I always imagined a school of the future would reflect the kind of school I would have liked to attended when I was a kid: classes in the clouds, hologram computers, and a shorter school day.

I always imagined I would have robot teachers and computerized lunch machines that dispense pink goo in a cup. I also imagined a school of the future might make a better world.

My school of the future probably finds its roots in my favorite childhood cartoon, The Jetsons. What I describe above is not quite the Little Dipper School attended by Elroy Jetson, but similarities abound.

This is a school where presumably the average kid is working on flying pills, not merely consuming content. While many technologies of the popular series would come to pass (video chat, 3D printed food, capsule endoscopies), others (flying cars, moon colonies, the school of the future) are on the way!

One thing that was assumed, but not at all predicted, was a worldwide communications network, the advancement of which would slowly reconfigure the world in its image. No one, except maybe Arthur C. Clarke, imagined the internet as a way for us to “no longer commute, but communicate.”

That was 1964.

Fast forward. The year is 2022. The internet exists and is evolving like a species. Web3 is surfing a third wave of worldwide communications technology, where the users have control over both the means and titles of production.

Clarke’s city of the future, not locations but a single point, is crisply expressed in online profiles, chat apps, and cryptocurrencies. The city of the future is the internet.

If it doesn’t feel quite as utopian as The Jetsons, there are reasons for that. The school of the future has not been invented, despite software eating the world.

For the world to be inspiring, we have to be inspired. For the world to be more, we have to want more. And I believe our lack of inspiration, our idea of not wanting more, begins with our most formative years as students in school.

There is no school that teaches our youth how to interact with and design the software they use. They are consumers, and not producers, of technologies, leaving the task of production up to companies, who are not exactly interested in their education.

Almost every child in a free society has a smartphone. Very few know how to write and design programs for it. If schools simply prepare students for everyday jobs, what hope is there for the day after tomorrow?

Knowing how things work make us less afraid to try and fix them when they break, and brave enough to try and improve them when they don’t. If your childhood was anything like mine, your school did not inspire you to be good at things, let alone to be someone who could anticipate them. I was left out of the future.

What if the school of the future attracted people like me? What if parents, educators, and individuals, came together to inspire each other, to help design the most exciting school there ever was based on the most exciting communications technology in the world?

What if we collectively owned the software we produced, and shared in the bounty of our production? What if our children found community in the same environment, asking us questions that inspired them to discover us as role models, not mere disciplinarians?

That’s what we’re building at First School.

We have come together to ask hard questions, to test unproven concepts, and to solicit feedback, from both students and parents. The fundamental question we are exploring is, what is unique and valuable about the school of the future?

I think one answer is Web3.

Teaching students ages 7-14 the details of Merkle trees and hash functions will prepare them for a world of growing cyberattacks and data corruption.

Teaching students the intricacies of non-fungibility standards and provenance will help them to build better systems to fight identity theft and increasingly sophisticated deep fakes.

Teaching students the culture of self-custody and asset protection introduces them to good digital hygiene practices, how to protect oneself, and your belongings, and even how to manage money, which is not taught at all in the school of the present.

Teaching students how the software they use is developed and designed will give them pattern recognition about what trust assumptions should be accepted. Future software engineers will think twice about what they ship, when they’re shipping to a much more educated userbase.

We believe web3 is the most exciting way to address this challenge.

First School is an asynchronous series of tutorials and adventure games about Web3 concepts. Our series is designed for parents and students to work together, until the student(s) feels comfortable working on their own.

Adventures are fun, unpretentious, emoji-heavy 🥳✌️🙋🏾🙋🏻‍♀️🌳😍, and, of course, come in light mode and dark mode. First School is a simple web app with Web3 infrastructure (connect with wallet, connect with ENS, earn NFTs), that should give children not just an education but real-world experience.

We would love to have you with us. Your input is invaluable, here, especially if you’re a parent, or educator, looking for a new school, or a high-achieving enrichment program.

Help us build the school of the future, the first school of the 21st century.

We call it First School.