The Curiosity Gap

My twelve-year-old grandson Dax didn’t break eye contact with me for twenty minutes.

We’d been sitting at my kitchen table talking about consciousness - not the stuff they test in school, but the idea that only twenty percent of who we are operates consciously. The rest, that massive eighty percent, runs in the background. Processing. Recognizing patterns. Sending signals we’re barely aware of.

His mom had brought him up for the weekend after his annual competency tests came back. Math and English Language Arts - both at the twelfth-grade level. Remarkable scores. But I didn’t want to talk about what he’d achieved on paper. I wanted to discuss what no test can measure.

Twenty minutes. Complete engagement. Questions I hadn’t expected from a twelve-year-old.

And afterward, sitting there alone, something hit me. We test kids constantly on academic skills, celebrate when they excel, then kick them out at eighteen and say, “Good luck with everything else.” Nobody’s testing whether he can read a room. Trust that uncomfortable feeling in his stomach when something’s off. Access that eighty percent of himself that’s constantly learning things school never teaches.

The Homeschool Revelation

Maybe Dax’s indifference to test scores reveals something profound. He’s been homeschooled since kindergarten. Never marinated in the achievement anxiety culture that traditional schools create. To him, these are just measurements. Why would you have feelings about a ruler?

What if homeschooling accidentally created ideal conditions? He gets academic challenges without a toxic performance culture. He can engage with consciousness concepts for twenty minutes because learning hasn’t been weaponized into grades and rankings. Maybe the problem isn’t that schools don’t teach life skills. Maybe they teach kids to perform learning instead of actually learning.

We’ve created this massive educational cliff. Intensive learning until eighteen, maybe twenty-two if you go to college. Then, suddenly, “good luck, figure out the rest yourself.” We kick them out and expect them to fly without ever teaching them how their wings work.

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The Research Rabbit Hole

That curiosity sent me down a research rabbit hole. Thirty pages. Several weeks. One simple question: What should people actually know by certain ages? Not just academic knowledge. The stuff that helps you navigate being human.

The research sorted itself into twelve categories. Financial skills. Social skills. Emotional regulation. Risk assessment. Relationship dynamics. Each category had clear age-based learning that made total sense. Nobody was systematically teaching it.

A five-year-old should be able to read basic social cues on the playground. A teenager should understand that gut feelings are actually data. Someone in their thirties should’ve learned uncomfortable conversations about boundaries. By fifty, you should recognize your patterns well enough to interrupt the destructive ones.

I couldn’t find a single institution teaching this complete framework. Schools handle academics. Parents cover some basics. Work teaches job skills. No systematic approach to developing the full spectrum of life competencies when you actually need them.

Then it hit me.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we need to create a new kind of school. Maybe informal education - the stuff you learn from actually living - stays invisible until someone shows you how to see it. I’m not teaching new content. I’m just formalizing what’s already happening to you.

The Fish Market Lesson

I learned this lesson twenty-five years ago at a fish market in Tokyo.

My buddy Peter Goldie and I spent four hours wandering through Tsukiji at dawn. No Japanese. No map. Just exploration. Tuna auctions. Things we couldn’t identify but tasted anyway. Wonderfully lost in controlled chaos.

Standing on the waterfront waiting for our taxi, I said what I always say after experiences like that: “So what’d we learn?”

Peter laughed. “Why’s everything a lesson with you?” Not with resistance. With the timing question every curious person knows: “Can we savor this for thirty seconds before we dissect it?”

But then, because genuinely curious people can’t resist a good question, he dove in.

Five minutes of talking. We’d navigated a completely foreign environment without language or a map. Survived and got through it, but couldn’t get the most out of it because we couldn’t ask the right questions.

Then I made the connection. “That’s exactly what our customers experience with Alias|Wavefront software. They’re trying to navigate powerful computer animation technology, but they don’t know the language. All these n