Roote's Vision
The mission of the Roote Fellowship is to help the next billion young people live up to their potential.
I. Me
This mission starts with my own story as a young person who wasn't living up to his potential. Growing up, I was a moderately precocious kid. Sharp kids take one of two paths. Some are pushed by their parents and develop anxiety and perfectionism. Others are left alone so they feel bored and tired. I was the latter. For 18 years, I was just another student in a 35-person classroom. I slept. A lot.
It wasn't all negative of course. I played sports. I played games. I laughed with friends. I traveled around the American Southwest with my loving parents and brother. It was good.
But I wasn't being challenged. Luckily, along the way, a variety of mentors pushed me. My high school physics teacher. My godparents. A friend's dad. They said "Rhys, you're sharp. But lazy! Please, live up to your potential."
I studied computer science at a selective liberal arts school, Carleton, which began to remove my lazy tendencies. After school, I founded a music education startup and finally began to work hard. But I could still feel that I wasn't living up to my potential. I was living in Denver, which increasingly felt like a cow town. Meanwhile, after Trump's election in 2016, I could feel technology and geopolitics moving more quickly. I was becoming aware of the world and couldn't just watch it all go by. I needed to do more.
So in 2017, I left my old startup in Denver and started hanging out on Twitter. That was the spark. I found other friendly ambitious nerds like me. I felt less alone. I fell down rabbit holes, read a non-fiction book a week, started a podcast, co-founded ETHDenver, taught tech ethics at MIT, moved to San Francisco in 2020, and founded Roote in 2022. Finally, home.
Now I'm mostly satisfied with my work life. There's still a ton I want to do of course. My book's not done. Roote is still small. But I'm working on interesting problems with good people.
It only took me 30 years to get here.
Sometimes I wish that I had found my path earlier. When I was 25. Or 20. Or 15. Or 10. But I didn't. And that's ok.
Still, I can give that gift to others. To help them find their path at 15 instead of 30. To tell ambitious young people "you are allowed". You can be ambitious. You can be weird. You should have high standards for yourself and others. You don't need to feel alone. Find your people. Meditate. Breathe. Make a dent in the universe.
II. Education Matters, But We're Falling Short
My story is not unique. There are 600 million high schoolers in the world. We should help them live up to their potential. On a personal level, this is self-evident. Every child is a person in the making. Every parent wants their child to succeed. Young people deserve a chance.
But education isn't just for do-gooders. It creates economic growth. Education enables us to research fundamental science, which is commercialized through technology, which creates economic growth.
There's lots of data to back this up. For example, test scores are correlated with GDP growth:
Another example: Education (in light blue) is a leading indicator of empires, just like reserve currency status (in dark blue) is a lagging indicator.
Anecdotally, every successful adult is the result of teachers who believed and challenged them. Here are three examples of just fourth-grade teachers:
Steve Jobs on his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hill:
Before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of reignited my desire to learn. She got me kits for making cameras. I ground my own lens and made a camera. I think I probably learned more academically in that one year than I’d ever learned in my life.
Bill Gates on his fourth-grade librarian, Mrs. Caffiere:
She stoked my passion for learning at a time when I easily could have gotten turned off by school. She pulled me out of my shell by sharing her love of books. She started by asking questions like, “What do you like to read?” Then she found me a lot of books—ones that were more complex and challenging than those I was reading at the time. It’s remarkable how much power one good person can have in shaping the life of a child.
Oprah Winfrey on her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Duncan:
One of the defining moments of my life came in fourth grade—the year I was a student in Mrs. Duncan's class. For the first time, I wasn't afraid to be smart, and she often stayed after school to work with me. It was in her class that I really came into myself.
So yes, teachers matter. School matters. Education matters. We should help those 600 million high schoolers. We should raise the floor—50% of kids still can't read by the end of primary school—and the ceiling.
For now, Roote is focused on raising the ceiling. (For all young people, but especially high schoolers.) Think about the top 1% of high schoolers. 6 million students. That's a lot of latent capability. We should unleash it.
