Founding Blog

These are the ideas I have been afraid to put down these the last years of being in the education sector.

We are failing our children in schools. It is so cliched it is almost mind-numbing. Something to turn away from and ignore. Governments ready and willing to let children starve and suffer even as they decry the need for education. Institution tasked with guiding and protecting children (often for exorbitant fees) that do the opposite.

In addition, education today has been captured by a cosmetic appeal to equality and inclusivity even as it perpetuates ignorance, superficial academic outcomes and lack of happiness.

Before I continue, It is important to acknowledge where I can coming from. I am Kenyan man who has live most of his life travelling around the world to Pakistan, Switzerland, Hungary and now the U.K. I am born of multiculturalism, my father is after all a globetrotting UN diplomat who has insisted we attend the best American schools money can buy. I have only ever being adjacent to true poverty behind large walls in gated communities. I long ago lost my ability to speak all but the global lingua franca, English. I am black, African, privileged, and young but even my own educational experiences have highlight that even here modern private education cannot deliver what students and society want most: a better world.

With or without education countries grow, they emit CO2, they collapse, they become more unequal.

And as some authors have demonstrated have little to offer along any dimension whether it be cultural awareness, political tolerance, and now economic prosperity. These are idea that many sound hyperbolic and counter intuitive and are best explored through the work of better thinkers than me. But something needs to change.

This is odd because I am also a facilitator of all that is wrong and all that could be good from our educational system. I am a well paid tutor to rich families, like my own, that is weaponized in service of broken notions of meritocracy and drive. My job at present is to help privileged mediocrity to power even as I shun those less fortunate than my self. I should be more guilty but I am not, I am one of the many indifferent actors within the education system aiming to reap profits, prosperity for my family and myself. But I am fed up and scared.

I now live in a state of rage and fear for the children who I have let and continue to let suffer in the public school sector and also for those who suffer in the private school sector.

Today’s wealthiest children live a much more constrained existent than is recognized. Take for instance in the U.K. and around the world a unique poison and aberration has taking hold of education in the form of boarding school: a mode of institutionalizing care for elite children. Whilst many in world decry the separation of children from their parents for long stretches of time, the wealthy parent and students celebrate and reward it. Private schools also act a breeding grounds for false meritocracy (if there even is one), bullying, cosmetic diversity, and as engines of inequality.

I think our children deserve better at all classes. But set within a context of increasing and unstoppable economic, environmental inequality what should the new education institution look like. Is it Montessori, Forest School, home schooling, or unschooling? Is it liberal or militaristic?

The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan made clear to me that education in today’s world serve no other social function than to be a encapsulation of what society has to offer its future generation. Warts and all.

I want Quest Education to encapsulate my dreams for my children and every child on the planet. That children can be independent, that they have a right to be unharassed and supported as they progress through life, and that the world has more to offer than routine and exam prep. I also want them to get the best of us through the connection that they can develop with their educators.

Therefore, To move forward I have come to the conclusion that we need to go back without escaping the current and past lessons.

Humans are a social species and the engine of cultural transmission in way or another is us. Teachers, tutors, educators. Our goal is to transmit society’s knowledge forward to the future with a respect and tolerance for difference and a the sober responsibility to care for children. And we must care for them at the least. That they are fed, well-rested and ready to interact with the world.

Everything in the way between student and teacher, learner and explorer is a distraction. Whether that is distance, class, ideology, institution, and even test prep.

Our new education must sanctify and transform this connection. So I want to do away with the focus on superficial facilities, with the focus on test scores, with the focus unsustainability, with the focus on devaluing education, and with the aspirationalism that paradoxically drives it.

I want to re-examine the idea that high quality one to one education is truly out of reach for today learners even as the world best educational facilities charge upwards of 50,000 pounds.

I am humbled by the complexities and difficulty of doing education right and I am aware that globally we have more inequality and by any known movement or cultural force beside catastrophic and undesirable ones at least according to experts like Walter Scheidel.

