TED Talks Daily - Schools urgently need a redesign. Here's how | Aylon Samouha

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

When kids say school is "fine," that's the sound of potential fading, says education innovator Aylon Samouha. He introduces Transcend, the nonprofit engaging communities across the US to redesign their schools and connect learning to the world kids are growing into. Check out what school looks like when students are solving real-world problems and building things that matter, not just studying what's on the test. (This ambitious idea is part of The Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. It's probably safe to say most of us want our children to get a good education. But what does a good education actually look like in a rapidly changing world? Is the schooling my daughters get preparing them in the ways they need? In today's talk, education innovator Alon Samoa takes us on a journey from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C. to rural North Dakota, giving us a glimpse of a movement that's rethinking every aspect of learning through community-based design, transforming classrooms into places where all young people feel seen, engaged, and ready to build the world ahead. You've never seen a school like this. In the middle of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, surrounded by cranes, startups, design studios,

young people aren't just sitting in classrooms. They're creating digital marketing campaigns for small businesses, wiring real houses. Down the hall, a student named Natalia is hacking websites safely with the guidance of cybersecurity pros. These students are part of the Brooklyn Steam Center, a public high school that looks and feels more like an engineering studio than a traditional classroom.

They're earning college-ready diplomas and industry credentials. They're building professional networks while discovering what they're good at in the real world. And none of it happened by accident. I lead a school design organization called Transcend. And when we began working with the Brooklyn community, our first step wasn't to bring in a program. It was to listen.

Students, families, educators, local employers, all told us the same thing. We want learning that actually connects to the world kids are growing into. So with the school's founders, we stitched together decades of practice and research, career-connected learning, project-based learning, purpose development. The result? A learning experience that's rigorous, relevant, and engaging. Not about regurgitating content, but about solving real problems. Not, what do I need to know for the test? But what can I build that matters?

And when you see it, it feels obvious. Of course, school should be like this. But if it's so obvious, why am I on this stage telling you about it? And what does it cost us when most students never get to learn this way? Transcend recently surveyed 70,000 students across the U.S. Less than half said they love school. Two-thirds said it's boring. Less than 4% said they get a chance to explore

and be in charge of their own learning. And the older students get, the worse it gets. Nearly three quarters of third graders say they love school. But by high school, barely a quarter say they do. And the data's just telling us what every parent already knows. You ask, how was school today? And you hear one word, fine. But fine isn't fine.

It's the sound of potential quietly fading. Here's the truth most of us don't say out loud. School isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do over a century ago. It was built for the factory age to standardize, sort, and prepare young people for predictable jobs. It worked for the time. Literacy rose, the middle class grew. But today, our graduates aren't heading to assembly lines.

They're stepping into a world being reshaped by AI, where thriving depends on knowing who you are, discerning fact from fiction, knowing how to keep learning, creating, collaborating, and indeed coexisting with others. That's why I believe our task isn't merely to improve schools. It's to redesign them for a new purpose. A purpose worthy of the 15,000 hours,

every young person spends in K-12 schooling. A purpose that shapes our very democracy, because, as my mentor puts it, what happens in classrooms today is what will happen in society tomorrow. But realizing this vision has never been easy. For decades, we've been trapped between two extremes, top-down reforms that can ignore local realities

or bottom-up efforts that often depend on heroic and exhausted educators. But there's a third way. Community-based design. Community-based design takes the best of both approaches. It brings together the wisdom of lived experience with the wisdom of research. The assets of communities with the assets of proven tools and practices to make change that's both human and enduring. It's the best of design thinking, R&D, and community participation

applied to the life of a school. That's how Brooklyn Steam came to be. It's also how Van Ness Elementary in Washington, D.C., redesigned school around a simple idea. Kids learn best when they feel seen. We brought together families, educators, district leaders, to imagine school that truly centered the whole child, nurturing mind, body, and relationships,

while confronting the real trauma that many students carried into school. So we integrated effective practices from other settings. Morning circles replaced roll call. Mindfulness breaks alongside rigorous lessons. Measures on student belonging that matter as much as test scores do. After months of piloting and iterating, these pieces came together into a coherent model where every student feels safe, connected, and ready to learn.

When I visited, I saw a seven-year-old named Jalisa who had an emotional outburst in the classroom. Her friend Amara gently guided her to a calming space where they practiced breathing together. Within minutes, Jalisa was back on track. No tension, no punishment, just learning for both of them. That's why, even as other D.C. schools issued dozens or more suspensions each year, Vannes issued none and exceeded district averages in reading and math.

Today, one in four D.C. elementary schools is adopting this approach, and it's spreading to more than 100 schools across the country. Yeah. And community-based design works in places that couldn't be more different. It's how Matthew, a high school senior in rural North Dakota, went from dozing through class to forging his own past, in every sense of the word. After discovering blacksmithing, his school was ready.

Because it had been redesigned around real-world learning, he had the structure and freedom to turn his curiosity into craft, applying math, science, and design to building a small business of his own. Now, imagine pairing community-based design with today's technology. AI can help us accelerate learning and facilitate immersive experiences

that spark every student's passion so that thousands more Matthews can find their purpose if we design on purpose. From Brooklyn to D.C. to North Dakota in 500 schools across the country. We've seen what happens when communities design learning around how young people actually learn and live.

When you put student experience, engagement, motivation in the center, not as a bonus, but as a driving principle, everything changes. The data backs it up. Students who experience engaging high-quality learning have higher grades, stronger attendance, fewer behavior issues. But the magic isn't in the number. It's in the spark you see when a student realizes,

I belong here. I can do this. I'm learning with purpose. I can make something that matters. I know I want that for my own kids. And of course, I'm not alone. Every parent, educator, every community wants schools that keep growing with the world around them.

School cannot be something we redesign once a century. We need community-based design as a muscle, not a program or an initiative, something built in, not bolted on. A continuous way of evolving how we do school together. So when we ask, and how are the children, let's make sure the answer isn't fine. Let it be they're engaged, they're thriving.

And they're transforming the world. Thank you. That was Alon Samoa speaking at TEDnext 2025. This ambitious idea is part of the Audacious Project, Ted's initiative to inspire and fund global change. Learn more at audaciousproject.org. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation.

guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Sungmar Nivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balareso. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Thank you.