Quick. What do you remember about the Great Depression?

1929, stock market crash, maybe FDR?

But here’s what you almost certainly didn’t learn: the interlocking systems that all strained at once.

• A financial system built on leverage.
• An economic system overproducing goods consumers couldn’t buy.
• A government unsure whether to intervene.
• A social system buckling under fear.

You learned dates. 

You didn’t learn how anything actually works.

This isn’t an accident. It’s how school is designed.

What School Actually Does

In most schools, learning happens through information transmission.

The teacher lectures.

The students pretend to absorb. Then they retransmit it back on tests.

If you’re a parent, you know the drill from experience: dates of battles, parts of the body, the three branches of government.

Schools teach information, not knowledge.

They treat the brain like a warehouse where facts stack on shelves, waiting for recall. The recall never happens because most information gets purged right after the exam.

School works like the hot dog eating contest at Coney Island.

And the children who succeed are Joey Chestnut.

At Forge Prep, we’ve spent years thinking about how to create enduring knowledge.

Instead of a warehouse that stores information, how do we develop students into a factory that transforms it?

Instead of being a passive warehouse that receives, stores, & retrieves, how does it become a factory?

A place that takes information inputs and combines them to fundamentally change them and create something new.

That’s what real learning does. It doesn’t just store facts. It transforms them into understanding, connects them to other ideas, and produces something that didn’t exist before.

Why This Matters: The Evidence

When students work on projects rooted in real-world systems rather than memorizing isolated facts, they outperform their peers across every metric.

A 2023 meta-analysis of 66 experimental studies found that project-based learning significantly improves academic achievement, thinking skills, and student attitudes compared to traditional teaching.[1]

Students don’t just score higher on tests. They retain information longer, transfer knowledge to new situations more effectively, and develop problem-solving abilities that matter beyond the classroom.

The data on intrinsic motivation tells the same story.

Students who engage because they find the activity meaningful (not because of grades or rewards) develop deeper understanding and persist through challenges.[2]

When learning connects to meaning, engagement isn’t something you manufacture. It’s something you earn by making learning consequential.

So the obvious question nobody asks is why don’t all schools do this?

The answer is uncomfortable.

Schools are organized around subjects not because it’s good for the students, but because institutions are organized for adults that way. Departments, tenure, textbooks, college admissions.

It is not because brains learn that way.

Changing this requires rethinking everything: how teachers are trained, how schools are structured, how success is measured.

That’s incredibly hard to retrofit into the existing infrastructure. So schools don’t do it.

Seeing the World as Systems

At Forge Prep, we teach students that the world runs on systems.

Sets of parts that interact through feedback and flow to create behavior over time.

Once you see these patterns, everything becomes clearer because you understand things at the foundational level.

Every system has structure:

• Components: the parts that make it up
• Flows: what moves between them
• Rules: what governs those flows
• Feedback: how the system self-corrects
• Purpose: what the system sustains
• Impact: how it affects other systems
• Leverage points: where small changes have large effects

This isn’t just theory.

Research shows that systems thinking helps students make connections across disciplines, understand complexity, and solve problems that have no single right answer.[3]

When you learn to see systems, you can’t unsee them. 

And that’s when you actually understand how the world works.

The Six Systems That Shape Life

We focus on six systems every human will navigate:

• The Human System. How your body and mind manage energy, attention, and emotion, and what happens when they fall out of balance.
• The Social System. How people cooperate, compete, and build trust, and how these same forces create conflict or exclusion.
• The Economic System. How people create and exchange value, and how those flows both lift and divide societies.
• The Technological System. How people invent tools that let us do more, and how those inventions reshape our environment, work, and attention.
• The Governmental System. How societies make and enforce rules, and how power drifts or stalls when feedback breaks down.
• The Ecological System. How energy and matter cycle through nature to sustain life, and how those cycles strain and recover.

Why these six?

Because every human being will navigate their own body, interact with others, earn a living, use tools, live under government, and depend on the natural world.

Everything else is detail.

Each system connects to the others, and understanding these connections unlocks possibility.

Technology creates tools that reshape how we work and live.

Economic growth funds the innovation that solves problems.

Government establishes the frameworks that enable cooperation at scale.

Ecology provides the foundation that sustains everything else.

When students see how algebra connects to entrepreneurship, how biology connects to public health, or how persuasive writing connects to policy, the perennial “when will I ever use this?” question disappears.

They’re not memorizing to please a teacher or chase grades and other trinkets of subordination.[4]

They’re learning to act effectively in the real world.

