A school for the next generation of builders.

I. The moment we're in

American education is faltering at the worst possible time.

Test scores have stagnated for two decades. Trust in institutions has collapsed. Phones have hollowed out attention. The pandemic exposed a brittle system held together by personal heroism — and then, after the disruption was over, the system mostly went back to what it had been doing before, only worse.

Meanwhile, outside the classroom, the most consequential technologies in two generations are arriving simultaneously. Generative AI is rewriting what knowledge work is. Robotics, programmable biology, energy abundance, and decentralized infrastructure are not coming — they are here, and the curve is steepening. The students sitting in fluorescent-lit classrooms today will graduate into a world where the cost of producing competent text, competent code, and competent images has fallen to nearly zero. What will be scarce is not output. It will be judgment. Discernment. Taste. Moral seriousness. The capacity to look at a powerful tool and decide whether, and how, and for whom to wield it.

This is not a curriculum problem. It is an aim problem. School cannot fix this by adding an AI elective. The whole shape of the project is wrong for the moment.

II. What traditional school no longer does

The honest indictment is not that public school is failing in the obvious ways it is sometimes accused of. Many teachers are extraordinary. Many schools are doing their best within constraints they did not choose.

The deeper problem is that even the best version of the existing system is engineered for a world that no longer exists. It rewards the willing absorption of pre-decided content. It mistakes compliance for character. It treats the transcript as the point and the person as a means.

A student who graduates near the top of a competitive American high school today often has these strengths: she can absorb material quickly, perform on standardized assessments, manage time across many simultaneous obligations, and present credentials in legible form to admissions officers. These are real strengths. They are also nearly the exact strengths that artificial intelligence is now best at imitating. We have spent twelve years training young people to be very good at the thing the machine has just learned to do for free.

What the machine cannot do — what the most thoughtful researchers in AI safety have been quietly conceding for several years — is care. It cannot suffer. It cannot decide what is worth wanting. It cannot stand inside a community and feel obligation to it. It cannot refuse to build something it has been asked to build because the building of it would harm the people who would use it. These are not technical limits. They are categorical. The machine is a tool. Tools cannot, and should not, take responsibility.

This is the work of human beings. School should be preparing young people to do it.

III. What we mean by first principles

The phrase first principles has become fashionable in startup culture and is therefore at risk of becoming meaningless. We mean it precisely.

To reason from first principles is to refuse to inherit the framing of a problem before examining whether the framing is true. It is to ask, of any received practice, why is this here? what is it actually doing? what would we build if we had to build it again from scratch?

It is not contrarianism. The first-principles thinker often arrives at conventional answers — but she arrives at them by a different road, and so she holds them differently. She knows why they are there. She can defend them. She can also abandon them when the conditions that produced them no longer hold.

This is harder than it sounds, and it is rare. Most people, including most professionals, reason by analogy nearly all of the time: the new thing is like the old thing, so we should treat it as we treated the old thing. Analogy is fast and usually safe. It is also, in moments of genuine novelty, exactly wrong.

The students who built the iPhone did not ask, "How do we make a better phone?" They asked, "What does a person actually want to do, and what would the best object for doing it look like?" The students who founded Walmart did not ask, "How do we run a better small-town store?" They asked, "If you owned the supply chain end-to-end, what would the cheapest possible store look like — and where would it have to be located?" The students who proposed an Ethical Compass for AI did not ask, "How do we comply with regulations as written?" They asked, "What principles, if we held them seriously, would actually keep this technology in service of human flourishing?"

A school that teaches first-principles reasoning has to be willing to apply that reasoning to itself. That is what we are doing.

IV. Why we are faith-rooted

The most distinctive claim of 01 Academy is also the most easily misread, so it deserves to be stated plainly.

We are a faith-rooted school. We hold that human beings are made in the image of a Creator, called into existence for a purpose, and given the dignity of co-creating in the world they were placed in. We believe that intelligence is not an accident, that beauty is not arbitrary, that justice is not a social construction, and that work — real, particular, embodied work — is one of the means by which a person becomes who they are meant to be.

This is not the faith of a school-assembly slogan or an inspirational poster. It is load-bearing. It changes how we choose what to teach. It changes how we sit with a student through a difficult critique. It changes what we will and will not build. It changes the kind of community we are trying to be.

We expect God to be active in the world. We expect students who form themselves in this school to walk into a future none of us have seen, do work none of us have yet done, and bring back fruit none of us have tasted. We are not preserving an inheritance. We are putting it to work.

