The pizza test failed. The music test failed. The trust test failed. Most Americans have looked at generative AI and concluded, correctly, that it cannot be relied upon for basic facts or cultural relevance. Yet a sliver of the ultra-wealthy has decided that same technology is fit to raise their children.

They are not waiting for evidence. They are buying in.

Alpha School charges $75,000 a year for kindergarten. Forge Prep commands similar fees. Their pitch: AI tutors plus "interactive project-based workshops" will produce children who "think on their feet and navigate the world." The customers? Venture capitalists like Shaun Johnson, who told The Wall Street Journal he recognizes education "is likely broken the way it is" — then admitted his solution is to hand his son to entrepreneurs trying to fix it.

Johnson's candor is revealing. He doesn't claim the model works. He claims the old model is broken, therefore the new one deserves his money. That is not educational philosophy. That is portfolio logic applied to a five-year-old.

Consider what these schools actually offer. Large language models are sycophants by design. They predict the token most likely to please the user. They do not probe. They do not resist. They do not say, "You're wrong, and here's why." A child who asks an AI tutor why the sky is blue gets an answer. A child who asserts the sky is green gets validation. Critical thinking requires friction. AI is engineered to eliminate it.

Johnson wants his son to "navigate the world, not necessarily a recitation of facts." But navigation requires a map. The map comes from facts — uncomfortable ones. Alpha School cofounder MacKenzie Price has already signaled she intends to keep "hot-button social issues" out of the classroom. In 2024, that phrase is a euphemism. It covers slavery. It covers women's suffrage. It covers the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Trail of Tears, Stonewall, the farmworkers' movement. Alpha serves students through high school. A teenager can graduate without ever confronting the country's actual history because a founder decided those topics were inconvenient.

This is not innovation. This is sanitization wrapped in a hoodie.

Neither Alpha nor Forge publishes performance metrics. No standardized test scores. No longitudinal studies. No peer-reviewed outcomes. Parents are writing six-figure checks for a product with no provenance, no accountability, and no track record. In any other sector — pharmaceuticals, aviation, food safety — this would be illegal. In education, it's "disruption."

The irony compounds. These same parents would never board an uncertified aircraft. They would not feed their children untested formula. But they will outsource the formation of their children's minds to a technology that hallucinates court cases and recommends glue on pizza.

Public schools are flawed. Teacher shortages persist. Curricula lag. Inequality is structural. But the answer to a broken system is not to abandon it for a black box that answers to no one. The answer is investment, oversight, and the slow, unglamorous work of repair — work that benefits every child, not just the offspring of limited partners.

What happens when the beta test ends? When the cohort reaches college and discovers their AI tutor never taught them to write a research paper, to defend a thesis under cross-examination, to sit with ambiguity? The wealthy can always course-correct. Tutors. Legacy admissions. Family networks. The children bear the cost of the experiment. The parents call it vision.

History will not judge this kindly. It will record that in the 2020s, a generation of technologists decided their children were data points — and called it the future.