A New Kind of Classroom
I’m sitting at the back of a lively learning studio in 2035, and it’s unlike any class I knew in my youth. The space is open and buzzing. Clusters of students huddle around tablets and smart surfaces; a few others appear to be talking to thin air until I realise they’re speaking with personal AI companions through augmented-reality glasses. In one corner, a retired civil engineer — spry in his seventies — helps a group of teenagers design a solar-powered water purifier. Across the room, a ten-year-old shows her NAVi assistant a 3D model of a plant cell she has built, while the AI, a gentle holographic avatar hovering over her tablet, asks her questions to reinforce the lesson. This is a typical afternoon at UP Academe, a new kind of school that has spread worldwide over the past decade. It is part of the UnitedPeoples (UP) network, and these students have never known an education system without it.
Ten years ago a scene like this might have seemed fanciful. In the late 2020s, classrooms were caught in an identity crisis. The sudden rise of capable AI tools upended traditional teaching. Teachers found that take-home essays had become futile — as one educator put it in 2025, “to assign writing outside the classroom is like asking students to cheat,” with AI-generated homework off the charts. In early 2023, a survey of college students found that nearly 90 per cent had already used ChatGPT on their assignments. Academic integrity seemed to be collapsing; if any student could get an algorithm to write their papers, what did a grade or a diploma mean any more? Schools first responded with bans and detectors — a losing battle even by the mid-2020s. The disruption had arrived, and it shook the foundations of an already fragile system.
I remember those turbulent years. They exposed cracks that had been forming for a long time. Even before generative AI, employers were growing sceptical of what academic credentials really meant: in 2022, 72 per cent of them reported that a college degree was not a reliable signal of a candidate’s skills. The AI cheating wave was merely the tipping point. It forced a harder question: what is learning for, if not the accumulation of credentials — and how could a society rescue it from a crisis of relevance and trust?
The cheating wave was only the tipping point. It forced the question the old system had dodged: what is learning for, if not the accumulation of credentials?
From Credentialism to a Learning Culture
Amid the chaos, a new model of learning took root and spread fast. It wasn’t born in a government ministry or a Silicon Valley boardroom but in a young civic platform, UnitedPeoples, which had started around 2025 as a kind of civic operating system — an online network of communities (Circles, in UP’s language) where members co-created projects addressing social challenges. One of its hubs, the GlobalCircle for Learning & Education (L&E), became the incubator for an alternative vision of education just when the world needed it most. By 2030 that vision had taken firm shape as UP Academe, which today anchors learning in countries around the world.
At its core is a simple but radical idea: shift from a credential-driven model to a learning-driven culture — skills, experience and personal growth rather than diplomas and test scores. Plenty of people had said as much in the 2020s; big companies claimed they wanted to hire for capability, not alma mater. What the old system lacked was a verifiable alternative to the diploma. UP’s ecosystem finally supplied one. Every learner in UP Academe, from preschooler to adult, keeps a living profile called a THRIVE Plan — a dynamic personal-development roadmap. Not a rigid schedule of classes, but a portfolio of projects completed, skills mastered, contributions made and goals set: a cross between a résumé, a transcript and a journal, continuously updated by the learner and their mentors. By 2035 THRIVE Plans are recognised from college admissions offices to HR departments, in place of the static records of old. When employers began to see that a THRIVE portfolio of real problem-solving and collaboration predicts performance better than a standardised degree, they came round.
UP Academe didn’t try to replace formal schooling; it embedded itself within it. In classrooms like the one I’m visiting, familiar structure blends with new practice. Students still have teachers, classes and projects, but the relationship is transformed, and “free-choice learning” is the guiding principle: rather than one curriculum delivered top-down, students exercise real choice in what and how they learn. This idea — named decades ago by the education researchers John Falk and Lynn Dierking — describes the self-directed, voluntary learning we do out of our own needs and interests, the kind we reach for when we actually want to learn something. In practice, the learner’s curiosity is the starting point. On my visit I watched a literature “class” in which half the students were writing chapters of their own novellas while the other half argued about how a classic novel spoke to current events. The teacher — a learning guide, as they’re called now — moved between groups, gently drawing a disengaged student back in by finding out what interested them and connecting it to a literacy goal. “If a kid loves sport, we let them learn physics by working out a basketball’s trajectory,” one senior educator tells me. “If they love art, we explore history through painting. There’s always a route that honours their spark.”
To keep a broad foundation, UP Academe still maps to core competencies — literacy, numeracy, scientific reasoning — and public authorities still mandate certain proficiencies. What changes is how students get there and how it’s tracked. Mastery is shown through projects, presentations and community contributions. A middle-schooler might satisfy her earth-science requirement not with a multiple-choice test but by completing a months-long local water-quality study with her LocalCircle and presenting the findings to the city council. That goes into her THRIVE Plan, and it carries far more weight than an exam score. Instead of a checklist of courses completed, the plan shows why the learning mattered and how it was used.
A THRIVE Plan doesn’t list the courses you sat. It shows why the learning mattered, and how you used it.
