MacKenzie Price built Alpha — an AI-first school where kids do academics for 2 hours a day, score in the top 1% nationally across every grade, and learn from AI tutors instead of teachers.
She also has a prediction. In the next 6 months, our friends, the people we work with, maybe even ourselves — will start losing jobs to AI. Which is why she's so urgent about this. The school we grew up in was built to raise factory workers. The world our kids are walking into is something else entirely.
I came into this conversation skeptical. I went to school in Russia, my parents and grandparents went through the same system, and a part of me still thinks it's the version that works. But MacKenzie's results are hard to argue with — kids in the 25th percentile growing exponentially, kids in the 95th still gaining 80–90%. Not because the technology is magical. Because for the first time, every kid gets the kind of one-to-one mastery learning that used to cost a private tutor.
In this episode, MacKenzie breaks down how the model actually works, why Alpha doesn't use chatbots in classrooms, what kids do for the rest of the day when academics only take 2 hours, the teenage student MacKenzie says is on track to be published in Nature, the 6-year-old who made $1,600 selling cookies, and how to replicate parts of Alpha at home if you can't pay $40K–$75K in tuition.
MacKenzie is co-founder of Alpha School and the 2 Hour Learning system. One of the few educators saying out loud what most schools are still pretending isn't happening.
Topics: AI education, future of school, AI tutors, mastery learning, homeschool, parenting in the AI era, career replacement, Alpha School, 2 Hour Learning, Silicon Valley Girl
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