The new education therefore most function and thrive in inequality and equality. An Orwellian tangle that may be impossible to achieve. I want Quest Education to do it.

Why focus on offering unlimited one to one support in a flexible schedule for both learner and educator. First and foremost it is because today’s student are sleep deprived. Sleep is the most important substrate for learning as well as life and through a flexible timetable around each student, Quest Education aims to eradicate sleep deprivation in children as well as improve their performance. This cannot be done within the current institutional framework of a school. The level of dynamism, openness and sustainability are simply beyond it.

The task is therefore to fund this process in ways a business structure capable of scaling the unscalable namely the teacher student bond. It must value and protect educators and importantly students. It must recognize its impact or lack thereof in the wider world and work to make it a substantive impact on it. It must also start from first principles to be environmentally sustainable. No wasteful frivolity indifferent to the suffering of the billions to come. It is must do the likely financially unsustainable task whilst surviving. Quest Education will do these things and more because they are necessary.

Hence the Vision is nothing less than the complete transformation of the global education system away from lazy and decrepit institutions catering to the rich towards sustainable and enjoyable teacher student interactions for all.

The first thrust is unlimited teacher student time across the A-level system at the same cost of current private school. A high cost endeavor that will flesh out the capabilities whilst also serving as proof of concept. That educational institution can be true partner and facilitators to the goals of students.

The second will be incorporating a ten to one delivery allowing 10 disadvantaged students for every advantaged student served to reach academic guidance.

The last will be an affordable one to one provision that any student in the world can purchase that would render any narrow educational outcome (grade, test score) within reach for any student with sufficient planning. The hope is that this would lead to an invalidation of the metric based system for quantifying learners intrinsic worth.

At all stages the goal will be to leverage technology where necessary and importantly de-emphasize it where not. The safety and well-being of students will be paramount and so to for the teachers. The world we are moving towards will have more pandemics, climate shocks, and disruption than the world we are leaving behind. A 21 century educational service should rise to the challenge in an environmentally sustainable way.

The important question one can ask is: how is this any different to what had come before? The answer, in a profound way, is that it represents a revisiting of our ancient primal needs for communication and cultural transmission. Is this not just tutoring on steroids? Yes it is. Nonetheless, Quest Education is an acknowledgement that the complementarity utilized to patch up conventional education is not fit for purpose. Receiving learners from educational systems that have already firmly placed them in graded hierarchies, when they are sleep deprived, and stressed is a soul crushing experience. These students and their parents are often not open to “enrichment”.

Is a predominantly online mode of instruction not going to affect the socialization of children? Of course but current educational environments are suited more for discipline and rote learning as opposed to socialization: the notion that the best socialization for children is 15 minutes at break and 45 minutes at lunch with heavily sanctioned classroom interaction in between is ridiculous. If Quest Education is successful learners will have more time to socialize and in the ways that serve them.

How does this actually help the learners in the long term? We truly want to make Quest Education a lifelong partner that can enable the paths that every learner wants to follow. To do that you must be structured to ensure financial security to your children, economic opportunities for them, and enable sustainable means to get there. We hope to be able to provide the products and services required to do so. But, in the meantime, we will strive for the world best alumni network.

These offering represents the thoughts, frustration, learnings and biases that I have inherited over our decades long interaction with education. One thing is for sure. Even with my privileged upbringing and education, I have felt let down, unprepared, and unsupported by my educational institutions around the world and here in the U.K.

Currently the students can’t change this, most parents are unaware there is a problem, teachers are too disempowered to change it, and educational institutions have no incentive to change.

I think we can do better or at least give learners the ability to enjoy and be enabled in the journey in a sustainable way. And it is my whole hearted goal that it can be reintegrated into the public mission which is to ensure prosperity and safety to all learners.

We should build an institution we can be proud of. I would like to leave an institution that tried to change things for the better.

Quest Education is an attempt to do just that.