Learning by Living Inside Systems

Forge students learn systems through our curriculum oriented around Challenges.

Not assignments. Not worksheets. Challenges.

Real-world projects that make the systems visible by having students operate inside them.

Each Challenge must hit three marks: personal relevance, discernible impact, and autonomy.

Here’s what a student might experience in the Public Health Challenge.

She chooses a disease that affects her or someone she loves. 

She learns how it originates and what treatments exist. Then she investigates the economics. How are the drugs priced? How is research funded? Who decides which diseases get billions and which get nothing?

Let’s say she chooses Type 1 diabetes because her younger brother was just diagnosed.

As she researches, the connections start to reveal themselves.

• Patent law, part of the governmental system, shapes which drugs can be sold and for how long.
• That policy feeds into the economic system, influencing pricing and profitability.
• Pricing and profit expectations steer the technological system—what kinds of research and manufacturing companies invest in.
• Insurance structures, within both the economic and social systems, determine who can actually access those treatments.
• And the governmental system loops back again through regulation, deciding which products reach the market at all.

She realizes drug pricing isn’t just about simple supply and demand.

It’s actually about the interaction of four systems all pushing on each other: governmental, economic, technological, and social.

That’s the lightbulb moment. Scattered puzzle pieces become a coherent picture.

Once she sees how the system works, she can’t unsee it. 

She has to do something.

So she creates a YouTube series explaining all this to middle schoolers. But not because we assign it, but because she understands something important and wants others to see it too.

That’s what systems thinking does.

It turns students from passive receivers into active participants.

Other Challenges work the same way:

The Human System Challenge. Track your sleep, diet, and focus for two weeks. Build a model of your own energy system. Redesign your routine to improve your energy. Learn that you are a system.

The Local Policy Challenge. Find an issue in Short Hills, NJ (our first campus) you want to change. Research the laws. Propose an ordinance. Build a coalition. Learn how the social and governmental systems interact, how change actually happens.

Students don’t all work on the same projects. They choose problems they care about, pursue questions that matter to them, and see their work affect the real world. (aforementioned points on relevance and impact for every Challenge)

What’s at Stake

When you teach subjects in isolation, students learn to see the world as disconnected facts.

When you teach systems, they learn to see how everything connects. How changing one variable cascades through others. How feedback loops amplify or dampen effects. How the same patterns appear everywhere once you know to look for them.

Once you see how everything connects, you can never unsee it.

You start noticing systems everywhere: in your body, your relationships, your workplace, your government, your environment.

You stop asking “what happened?” and start asking “what’s happening to produce this behavior?”

You stop feeling like a victim of forces beyond your control and start seeing where you can actually influence change.

That’s what agency looks like. Not wishful thinking. Not blind optimism.

Real agency comes from understanding how systems work and knowing where your actions matter.

When students understand systems, they stop feeling powerless. They see that they’re not just subject to these forces. They’re participants in them. And participants can change outcomes.

That’s not just better education.

It’s a fundamentally different way of seeing the world and developing leaders.

And it’s what we need students to become.

Not someday, but now.

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[^1]: Chen, C.-H., & Yang, Y.-C. (2023). A study of the impact of project-based learning on student learning effects: A meta-analysis study. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. The meta-analysis examined 66 experimental and quasi-experimental studies over 20 years, finding that project-based learning significantly improved academic achievement, affective attitudes, and thinking skills compared to traditional teaching methods.

[^2]: Research consistently shows that intrinsic motivation (when students engage because they find the activity meaningful rather than for external rewards) leads to higher achievement, deeper processing, and greater persistence. Studies indicate that intrinsically motivated students outperform peers on measures of academic success and are more likely to continue learning when challenges arise. See Wigfield, A., & Wagner, A. L. (2005) and Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000) on self-determination theory and intrinsic motivation.

[^3]: Multiple studies demonstrate that interdisciplinary and systems-based approaches promote gains in cognitive ability, critical thinking, and the capacity to handle ambiguity. Research from Science Education Resource Center (2021) and work by Richmond (2010) on systems thinking in education shows that when students learn to see systems, they develop transferable problem-solving skills that work across domains. See also: Mathews, L. G., & Jones, A. (2008), “Using Systems Thinking to Improve Interdisciplinary Learning Outcomes,” Issues in Integrative Studies, 26, 73-104.

[^4]: This phrase is borrowed from John Taylor Gatto’s critique of conventional schooling in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Gatto argues that traditional schools use grades, gold stars, and other external rewards to create compliance rather than genuine learning.