. One mother plus one father doesn’t always equal two people—it can equal three: me. Or ten, in larger families. Math is not always absolute—it depends on context. So no, that teacher does not understand math.”

That was my last day in school.

Since then, I’ve never sat in a classroom again. Everything I know, I taught myself. I became addicted to learning. I read and investigated every volume of the encyclopedia in our home—and even the ones in my neighbor’s home.

But that’s not why I started researching education.

What really pushed me came years later. I noticed something strange: the smartest students in my class—the ones with the best grades—grew up to be decent people, but lived average lives, barely able to pay their bills, often without owning their home or even their car. Meanwhile, I—and most of the top 100 richest people in the world—never finished formal education. The founder of IKEA. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jan Koum (WhatsApp), Evan Williams (Twitter, Blogger, Medium), Travis Kalanick (Uber), Daniel Ek (Spotify), Michael Dell (Dell Computers), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), Paul Allen (Microsoft), and Richard Branson—all dropped out and never completed their formal education, to name just a few.

That contradiction haunted me.

If education is the key to success, why do so many of its “failures” end up thriving—while so many “top performers” barely get by?

The more I succeeded in the tech industry—and in building a happy, healthy family—the more I was compelled to explore this contradiction. What if formal education isn’t the key to success, but the mental block that prevents it? What if it teaches obedience instead of courage, memorization instead of creativity, caution instead of risk-taking? What if it rewards test-passing, but punishes curiosity and learning from failure—the very ingredients of success?

That’s why I launched this lifelong education research project.

To completely rethink education—not just the content, but the methods, tools, and systems. Not just once every 500 years, but constantly. Continuously. Adaptively. To design education for children who are meant to be happy, successful, and valuable contributors to society—not just obedient test-takers or passive employees upholding a status quo in a rapidly changing world.

To leverage the incredible qualities of educators themselves—granting them independence, uniqueness, and the academic freedom to teach the next generation with personalization and constant adaptation, rather than by outdated curricula and archaic standards that bore students, suppress talent and motivation, and entangle the remarkable capabilities of the teaching community in bureaucracy.

This project has evolved into multiple branches—from reimagining early childhood education through mother-led learning (Education by Mum), to AI-powered education platforms, to liberating teachers and professors from outdated methods so they can fulfill their true potential as mentors, not curriculum robots.

Every article here, every suggested idea and framework, is reviewed, questioned, updated, and adapted over time—because that’s the point. To grow with the world. To reflect new knowledge, experiences, technologies, trends, and challenges.

This is a self-financed research initiative—offered freely to the public. For educators. For parents. For academic institutions. For governments. For anyone who cares about building a better future. And I warmly welcome educators, parents, and students to add their own insights, critique, and challenges. This is a living system. A collaborative rethink. A conversation.

This is not just theory.

This is my mission. My mission to help education ministries, institutions, educators, professors—whom I deeply value—and especially mothers (and yes, fathers too) to change, update, upgrade, evolve, and wake up to the real world. To stop wasting the most valuable learning years—ages 0 to 15—on memorization, meaningless exams, and a fear of failure. To empower kids to fail proudly, think differently, dare boldly, and build something meaningful.

To teach them to “move fast and break things”—but with honor, compassion, and a strong moral contract with society. To challenge the status quo. To reinvent, rethink, and remain forever curious. To be confident enough to admit: the more we learn, the more we realize how much more there is to learn.

To always question more.

To never say never.

In the end, it comes down to this:

If most of the world’s billionaires dropped out of school, maybe it’s not the students who failed. It’s a system built to reward memorization and obedience, not originality, courage, and out-of-the-box thinking. Because memorization is a job for machines. Human brilliance begins when we stop following scripts and start challenging the art of the question—not by asking why, but daring to ask why not. Education must change—from teaching answers to teaching the art of the question. To teach the most important skill in life: how to learn. Not to prepare children for a world that no longer exists.

Thank you,

Eric Bach