When we talk about “fixing education,” most conversations start with small adjustments: more technology in classrooms, new assessment formats, a better campus experience. Ben Nelson, founder of Minerva University, argues that this is nowhere near enough. In a recent webinar with educators from across Latin America, Ben and Will Sánchez, who leads Minerva’s partnerships in the region, invited us to confront a harder question: What would education look like if we actually designed it for learning—rather than for certificates, rituals, and rankings?
Why the Current System Isn’t Working
Ben began with a simple thought experiment. Imagine you want to learn tennis. You spare no expense and hire four coaches…None of them knows how to play tennis. They refuse to talk to one another. You work with them for four months, then fire all four and randomly hire four new ones who have no idea what the previous coaches tried to teach you. You repeat this eight times (or for 4.5 years).
We instantly recognize how absurd this is for sport, music, or languages. And yet, as Ben pointed out, this is essentially how our secondary and higher education systems operate: fragmented, uncoordinated, and disconnected from actual mastery.
Then he pushed us further. Imagine this webinar suddenly turned into the final exam for your undergraduate degree. A 60-minute test appears on the screen, covering everything you were “supposed” to have learned. How confident would you feel?
Every time Ben has asked this question to thousands of people in dozens of countries, the reaction is the same: laughter. Not because it’s funny, but because the idea that we still remember, let alone use, most of what we were tested on is obviously unrealistic.
He then asks a more piercing question: even if you could get an A today on every exam, assignment, and project you ever completed as an undergraduate, whose life would be materially different?
For Ben, this reveals the core problem: we’re running a multi-trillion-dollar performance, a “Kabuki theater” of grades, exams, and admissions rituals that adds very little real value for students or society. Meanwhile, we expect these same graduates to: 1) Participate in elections and democratic decisions, 2) Adapt to changing careers, 3) Contribute productively to their communities, and 4) Navigate a world of accelerating technological and social change. Our current model simply doesn’t prepare them for that.
Education in an Age of AI and Polarization
When Ben began designing Minerva around 2010–2011, he was thinking about two forces that now shape every classroom: the rise of advanced AI and the rise of highly sophisticated political propaganda.
On the one hand, AI systems are rapidly becoming “superintelligent” in specific domains. On the other hand, misinformation and polarized narratives, on all sides of the political spectrum, are becoming more targeted, more persuasive, and more destabilizing.
For Ben, this creates a stark imperative: Students must be able to discern quality: distinguish what is probable from what is merely plausible, what is rigorous from what is manipulative. And, students must be able to add value to superintelligence: not compete on memorizing facts, but contribute judgment, creativity, and ethical reasoning that AI alone cannot provide.
This requires two things that universities rarely deliver today: Deep mastery of fundamentals – understanding why core concepts matter, not just what they are. And higher-order thinking – the ability to transfer those concepts into new, messy, real-world contexts and make decisions.
Instead, most institutions sit in the mushy middle: they overload students with information that gets crammed into short-term memory and then quickly discarded.
The Opportunity for Emerging Countries: Leapfrog, Don’t Imitate
When participants from Latin America raised concerns about limited resources, political constraints, and lagging infrastructure, Ben’s response was surprisingly optimistic. “The worst thing emerging systems can do”, he argued, “is try to copy the large, prestigious universities in the US and Europe: With a fraction of the resources and no centuries-old brand, why would you try to play a game you can never win? Instead, he sees a historic opportunity to leapfrog the broken model and design from first principles.
If we return to the sports analogy, effective education should look less like a four-month blast of everything at once and more like:
Deliberate practice over time – practicing core skills “over and over and over again” rather than touching them once and moving on.
Contextualization – applying those skills in varied conditions: different “courts,” different rules, different levels of complexity.
Transfer – once you’ve mastered tennis, you can move into pickleball or another game and carry core techniques across contexts.
That kind of educational experience doesn’t resemble most school or university programs today—but it is vastly more effective. And it doesn’t require copying elite US campuses; it requires courage to design something better.
Three Elements of an Effective Educational System
Ben outlined three components that, together, define a truly effective learning system—whether at high school, university, or in professional education.
1. Coherent and cohesive curriculum
A real curriculum is not just a list of courses. It is: Designed as a whole, coordinated across years and disciplines, and built on a clear “skeleton” of cognitive tools, concepts, and habits of mind that every graduate must master.
When a student encounters a key skill in the first course, it should reappear—deeper, more complex, more applied—throughout the rest of the program, no matter which path they take.
2. Evidence-based pedagogy
Lecturing, Ben reminded us, is often “the most efficient way to move the notes from the professor’s notebook to the student’s notebook without passing through the brain of either.”
