We are training students to honor what is good — to give it back to the world, and to receive what the process teaches.

For a generation, school has trained students to optimize for a test that no one will ever ask them to take.

Standardized scores. Extracurriculars accumulated for the transcript. Five-paragraph essays that argue what the rubric expects. AP courses ranked by how many points they earn — not by what they make of the person taking them.

This was a workable arrangement in a world that needed credentialed knowledge workers in known fields. It is not the world we now live in.

The accelerated world

We are entering an era in which the tools of creation — generative AI, programmable matter, distributed manufacturing, decentralized capital — are accelerating faster than the institutions meant to prepare young people to use them. The students who will shape this century are sitting in classrooms designed for the last one.

What they need is not more content delivered faster. They need the disciplines of making. The judgment to ask better questions before reaching for better answers. The ethical seriousness to know when not to build a thing. The systems mind to see how their work compounds across decades and across people.

A different aim

01 Academy is built on a conviction older than any of these technologies: that human beings are made for creative work, and that the purpose of education is the formation of a person capable of doing that work well — and rightly.

We believe students are not assets to be optimized. They are bearers of the imago Dei — the image of God — called to steward what is given and to build what is not yet. This belief is not decoration. It is the foundation from which everything else follows: how we choose curriculum, how we sit with a student during critique, how we measure a project, how we decide what is worth making at all.

A faith-rooted school in an age of exponential technology is not an anachronism. It is the only kind of school equal to the moment. The tools we are giving to seventeen-year-olds will reshape work, war, art, medicine, and discourse within their lifetimes. They cannot wield those tools well from a thin moral framework. They need ground.

The synthesis

This school is a synthesis.

It draws from three years of graduate study at USC's Iovine & Young Academy, Viterbi School of Engineering, and Marshall School of Business — distilled into five themes: Product · Data · Systems · Ethics · Research.

It draws from applied work on exponential technology and digital transformation, written in public at Longitudinal.ai — where we have argued for an ethical compass to guide what we build.

And it draws from a tradition far older than either: the Christian conviction that intellect, beauty, and labor are not means to wealth or status, but expressions of a creature made to know, to make, and to serve.

These are not separate tracks taught in separate hours. They are the same thing, looked at from different angles.

The first cohort

In the future, twenty high school students — grades nine through twelve — will begin a six-week Innovation Challenge: lift up something you love about your local community.

They will conduct interviews. Draft a point of view. Ideate against constraints. Prototype something tangible. Test it on real people. Reflect. They will be taught not only to build, but to discern whether to build.

This is not an after-school enrichment activity. It is the first proof-of-concept for a school that does not yet have a campus — a digital provocation for a K-12 institution we intend to found in north San Diego County. The high-school cohort comes first because that is where this curriculum has its most authentic reach. The larger vision spans kindergarten through twelfth grade.

We will be an independent school. There are many great churches in this region, and we intend to be in fellowship with them — friend to many congregations rather than the outreach of one. Students from across the Christian tradition are welcome, as are families still finding their way into it.

The invitation

If you are a student who is already restless: apply. You will be supported. You will be challenged. You will be expected to ship.

If you are a teacher, designer, researcher, founder, or pastor with a vision for what young people are capable of: collaborate. This is being built in public, and we need partners.

If you are a parent or family who wants more for your children than the system is offering: join the waitlist. The depth of your interest is data. It is also encouragement.

We are training students to honor what is good — to give it back to the world, and to receive what the process teaches. That has always been the work. We are simply building a school equal to it.

— Soren DeOrlow, founder