Unfortunately, talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. The vast majority of those high-potential students aren't being challenged enough. 70% of high schoolers are stressed, bored, and tired. Anxiety rates among young people have doubled. In San Francisco, teaching algebra to advanced middle schoolers was illegal. PISA scores in OECD countries plummeted by 20 points—one full year of schooling.
I see these students every day in Roote. They have sky-high potential but are under-resourced and under-stimulated. There's the physics whiz who is living in Poland as a refugee. There's the rural Indian girl who is smarter than her teachers, and so is learning C++ and biotech from the internet. There's the Nigerian law student who takes calls from the public bathroom when the electricity is out. And so many more.
So much hunger, so little support.
III. School
What would it take to help these sharp young people live up to their potential? To start, let's look at existing organizations that are already helping. Here's a simplified market map:
Educational organizations can either operate during the school year, over the summer, or after school. They teach in-person or online. Let's look at each.
- First, in the bottom left, there are traditional schools for gifted/rich high schoolers. These are places like the 150 top private boarding schools, International Baccalaureate programs, Chinese Key Schools, and the United World Colleges. Imagine Hogwarts.
- In the top left are online schools. This has grown massively in the past decade, especially after COVID. Perhaps 1-5% of high schoolers attend online school.
- Over the summer, universities often host in-person programs for gifted youth like the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth or MIT's Research Science Institute.
- After-school programs are another meeting ground for sharp young people. The International Science Olympiads attract STEM students while speech and debate attracts lawyers and economists. They're both great.
- Finally, there are online after-school programs like The Knowledge Society and Roote. They take kids seriously and let them explore their passions. Less factory vibes. More internet. This is also true with the grant programs I've highlighted here: Emergent Ventures, 1517, and Rise.
What can we learn from this market map?
First, we can estimate how many high-potential high schoolers go through one of these programs. Of the six million top high schoolers, around 200,000 do IB programs and another 200,000 go to top private schools. It's tough to know how many students go through Chinese Key High Schools. Maybe another 200,000. Meanwhile, summer programs like John Hopkins CTY have 30,000 students per year, while International Science Olympiads have around 3,000. TKS has had 4,000 students, while Roote has had only 200.
Altogether, it seems like less than one million students have been accelerated in one way or another. That leaves five million ambitious high schoolers who we're failing. Many of them are in the Global South—high-income countries spend 150 times more on education than low-income countries.
Second, so much of the current educational infrastructure is focused on college admissions. For students and parents, it's 18 years of life leading to one application that will determine your next four (and forty) years. It's an alphabet soup. GPA, AP, IB. SAT, ACT, A-Levels, JEE, 高考. Extracurriculars, sports, volunteering.
Everyone is focused on doing anything they can to get into a top 20 school. They'll do anything to signal correctly to colleges. Here are a few screenshots showing this.
Students aren't following internal passions, but looking for ways to signal to college. (Which is itself a signal for employers.) Roughly 50% of education is signaling. It's too much.
This all sucks. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Show me the cartel and I'll show you the price-fixing.
Third, because the need to signal to universities is so strong, most of the programs in the map above are focused on signaling. It's one big STEM competition, with a bit of debate thrown in.
From my experience at Roote, students could use a lot more socioemotional support. The college application process is brutal. It stack-ranks kids against their peers in a competition that determines the next four years of life. It forces comparison which breeds contempt, anxiety, and low self-esteem. We don't do any tests this impactful later in life, and would never willingly put ourselves through something like it again. But high schoolers don't have a voice.
Besides socioemotional learning, colleges also don't check for self-awareness or success spirals. At Roote, we teach both, even if they're not tested for.
Fourth, the current set of high school programs doesn't funnel students toward impactful work. In fact, it's mostly unaware of the real adult world. That's because high school is shielded from the real world by the barrier of college. In high school, kids only want to be doctors, nurses, lawyers, or teachers. They don't know other jobs. Only after college, and an unhelpful trip to the university's career center, do young people begin to understand how the adult world works. It's much too late.
This disempowers young people and makes them fatalistic about our future. More than half of them think "humanity is doomed" due to climate change.
Yes, things will be hard. We'll have 2.5C of warming by 2100 and hundreds of millions of climate refugees. But there's tons of optimism to be had. Many countries have substantial carbon taxes. We're injecting trillions into the green transition. Solar is cheaper than coal. We will make it. And we need young people to get us there.