A reasonable reader might ask: why now? why faith and innovation in the same sentence?

Because the era we are entering will require courage of a kind that thin moral frameworks cannot underwrite. The questions in front of this generation are not technical. They are anthropological: what is a human being? what is a human being for? when does a thing we have made become a substitute for the people we were made to be with? These are the oldest questions, and the tradition has been answering them for two millennia. Students should not be sent into the next thirty years without that inheritance.

There is a deeper parallel here, and it is worth naming. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued that faith and doubt are not enemies. Without doubt, faith would not be faith — it would only be certainty. A pencil does not require faith. A truth that can be calculated, audited, and shipped does not require faith. Faith is the act of moving forward toward what is real but cannot yet be fully proven.

This is also what innovators do. The student in our Innovation Challenge does not yet know whether her prototype will work. The founder of a new venture does not know whether her thesis is correct. The biologist following a curious result, the artist following a half-formed image, the friend taking a chance on an honest question — every act of genuine making is a leap.

Sometimes the leap is one of conviction — a step into difficult territory that must be taken whether or not the way is yet clear. And sometimes the leap is one of curiosity — a step toward something glimpsed but not yet known, taken because the glimpse alone makes the next step worth the trying. Both are leaps of faith, in the sense Kierkegaard meant. Both belong in this school.

We teach students to take that leap. Not recklessly, but with the disciplines that make the leap responsible: empathy, evidence, ethics, and feedback. And we teach them that the same human capacity is at work in matters of the soul. To act, to build, to love, to wonder, to believe — under uncertainty, on the strength of conviction or the pull of discovery — is one capacity, used in different rooms.

This is the synthesis the school's name points to. 01 is the binary first principle: the moment a thing begins. The leap from nothing to something. The decision to act.

There are four words that organize how we think about a student's work in this school. They are sequenced, intentionally — from identity to impact.

Workmanship. Before a student makes anything, she is made. She is, in the language of Ephesians, God's workmanship — created with care, given gifts and inclinations and a particular shape, loved before she has produced a thing. This is the first word because it is the first fact. The student is not what she will eventually achieve. She is already what God has called good.

Relational. Flourishing flows from relationship. With God; with the people she encounters; with the place she is rooted in; with the materials she works with. Innovation is not solitary genius. It is the fruit of attentive, honest, repeating relationships.

Missional. From relationship comes calling. A student formed in this school is being prepared to be sent — to a problem, a place, a people, with the gifts she has been given. Some will be sent into medicine, some into the arts, some into trades or technology or family-building or pastoral work. The word missional keeps the question of where am I being sent and to whom in front of the work, where it belongs.

Redemptive. Some — not all — of what students make will heal what is broken. There are problems in this world that need redeeming, and we will train students to recognize them, name them, and work toward their restoration with patience and skill. But not every act of making is redemptive, and we do not pretend otherwise. There is room in this school for delight, for beauty, for play, for the simple joy of having made a thing that was not there before.

Students do not have to carry the weight of the world. That work has been done.

We do not require students to share our convictions to enroll. We require only that they be willing to take seriously a curriculum that takes them seriously — body, mind, and soul. And we expect, with God's help, that some of them will leave with more than they came with.

V. On phones, attention, and embodiment

The argument we have just made about formation has a practical corollary that deserves to be stated plainly. The work of a school like ours requires attention — the kind of attention steadily eroded over the last fifteen years by a device most students now carry from the age of eleven. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has documented the cost in The Anxious Generation: a generation overprotected in the real world and underprotected in the virtual one, formed by algorithms designed to be unputdownable rather than by people designed to be loved.

We take that diagnosis seriously, and our pedagogy already answers it. We make three commitments without apology. Instruction is phone-free — devices stored bell-to-bell, no exceptions for "just checking." Coursework requires no student smartphone — the tools the work needs are provided by the school, and the work is built with hands and minds rather than thumbs. Assessment lives in real-world artifacts — interviews with real people, prototypes that real users can react to, a public pitch delivered in a real room — because formation that is not embodied is not formation at all.

These are not policies we will have to defend against student or parent objection. They are downstream of what the school is. A faith-rooted school formed around embodied work does not need to enforce attention. Attention is what it is for.

VI. The synthesis

If you visit two websites that have shaped this school, you will see most of what 01 Academy is.