In contrast, high-retention learning requires students to struggle productively with material; actively engage with problems and peers; apply previously learned tools to new situations, and practice repeatedly over time. The research literature is full of high-effect-size pedagogical techniques. What Minerva did was systematically compile and integrate them into a single teaching methodology.
3. Assessment for transfer, not recall
This is where Ben is particularly passionate. Most assessments operate on a simple scale: correct/incorrect, or at best, “how well do you know this topic?” But knowing something in one narrow context rarely means being able to use it in another. He gave a familiar example: many of us can recognize when a presentation is boring, yet we may give boring presentations ourselves. We can critique, but can’t produce. That’s a failure of transfer.
For Ben, assessment should answer a different question: “In how many different contexts can you effectively apply this concept or skill?” Imagine if your degree depended on demonstrating a core idea in 20 different contexts, across multiple courses and projects. You would spend your time practicing exactly that—and your learning would look very different.
Designing such assessments is hard. Doing it at scale is nearly impossible without technology. Which leads us to Forum.
Forum: The Platform Behind the Model
To operationalize this vision, Minerva built Forum, its digital learning environment. Ben described it as a platform that enables all three elements above:
Curriculum – Forum connects a detailed “learning economy” of outcomes and skills down to every lesson plan and activity across the institution. It makes sure the intended scaffolding and repetition actually happen.
Pedagogy – Forum acts as a “super-intelligence” for instructors. It lets them see who is speaking, who is silent, how each breakout group is progressing, and when to intervene. It makes active learning possible and manageable.
Assessment – Built-in tools allow institutions to measure not just correctness, but the breadth of application and transfer of each skill, across many different contexts and courses.
One of Ben’s favorite early findings from Forum was unexpected. A founding dean ran a small research project: after each of 32 class sessions, professors wrote down who they thought was the “best student” in the room. Later, the team compared those impressions with actual performance data from Forum.
The result: not a single professor correctly identified the top performer in their class. And in every case, the students they thought were strongest were men, while the actual top-scoring students were women.
In other words, the platform didn’t just support learning—it revealed and helped counteract deeply ingrained bias.
Are Accreditors Really the Problem?
One participant asked about resistance from accreditation bodies and regulators, especially in conservative systems.
Interestingly, Ben said the biggest barriers haven’t been accreditors themselves, but the stories universities tell about them. When Minerva has dealt directly with national and professional accrediting agencies, they’ve generally had clear requirements and checklists. Minerva’s model meets or exceeds those standards.
The stronger resistance comes from institutional leaders and faculty who fear change and blame external constraints. It’s easier to say “the accreditor will never allow it” than to do the hard work of bringing people along, addressing doubts, and rethinking long-standing practices. For Ben and Will, the real barrier is not regulation; it’s a lack of vision and “intestinal fortitude” among those in charge.
What This Means for Leaders in Latin America and Beyond
When educators from Costa Rica, Mexico, and other countries described their constraints — limited budgets, unstable politics, outdated structures — Will came back to a simple, human starting point: Young people are hungry for opportunity, but old structures hold them back.
The first shift, he argued, is a mindset shift. Institutions must move from viewing their role as transmitting knowledge to developing students who can think, adapt, and lead. Once leaders and faculty embrace that, change becomes possible step by step, in collaboration, grounded in local realities.
For Ben, countries in Latin America and across the Global South have a unique chance right now: don’t spend decades chasing the traditional model. Instead:
Design coherent curricula around the skills your citizens truly need
Use active, research-based pedagogies, supported by technology
Build assessment systems that reward transfer and real-world application
Partner with organizations that already have tools and evidence, rather than reinventing everything from scratch
A Call to Build the Next Generation of Institutions
Minerva began in 2011 with a bold experiment: could a university built from first principles, serving a highly diverse, often financially disadvantaged student body, produce outcomes that rival or surpass the world’s most prestigious institutions?
The early answer, backed by data, was yes—but not because Minerva “found” better students. As Ben said, they made them by designing every element around learning that endures and transfers.
Today, Minerva’s curriculum and Forum platform are being used by institutions across the world, including in Latin America and Japan. For leaders, faculty, and policymakers who feel trapped between a failing status quo and impossible constraints, Ben and Will’s message is both challenging and hopeful:
The system we inherited is not working—and pretending otherwise is dangerous.
The tools and knowledge to build something better already exist.
The real question is whether we are willing to rethink our assumptions, confront our fears, and design education that truly prepares students to thrive in an age of superintelligence.
Here is the webinar that Paty, Gus, and I (HAED LATAM) hosted with Ben Nelson and Will Sánchez for Minerva University