Raising creators, not consumers

For most of history, children learned by imitating the tools of their elders. The child of a carpenter learned wood; the child of a farmer learned soil. In our time, the tools have changed — and with them, what it means to prepare a child for the world.

Screens are not the enemy. Passivity is. A child who spends four hours a day consuming algorithmically-selected content is being shaped by a machine they do not understand. A child who spends four hours a day building — writing code, designing systems, teaching a model — is doing the opposite. They are shaping the machine.

This is the quiet inequality of our era. Not who has a device, but who can command one.