The first is sorendeorlow.vercel.app — three years of graduate coursework at USC distilled into five themes: Product, Prototype & Design; Data, Models & Decisions; Systems & Operations; Health, Ethics & Society; Research & Directed Study. The work there spans machine-learning models for post-pandemic customer behavior, an analysis of how the failed Apple Newton became the foundation for the iPhone, an examination of how Walmart bent supply chains to serve low prices and what happened when the system stressed, and a legal study of generative-AI image rights. Five themes. One coherent practice.

The second is longitudinal.ai — a journal of innovation exploring exponential technologies, product design, and digital transformation. The voice there is intellectually measured and policy-aware: examining SB 1047, proposing an Ethical Compass of six principles, asking how healthcare designers should navigate AI's emerging frontier. Innovation, but with the brakes installed.

01 Academy is what happens when you bring those two repositories — graduate-level rigor and applied ethical innovation — into a coherent curriculum, and then place that curriculum on the foundation of Christian intellectual tradition.

The five themes become a way of seeing. Product teaches a student to make tangible artifacts from concept through critique — and to ask whether the artifact is worth making. Data teaches reasoning under uncertainty — and the limits of what data can tell you about a human being. Systems teaches the patterns by which work compounds — and the fragilities every system hides. Ethics teaches an honest examination of the costs of one's own creations. Research teaches the discipline of asking better questions before reaching for better answers.

These themes do not run in parallel. They run together. A student working on the Innovation Challenge encounters all five inside a single project, and learns to feel them as one fabric.

VII. What students will actually do

The first Innovation Challenge — lift up something you love about your local community — runs six weeks at roughly four hours per student per week. The student picks something special — a place, a practice, an institution, a tradition, a person — that she would want either to share with the rest of the world or to make even stronger. It is small, on purpose. The cohort cap is twenty.

Week one — Empathize. The student selects what she will lift up and conducts five structured interviews with the people closest to it — those who keep it, those who use it, those who depend on it. She is taught how to listen, what to record, what to refuse to interpret too quickly. She produces interview notes.

Week two — Define. She drafts a point of view — a one-sentence statement of who has the problem, what the problem is, and why it matters. She is taught the discipline of refusing to skip ahead to solutions. She produces a POV statement and the constraints she will work within.

Week three — Ideate. She generates, against constraint, at least fifteen meaningfully different solutions. She is taught how to use tools — including AI — as thinking partners rather than as answer machines. She is also taught when to ignore them. She produces an ideation portfolio.

Week four — Prototype. She selects one direction and builds a tangible prototype. The standard is low fidelity, high signal: a thing real enough that real people can react to it. She produces the prototype.

Week five — Test & Iterate. She takes the prototype to at least three of the people from her empathy interviews and watches them use it. She does not defend it. She watches. She produces a test report and a revised version.

Week six — Launch & Reflect. She delivers a two-minute pitch — recorded, public — and a written reflection on what she learned about the problem, the people, the process, and herself. She produces the artifact that will live, with her consent, on the public Showcase.

Throughout, the founder runs a sixty-minute weekly seminar with the full cohort, written feedback on each artifact, and one personal mid-cycle review. There is no busywork. Every assignment produces evidence. Every student leaves the six weeks with something she would actually show.

VIII. Field Week

The work of formation cannot live entirely in a room. Once a year, every cohort will leave the corridor for five to seven days at a regional site — Cuyamaca, Palomar, the Anza-Borrego desert, or the Pacific coastline depending on the cohort and the season — and undergo a week of practice that no indoor curriculum can replace.

We have a name for this kind of practice, and we should be honest about its lineage. The South African schools — public and private, secular and religious — have for generations built such a week into the school year and called it Veldskool: "field school." The tradition has carried real baggage we do not pretend away; in the apartheid era it was at times instrumentalized for ideological formation we would not endorse. But the pedagogy is older than that distortion, and modern Christian schools across South Africa have substantially recovered it. We adopt the recovered form.

Each day opens with stiltetyd — silent time, Scripture, journal — before the cohort moves. Students hike at distance, swim, run, lift, and sit. They build fires. They purify water. They navigate by compass and stars. They cook for one another in rotation. The body is treated as a classroom rather than a logistics problem.

In the middle of the week we run a forty-eight-hour material-scarcity design challenge — defined tools, defined materials, defined water, a defined problem belonging to a real person who has, by then, already been encountered. The Innovation Challenge methodology compresses to its essence under the constraint of a desert ridge or a coastal cliff. Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, reflect — but with a body that has carried its own gear and a mind that has slept under stars.

The week closes with public reflection around a fire, not at a podium.