It's not just climate of course. Here's a dashboard that shows the other impacts we want to have by 2100.
We can make abundant clean energy. We can stop factory farming and species loss. We can eradicate infectious diseases and eliminate poverty. We can create safe, abundant intelligence.
Fifth, what role does technology play in educating young people?
The internet has already changed education. Students can access the world's knowledge in their pockets. Khan Academy, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other edtech products account for roughly one trillion minutes of learning time each year. This is an impressive 1% of all learning time, most of which occurs in classrooms. Even in those classrooms, tech is playing an increasingly large role. 10% of K-8 students use DreamBox for math, and 50% of K-8 schools use Mystery for science.
Fundamentally, the internet changes the cost structure of lectures. Khan Academy has around a $30M budget, which is the same as a large high school. But they serve 120 million kids, not just 2,000. This means Khan Academy costs $0.25 per student vs. $15,000 for high schools. With the internet, you can record once but teach forever. Plus you have access to the world's best teachers, not just those in a 10-mile radius. Finally, it's personalized—you can follow any curiosity at any time of day.
Of course, educational internet videos can't control a classroom, nor can they empathetically listen to the emotions of an 8th grader. But the internet has drastically democratized access to knowledge. That's a good thing.
What about AI then? It's tough to know exactly what will happen. Already, 50% of students and 50% of teachers use it. Fundamentally, AI is cognitive labor that we can spin up at will. Teachers will use it to craft lessons and grade papers, while students will use it to follow lessons and write papers. The biggest promise of AI is a free personal tutor for everyone. A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer that enables everyone to do aristocratic tutoring and capture the learning gains of Bloom's Two-Sigma.
With AI, you can train once and tutor forever. I expect 1% of all tutoring to be done by AI by 2030.
But if AI can do everything, what world should we prepare young people for?
It's helpful to look at past technological shifts. The Industrial Revolution automated physical labor. We replaced muscle with fire. Farmers first became craftsmen and then became salesmen. Service jobs replaced agricultural jobs.
AI is automating cognitive labor. This democratizes expertise. I can ask my AI doctor for health tips before I ask WebMD or my real doctor. But AI also gives all existing experts a helpful assistant. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, and financial analysts can automate administrative tasks. As an example, 20% of healthcare costs come from repetitive admin—a massive work tax that we can reduce with AI.
Altogether, AI should give us a bit of a reprieve from Baumol's cost disease. Prices for services might go down, just like prices for consumer items have.
But white-collar labor is just the tip of the iceberg. AI cognitive labor can be used to automate and augment many other kinds of work. AI can model and predict physical systems, biological systems, human systems, and computational systems.
We should prepare ambitious young people to be orchestrators of digital minds, just like previous leaders managed human minds.
IV. Roote
What role will Roote play in all of this? How can we help the next billion young people live up to their potential?
For now, we're focused on young folks aged 15-25, especially those in high school. We'd love to help accelerate those five million students who are still under-served.
(Note: We're still excited to help anyone live up to their potential. 25% of fellows are older than 25.)
In 2022, we had 13 Roote Fellows. In 2023, 59. In 2024, 100. We hope to keep doubling for the next few years.
There's a lot of room to grow. Even if we double every year, it'll be 2040 before we reach 6 million students.
We're still working out our business model. We had a few large donations in 2022, so we can run the fellowship at no cost to students while still paying my salary through 2026. In the near future, I'm excited to try a model where adults donate $500 to support an individual student. I also want to give the fellows themselves $500 grants.
In addition, I hope to do some educational field-building. We're happy if any student lives up to their potential, whether or not they went through our program. We mostly just want to be part of a healthy educational ecosystem, no matter how big our role. In 2026, I hope to run a conference like NAGC. Around then, we'll also conduct research that helps find and spread effective models of teaching and learning.
If we're still in operation by the 2030s, I hope to expand our focus to other ages and ability levels.
In all scenarios, the most crucial thing is to stay focused on the students. Make the school I wish I had. Be the teacher I wish I had. Make something students want. Challenge and support them. Be helpful.
Lots of work still to do. RF8 awaits!