NAVi: An AI Guide for Good
The most visible — and at times most contested — part of UP’s education work is the ubiquitous presence of NAVi, the AI assistant I saw students conversing with. A decade ago AI in schools was seen mostly as a threat: the enabler of cheating, or a sci-fi intrusion. UP’s bet was that AI, used with care, could transform learning. It framed the effort as “NAVi for Good,” an explicit attempt to turn AI into a guardian of academic honesty and a personal tutor rather than a shortcut. The name is meant to evoke a navigator — a guide who helps you find your way. An internal UP paper in 2025 described NAVi as “guide, tutor and guardian” at once, on the principle that support and accountability must travel together.
Sitting with students, I see what that means. One teenager shows me how NAVi helps him debug his code for a robotics project — but it doesn’t hand him the answer. It asks guiding questions when he’s stuck (“Have you considered the edge cases for this sensor input?”), offers a short video on the concept he’s missing, and now and then plays devil’s advocate to check that he really understands. It feels like a patient tutor. It is also ever-vigilant: it knows each student’s THRIVE Plan goals and watches for shortcuts. If he tried to get NAVi to write the code outright, it would refuse — and gently remind him why the work matters. “It’s like a guardian angel that can also grade your maths quiz,” he laughs. Teachers tell me academic-dishonesty cases have plummeted since NAVi arrived; it is simply hard to cheat when your AI collaborator is built to keep you honest.
NAVi also frees teachers from drudgery. Routine grading and admin are largely automated, so teachers can spend their time on one-to-one mentoring — orchestrating project logistics, mediating group dynamics, sitting with a single student who needs support. It was a vision the education futurists of the mid-2020s described: AI to augment teachers, not replace them. One teacher tells me her job satisfaction has soared. “I became a teacher to inspire kids, not to police plagiarism or grind through grading. Now I actually get to do what I love.”
None of this was automatic. UP’s engineers built NAVi with heavy input from educators and child psychologists, and its workings are open to regulators. Debate continues — some worry about over-reliance, or about bias in the system — but for the most part NAVi has earned the trust of students and teachers as part of the learning environment.
Youth, Safety and the Member–User Bridge
One of UP’s boldest moves was finding a way to include children in a global civic network safely, and at scale. In the early days only adults could join as full members, given the legal and safety complexities of an online community with governance, finance tools and open dialogue. Yet the aim was always to bring young people into civic projects and learning beyond the walls of school — without exposing them to the wilder internet or to adult responsibilities too soon. The answer was the Member–User structure: a two-tier model now used across the platform’s educational work.
Here is how it works. Minors join UP through verified institutions — usually their school, a youth organisation or another trusted body — each operating as a BrandedCircle (BC) formally affiliated with UP. These BCs are institutional Members in their own right, the parental bridge for youth participation, and within them the organisations sponsor young participants as Users under their umbrella.
I visited a nearby LocalCircle, a community makerspace where youth and adults work on local improvement projects together. The children sign up through their school’s UP portal with parental consent — the school itself a certified BrandedCircle — and their accounts default to Safeguard Mode. The teens I met can communicate only within approved group spaces (their class Circle, their project team) and with designated mentors; the system screens content; and they have no access to financial transactions or sensitive governance forums. Their teacher, the Host of the school’s online Circle, can see all activity, backed by UP’s moderation AI. The BrandedCircle’s presence vouches for and supervises the student, and NAVi keeps a walled garden around them. One fifteen-year-old on a community-garden project told me she loves that “we get to work with real activists and experts,” something she could never do on an ordinary social network — and that she feels safer for the moderation: “There’s always a responsible adult in the loop. It’s our space, but it’s safe.”
The system was not trivial to build. It meant working inside data-privacy law — parental consent, and strict limits on the data each BrandedCircle could hold about its underage Users — and clear legal agreements in which the BrandedCircle signs on as guarantor that its Users will follow UP’s rules, with UP holding it to a Youth Safeguarding Code. In the late 2020s, sceptics doubted that thousands of schools and youth groups would bother with the onboarding. But the demand was there: children were hungry to engage with the wider world, and educators wanted structured ways to channel that energy. NAVi did the joining, handling identity checks, moderation and translation so institutions could join in hours rather than months. And because UP treated access as a public good, joining cost nothing — the only price of entry was curiosity.
Over ten years the approach proved scalable. Partnerships from national education ministries to NGOs like UNICEF set up BrandedCircles to onboard their youth cohorts. By 2035 it is ordinary for a teenager to be a User via their school or club, working on global themed projects with peers around the world inside youth-designated zones. When they reach adulthood the transition is automatic: the account becomes a full Member account, carrying forward its history, reputation and THRIVE Plan. I spoke with a university fresher who had just aged out of User status; the day she turned eighteen, she said, NAVi sent birthday wishes and a prompt to finish her verification. “It was actually exciting, like a coming-of-age ritual. Suddenly I could explore the whole network on my own — but I wasn’t overwhelmed, because I’d been at home here since I was thirteen.”