We call this, for now, Field Week. The vocabulary may sharpen as the practice matures. What will not change is the conviction underneath. A school that takes formation seriously cannot leave the body to the algorithm. A school that takes faith seriously cannot leave the soul to the device. A school that takes innovation seriously cannot leave judgment to the simulator. The physical, the spiritual, and the artifactual are not three modules. They are one fabric — and we will weave it once a year, on purpose, in the field.

IX. What we are not

It will help to say plainly what 01 Academy is not, because in the absence of that distinction we will be misread.

We are not a secular innovation school. The good versions of those — and there are good versions — share much of our methodology, but they cannot answer, at the level that matters, why innovate? When that question gets pressed, they tend to respond with vague appeals to human flourishing or societal progress. We answer it differently, and that difference shapes everything downstream.

We are not, narrowly, a classical Christian school. The classical Christian movement is doing essential work — conserving the western intellectual heritage, cultivating virtue through the trivium and quadrivium, forming young people in the company of the great books. We are grateful for that work, and the rigorous schools doing it are part of why a school like ours can exist at all. We share the foundation: the conviction that education is the formation of a soul, that there is such a thing as the good, that the heritage of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome is worth conserving rather than abandoning. Where we diverge is orientation. The classical school treats the heritage as the trunk and lets students extend its branches. We treat the heritage as the soil, and the disciplines of making — product, design, systems, exponential technology — as what we are growing in it. Both are valid responses to the same diagnosis. They serve different students. A young person who is restless to build — who wants to put her hands on the next century the way the medieval craftsman put his hands on a cathedral — will probably find her home with us. A young person formed for the contemplative, literary, and rhetorical life will probably find her home with one of our excellent classical Christian peers. Healthy ecosystems have many kinds of school in them. We hope to be one good kind.

We are not a college-prep program. We are not optimizing for SAT scores or for admissions consultants. Many of our students will go to selective universities; some will not. The portfolios our students produce will speak for themselves to admissions offices that are paying attention, but that is a side effect, not the aim.

We are not an AI bootcamp or a coding academy. Some of our students will go on to build with AI; some will not. We are after something underneath the tooling — the formed person who can pick up a powerful new tool and know what to do with it.

X. The path to the physical school

01 Academy is, at this moment, a digital provocation. It is built in public. The website you are reading is, deliberately, the first artifact of the school — a proof-of-pedagogy assembled before the doors of the physical campus open.

The eventual school will be K-12. The high-school cohort comes first because that is where the founder's curriculum has the most authentic reach — a young person of fifteen can be handed graduate-level material, scaled in vocabulary but not in ambition, and rise to it. But the larger vision spans early childhood through twelfth grade. A child who begins with us in kindergarten ought to be able to graduate from us, formed across thirteen continuous years of the same conviction.

We intend to found the physical campus in north San Diego County — the coastal corridor that runs from Carmel Valley through Solana Beach, Rancho Santa Fe, and Encinitas. The choice reflects the founder's network, the depth of that area's faith and innovation communities, and the reach of its families. The exact location will be informed by the geographic concentration of waitlist signups over the coming year.

01 Academy 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. Independence allows us to welcome students from across the Christian tradition, and from families still finding their way into it. We are not interested in defending denominational borders. We are interested in forming young people who know who they are, why they are here, and what they have been given to do.

The path forward is straightforward and falsifiable. Over the next ninety days, we will run the first Innovation Challenge cohort. We will recruit five formal collaborators — educators, mentors, practitioners, operators. We will publish student artifacts in the Showcase. We will build a waitlist of three hundred families, of whom seventy-five express engaged interest and ten place a placeholder commitment. If those proofs come through, we move into Phase Two: a fundraising deck, a search for a founding head of school, and a site search.

If they do not come through, we listen. We adjust. We try again. The thesis is the school; the proofs are the test of the thesis.

XI. The invitation

If you are a student who is already restless inside the system you have been given — apply. You will be supported. You will be challenged. You will be expected to ship.

If you are a teacher, designer, researcher, founder, pastor, or operator with a vision for what young people are capable of — collaborate. This is being built in public, and we need partners. The mentors, guest seminars, co-authored modules, and quiet operational help that will make this real are not yet on the staff page. They are people we have not yet met.

If you are a parent or family who wants more for your children than the system is currently offering — join the waitlist. The depth of your interest is data. It is also encouragement. Schools are not founded by founders. They are founded by the families who refuse to wait for them.

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 of every generation worthy of being called one. We are simply building a school equal to it.

— Soren DeOrlow, founder