The Classroom is Wrong

Many think the problem with education is bad teachers. Or perhaps unmotivated students. Or maybe an obsolete curriculum or lack of funding. But what if the real problem was the classroom itself?

For over a century, we've known how people learn best. It's not by sitting passively and listening to a lecture. The human brain isn't designed for that. We learn by doing, making mistakes, receiving feedback, and teaching others. This isn't a modern theory; it's backed by decades of research in cognitive psychology.

Imagine you're that teacher. You walk into a room with 30 pairs of eyes looking at you expectantly. What's your instinct? To start talking, give a lecture. The room is designed for it. Fighting against that instinct is like swimming against the current. A few exceptional teachers manage it, but it's exhausting, and most will eventually let themselves be carried by the current.

However, walk into almost any classroom in the world, and what do you see? Rows of desks with a teacher at the front. It's a configuration that practically begs the teacher to lecture. Even if you put the best teacher in the world in that room, the environment itself pushes them toward poor pedagogy.

We've been trying to solve this problem by training teachers to swim better. We give them workshops on active learning techniques, preach about the importance of group work and peer feedback. But it's not working. Most teachers still lecture most of the time.

Why? Because we're solving the wrong problem. We're trying to change the swimmers when we should be changing the river.

Some innovative institutions are already pioneering this approach. For example, Minerva University. All their classes are online, and they built a learning management system that literally puts a muzzle on the teacher. The system only allows the teacher to speak for a fraction of class time, forcing more active student participation. And it's working. Minerva is now more selective than Harvard. For the class of 2026, Minerva had an acceptance rate of 0.99%, compared to Harvard's 3%. Effective teaching is one of the things they're doing right.

In Photoshop you can do anything, even more than in Canva. But unless you're an expert, you end up using four or five tools from the main menu. Canva democratized good design. We need the Canva of education - a system that makes great teaching accessible to everyone, not just experts.

This is somewhat like what Canva did with graphic design. For years, we thought the solution for better design was to train more people to use complex tools like Photoshop. Canva took a different approach. They eliminated most of the option-filled menus to create a product that allows anyone to create beautiful designs. As a result, Canva is now more widely used than Photoshop. In fact, Canva has 150 million users worldwide, five times more than Photoshop, despite being launched 23 years later.

In Photoshop you can do anything, even more than in Canva. But unless you're an expert, you end up using four or five tools from the main menu. Canva democratized good design. We need the Canva of education - a system that makes great teaching accessible to everyone, not just experts.

At Circles, we believe the way to eliminate menus and their hundreds of options is to divide students into small rooms before the teacher enters the classroom. Imagine a learning environment where, instead of a room full of students facing a single teacher, you have multiple small meeting rooms, each with 3, 4, or 5 students. In this configuration, you couldn't lecture even if you wanted to. Your only option would be to move from room to room, giving instructions, guiding conversations between students, answering their questions, facilitating group work. You would become the "guide on the side" that education theorists have been advocating for decades, not because you're exceptionally skilled, but because the environment gives you no other choice.

Achieving this in the physical world would require rebuilding global educational infrastructure - a daunting and impractical task. But in the online world, we can do it. And that's what we're doing at Circles.

We've designed our platform so that students are divided into small groups. The teacher can't address everyone at once. They have to interact with each group separately, which naturally leads to more active and participatory learning. The beauty of doing this online is that we don't need to rebuild every school in the world. We can create this ideal learning environment with a few lines of code. And once built, even a novice teacher will find themselves doing good pedagogy by default.

By limiting their ability to lecture, we're expanding their capacity to teach effectively.

Some might argue that this approach limits teacher freedom. And they're right. But that's the point. We're not trying to restrict teachers; we're trying to free them from the pressure that the traditional classroom puts on their practice. By limiting their ability to lecture, we're expanding their capacity to teach effectively.

This isn't to say that lecturing is never useful. It has its place, particularly for introducing new concepts or inspiring students. But it shouldn't be the default teaching mode.

While we might struggle to implement these ideas in physical classrooms, digital learning environments can easily be configured to support more effective teaching methods. We can create environments that make good pedagogy the path of least resistance.

This is the promise of online education that hasn't yet been fulfilled. Most online courses are just lectures delivered through a screen. They're replicating the worst aspects of traditional education, just with more sophisticated technology.

At Circles, we're building a future where educational environments are optimized for how the human brain actually works. Where active learning, peer support, and immediate feedback are the norm, not the exception. Where teachers are free to focus on what they do best - guide, inspire, and mentor - instead of fighting against the current of an obsolete classroom design.

The classroom is wrong. It's time to design it right.