Somewhere in your house there’s a plan. The fund, the tuition schedule, the shortlist of universities your kid might reach if the grades hold. Before you spend another year on it, let me tell you what it felt like to be the kid inside one.
In 1999 I was 13, on an ASEAN scholarship in Singapore. But I kept coming in last or second last in class. As a scholar, that was the ultimate taboo.
Astray
As far as I remember, here’s what I actually studied in secondary school: StarCraft, Counter-Strike, Diablo, MTG, chess, robots, and computers themselves. It might sound like a lot of fun, but it wasn’t just play. It was strategy, resource management, losing and iterating under pressure. It was the hardest thinking I did that decade, and none of it counted in the eyes of the system.
The school report cards were bad enough that I once forged my mother’s signature on one semester. I had no future in crime: I can’t draw to save my life, and the signature came out looking like a kid’s best guess at his mother’s handwriting. It worked anyway. Nobody was looking closely at either of us. I still remember picking up that report card years later and laughing about it.
The funny thing is, the forgery was mostly unnecessary. My parents let me go astray. That sentence took me 30 years to recognize as the luckiest one in my life. They saw the report cards. They didn’t love them. But my mother was a programmer, and whatever she felt about my grades, she never declared war on my obsessions. The games stayed. The computers stayed.
The school saw it differently. The hostel charged SGD$5 an hour for computer time (1999 money), so I hacked the cash-card system to freeze the billing clock and taught my whole floor to do it. We played StarCraft for hours, free. The IT administrator kept patching it, and I kept cracking it, until he gave up and reported me to the matron, who threatened to report me to the Ministry of Education and cancel my scholarship. In the school’s ledger, the most educational thing I did that year was a close shave with expulsion.
The one class that got through
One class reached me anyway. Literature. We studied To Kill a Mockingbird, and somewhere in it I picked up the line I still carry: put yourself in someone else’s shoes and walk around in them. Atticus said skin, not shoes, but this is how it wore into me. I wrote my literature essays like they mattered, because to me they did. It was the one subject where the question was never what the model answer was. It was what you saw.
Then the O-levels came. 4 essays, 25 marks each. I walked out of that exam feeling so good, but I had numbered my answers wrongly, and the machine killed a whole essay for it. 52 out of 100. C6. The one subject I loved, the one teacher I was genuinely sad to disappoint, my best work. Graded like a parking ticket.
Hold that scene for a second. The love of learning was standing right in front of the machine, and the machine couldn’t see it. It was never built to.
That’s the system, everywhere I look in this region. Rote from the first year to the last. Model answers memorized, past-year papers drilled, tuition stacked on top of school like a second shift, rankings on the wall, and every childhood question slowly replaced by the only one that pays: will this be in the exam?
That question is the sound of curiosity dying.
I did try to study. The memorising was just a bigger struggle for me than for my friends, and my friends and my wife will tell you I’m probably neurodivergent. The machine is tuned for one kind of brain and discards every other kind as junk. Not because teachers are villains. Because the machine is built to maximize exactly one output, exam performance, and it’ll happily pay for it by killing the love of learning.
The trade just became fatal
For 100 years that trade was just sad. In the age of AI it’s fatal.
Not long ago a friend told me, half proud, that the tuition for her kid had started. Age 5. The race starts early, everyone does it, it would be irresponsible not to. I laughed, and then I said it straight: you’re training your kid in skills the world has already stopped paying for.
Look at what exams measure: recall, compliance, speed to the single right answer. Now look at what AI just made free: recall, compliance, speed to the single right answer. Why would you spend a childhood training a human to do what a machine is already 10 times better at? The kid who wins the whole race, straight As into the good university, graduates into an economy that automated the model answers. And then stands there, waiting for instructions that never come.
I run a company, so I’ll say this part plainly. I hire people, and these days I also hire AI. I’m never again hiring a person for the things the AI does better. I’m hiring for exactly the things it can’t do. That’s where the whole job market is going, for everyone’s kid.
In the age of AI, a child who does not love learning is not under-prepared. They are redundant.
What’s left is the one thing the exam never measured: whether you keep learning when nobody is grading you. I’ve turned 40 this year, and I’m still going obsessively deep: coffee extraction, new games, and running my whole working life through an org of AI agents that didn’t exist 18 months ago. Nobody assigned any of it. That appetite is the whole qualification now. School didn’t give it to me. I got it from everything school graded as failure.
The smaller, harder plan
So here’s what I say now at that dinner table, out loud. Stop planning for university. Not because university is worthless, but because the plan is. The plan optimizes your kid for the machine, the machine optimizes them for exams, and the exams are training them for the one job AI already took.
The plan worth making is smaller and harder. Foundations, fine: kids should read, count, and know how the world works. Past that, breadth beats drilling, wandering across domains beats mastering a syllabus, and an obsession is an asset, not a symptom. Watch what your kid can’t stop doing, and guard it like it’s the college fund. Mine was games and computers, and it was worth more than the scholarship it nearly cost me.
My parents never had a plan. They had nerve. They let a failing scholarship kid keep his obsessions, and every good thing in my life came out of exactly the hours the report card refused to count. The failing was the education.