Dear subscriber,

Over 25 years ago, I walked into my grade 2 classroom and told my students they were limitless. I believed it then. And I believe it now. Even more.

Somewhere between that classroom and today, I started writing. First it was notes to myself. Then it was short essays in a scrapbook. Then it was posts on LinkedIn, most mornings, for over a year. Some of those posts landed, most didn’t. A few of them found their way to you, and you replied or commented, and you forwarded or reposted them, and you told me you’d been thinking the same thing but hadn’t quite found the words yet. That was the whole reason to keep going.

Fast forward to the present, all of that became a book.

The Great Unlock: How AI Is Helping Make the Future of Learning More Human has officially been available on Amazon for a week and it hit #1 in Education.

If you haven’t read it yet, the argument is simple, even if the educational system is not. In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that students tutored 1:1 perform two standard deviations better than students in a conventional classroom…two sigma. So, we’ve known for forty years what works best. The challenge is that you can’t scale 1:1. The cost to school districts is too prohibitive (as we’ve seen with the demise of providers such as FevTutors and Varsity Tutors for Schools). So, only families that could afford it privately have been able to leverage the power of one-on-one tutoring.

Today, that constraint is gone. For the time in human history, we can give every child a bespoke, patient, mastery-based education at scale. The book is about what that unlocks, what stands in the way, and what school leaders can actually do about it. To be clear, it’s not a book about technology. It’s a book about children, and about a system that was built for the masses and quietly decides that some kids matter more than others.

Deep down, I wrote the book I needed as a teacher and a parent. Many of you were here before there was a book. You read my posts when they were rough. You pushed back when I was wrong. You sent me research. Counterexamples. This book exists because you kept showing up. It’s yours as much as it’s mine.

If you’ve seen Project Hail Mary, you’ll remember Rocky, the alien engineer who learns to talk by conversing with Ryland Grace, a schoolteacher. There’s a running joke throughout the film where Rocky offers Grace “words of encouragement”. Grace snaps back, '“You can’t just say ‘words of encouragement!’”. So Rocky upgrades it to “works of great encouragement.”

I’m sharing this excerpt from the movie because, if you’ve read my book, I would love for your to share your words of encouragement to potential readers. It doesn’t need to be long. A couple of honest sentences about what the book made you think and how it made you feel is worth more than any ad. Three words even. If all you felt was “amaze, amaze, amaze,” write that. Conversely, if you disagreed with something, write that too. I’d rather have an honest review than a polite one.

And if you haven’t read The Great Unlock, this is your invitation: Amazon link. The link is for the e-book. The print version will be ready next month. You can use the same link to write your review.

Thank you for reading my work, for challenging it, for keeping me honest, and for believing that children are limitless and deserve better than the system we built for them. This book is the start of the argument, not the end.

Many, many thanks,

Karim