Not everyone was pleased at first. I remember the late-2020s arguments about putting children on a platform that also ran civic crowdfunding and political deliberation. Some feared indoctrination, or that Big Tech — though UP is a non-profit consortium, not Big Tech — would end up raising our kids. What happened is less tidy. Young people are inside the tent now, but under careful watch and with agency suited to their age, and their voice is no longer muted. I have seen sixteen-year-olds in LocalCircles put ideas to city-council members, and watched a global youth climate Circle, under a UNICEF-affiliated BrandedCircle, work with adult experts to launch a reforestation campaign. As minors they couldn’t move funds or sign contracts, but they could do the research, the outreach and the on-the-ground work, and present their findings while adults handled the formalities. It is, arguably, how it always should have been: young people learning civic participation by doing it, inside a structure that keeps them safe.
Learning as Society’s Immune System
Late in the day I join a circle of students, teachers, parents and a few neighbourhood elders under a large banyan tree in the school’s courtyard. The campus deliberately blends into the community — there are no gates between the school and the public library and makerspace next door. It looks like a casual chat but it’s a facilitated reflection session, something that happens weekly in UP Academe schools and LocalCircles. Today’s question: how has learning changed us as a community? A retired nurse describes how mentoring teenagers on health literacy gave her a renewed sense of purpose. A high-schooler talks about her grandfather, once shy of technology, who started coming to the school’s intergenerational coding nights and is now helping her build a language app in their tribe’s native Tongva. A teacher admits she was sceptical two years ago — “I worried we were throwing out all the old rigour” — but that her students’ engagement made a believer of her. What strikes me is how intergenerational it all is: young and old exchanging perspectives with real respect. That is not incidental; it is UP’s conviction that learning should be lifelong and community-wide, not walled off by age.
Around that circle I keep returning to a phrase one of UP’s early architects used about learning and the health of a democracy. When I first heard it, it struck me as poetic but abstract. After ten years it feels concrete. The past decade taught us, painfully, that a society’s health — a democracy’s especially — depends on an informed, critically thinking citizenry, and that these are not qualities you can graft on after the fact. They have to be cultivated continuously, through learning. In the chaos of the 2020s, many of our institutions — schools, universities, the press — struggled to serve that function.
Learning is society’s democratic immune system.
What the decade proved is that prevailing in that crisis of democracy required exactly this kind of resilience — the shared capacity to make sense of the world together. Without a culture of collective sense-making, no policy or platform could hold.
Now, in 2035, the pendulum has swung: communities have reclaimed learning as a commons, a shared responsibility woven through everyday life. The UP Academe framework — formal and informal, global and local — has been the vehicle. It gave people the tools to keep learning and a reason to: a better job, better communities, and some inoculation against the next wave of disinformation or economic shock.
The grand narrative has its caveats. The change is uneven. Well-resourced schools and regions leapt ahead with UP Academe while underfunded areas needed more time and support — a gap UP’s GC L&E has been working to close. Sceptics remain: a parent in a café worries that “all this self-directed stuff” might leave some children with gaps in the basics (educators counter that THRIVE tracking prevents exactly that, since core goals still have to be met). And there are deeper worries — whether a global learning network has quietly thinned local traditions and languages. UP has tried to stay sensitive to that, translating materials into dozens of languages and letting local curricula plug into THRIVE Plans. Still, not everyone is comfortable with a single international platform holding so much sway over learning. “It’s a fine line between global collaboration and homogenisation,” one education expert cautions. Such critiques keep the system honest.
Yet, standing on this campus green watching a college student and a grandmother swap stories about an app they built together, it is hard not to feel some optimism. The human shift is the profound one. Students are no longer passive consumers of education; they are participants, and sometimes leaders. Teachers are no longer only deliverers of content; they are facilitators, mentors and organisers. Learning has broken out of its old confines — classroom walls, school hours, age brackets — and fused with civic life.
On my way out of the city I stop at the local UP Museum of Leadership, housed in a restored university library. It is a living archive of this learning revolution: story-rooms on teachers who redesigned their classrooms with NAVi, LocalCircles that turned projects into public goods, students whose THRIVE Plans trace a decade from a first community project to post-doctoral research. A quiet installation called “Truth Rebuilt” walks you through the disinformation years to the present, ending on a line that could stand as the movement’s epitaph: “Democracy survived because we learned our way back to trust.” The place feels less like a memorial than a classroom in motion.
In the last moments of the circle discussion, a quiet twelve-year-old — the one who had been tinkering with the solar water purifier — speaks up. “Before UP came to my school,” he says softly, “I used to always ask, ‘Why do I need to learn this?’ Now I don’t ask, because I know why. I’m learning so I can help my community, and maybe even the world — and it’s fun.” Around him, people nod. Ten years into this experiment, that might be the simplest summary of all: education became something personally meaningful and socially vital. In tying free-choice learning to real-world purpose, we rediscovered the why.
The session ends and people drift off — some students to update their THRIVE Plans from the day, a pair of grandparents to plan next week’s meet-up, a teacher to close her eyes for a moment of gratitude. I pack up my notebook feeling I’ve watched something small and remarkable: a community learning its way into a better future. As I leave the UP Academe campus for the city street, the sounds of laughter and earnest argument follow me — and I can’t help thinking that if this is what ten years of UP has brought, the next ten might reshape our schools, and our capacity to adapt, to grow, and to thrive together.
