I Dropped Out Because I Was ‘Stupid.’ Then I Became a Systems Engineer.

P4.2.1 When failure has a pattern, the problem is the system—not the student.

I barely graduated high school. I dropped out of university. People told me I was stupid because I got poor grades, even though I could ace tests. I believed them. For years, I carried that label.

Then I spent 20 years building complex systems as a software engineer. Solving problems other people couldn’t solve. Seeing patterns others missed. Leading teams. Fixing what was broken.

The disconnect started making sense with an ADHD diagnosis in my 40s. But that didn’t fully explain it. What clicked everything into place was understanding I’m autistic—that’s why I see patterns others don’t, why I need the framework before the details make sense. I wasn’t stupid. The education system just couldn’t accommodate how my brain works.

The Translation Problem

My brain processes information top-down. I see the whole system first, then understand how the pieces fit. Give me the framework—the “why”—and everything clicks into place. Teach me bottom-up, building from details to concepts, and I’m lost in the weeds before we get anywhere.

Traditional education does the opposite. It teaches sequentially, piece by piece, building toward understanding. For most people, that works. For people whose brains work like mine, it’s a translation problem—every single day, in every single class.

This Isn’t Fantasy—It’s Engineering

I’m not writing this to vent about how “education is broken.” I’m writing it because I’ve spent my whole adult life watching people treat solvable design problems as fate.

In software, when something consistently confuses users, we don’t solve it by lecturing them to “try harder.” We change the flow. We remove steps, change defaults, add guardrails, and measure whether people can actually complete the task. We assume the user is normal—and we treat consistent failure as a design signal.

School is one of the few places where consistent failure is treated as evidence that the user is the problem.

When failure has a pattern, it has a cause. And causes can be engineered around. This is what engineering is: turning “hard” into “workable” by changing structure instead of demanding heroism.

The Self-Perpetuating System

But here’s what I’ve discovered talking to people outside academia: Many of them understand concepts better when I explain them top-down—framework first, then details—than they ever did in school.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: What if the dominant pedagogical approach isn’t optimal for all cognitive styles? What if it’s just self-perpetuating?

YouTuber Johnny Harris has a great piece about graduating with a degree in French—able to ace tests and name every grammatical structure—then landing in Paris and realizing he couldn’t order breakfast. My wife had the same experience with law school: passed the bar, got a job, and realized she had no idea how to actually run a case.

I’ve interviewed many software engineers in my career. People with fresh CS PhDs often can’t build a basic app. Not because they’re not smart—they can explain algorithms and data structures brilliantly, which is exactly what they studied and what advances computing research. But that’s not what software engineering is. Translating product requirements into working code? That’s a different skill, and it’s not what CS degrees prepare you for.

Know who’s usually better prepared for actual software engineering work? People who learned by building. The best engineers I’ve worked with have degrees in electrical engineering and economics—or no formal CS degree at all. They started with “what are we trying to make?” and figured out the technical details from there. Framework first.

It’s like the difference between looking at a pile of Lego bricks and deciding what you can build versus picturing what you want to build and figuring out which pieces you need. The first approach works, but you’re constrained by what’s already there. The second approach lets you innovate.

That’s what happens when we teach rules without building usable competence first. You can memorize all the components without being able to apply them.

Think about who becomes teachers and education researchers. The people who thrived in that bottom-up, sequential system. The people like me—who need the framework first—many of us self-select out. We drop out. We go into other fields. So the people studying “how people learn” are disproportionately studying people who learn like them.

Some pattern-thinkers do make it all the way through to academia—the scientists who can finally work with frameworks and complex systems. But they’re rare. And even they often struggled miserably getting there. We see the survivors and miss everyone we lost along the way.

That’s a structural feedback loop. The system selects for one cognitive style, and that style then designs and studies the system, which further reinforces itself.

I spent years thinking something was wrong with me. Turns out something was wrong with the system—it was designed for one cognitive style and treated everyone else as defective.

What We’re Losing

Things are better than when I was in school—there’s more awareness now, more accommodations, more options for kids like my daughter. That matters.

But here’s what hasn’t changed: My daughter recently had a neuropsychological evaluation. The assessment included various measures, but what got emphasized—what the school-facing system treats as “functioning”—was executive function, sequential processing, working memory for detail-to-concept building. Many measures designed around one cognitive style. Not intelligence. Not problem-solving ability. Not pattern recognition. Just: how well does your brain fit the bottom-up sequential model?

We’re still running on the same fundamental architecture, just with more patches and workarounds. Students are still being told they’re “lazy” or “irresponsible” when they just think differently. Still internalizing that they’re moral failures—that they could do the work if they just tried harder.

And here’s what really keeps me up at night: The problems we’re facing as a society—climate change, governance dysfunction, technological disruption—these aren’t problems you solve with rote memorization, standardized tests, and executive function drills. They’re systems problems. They require pattern recognition. Creative problem-solving. The ability to see connections others miss.

Exactly the cognitive strengths that our current education architecture systematically suppresses.

We built this system in the 1800s and scaled it for mass standardization. We’ve patched and updated, but never redesigned the core architecture for what we actually need in 2025. We’re losing the bright minds who could help us solve these problems—because the system told them they were lazy and they believed it.

My high school calculus teacher had a poster by his door paraphrasing Emerson: “The man who knows how can always find work. The man who knows why will boss the jerk.” He understood that frameworks mattered. But then he’d tell me, “You do well on the tests—if you would just do the homework, I could give you a good grade.” He never called me stupid explicitly. He didn’t have to. The system valued compliance over understanding, and he had to enforce it.

Education isn’t failing because teachers and administrators aren’t trying. It’s failing because we don’t treat education design as a professional architecture problem. We treat it as politics. That guarantees patchwork.

Here’s What I’m Going to Show You

In this series, I’m going to fundamentally question everything we “know” about education in the United States, and then I’m going to outline solutions. The scope is large—education is one of the biggest, most contested areas of policy. But that’s exactly why it needs professional design thinking instead of political patchwork.

I’m respecting every real constraint: you can’t pause school while you rebuild it, you can’t strand rural districts, you can’t ignore special needs or existing infrastructure, you can’t pretend transitions are free, and you can’t bypass human nature. Constitutional-level change takes decades and requires broad political support—I respect that too.

The only constraint I’m not respecting is whether people currently want change—because unlike infrastructure, that constraint is malleable.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to answer a specific question: “If I were designing education from scratch, knowing what I know now, what would I build?”

Not “how do we make the current system slightly better?” But “what would education architecture look like if we designed it for 2025?” For multiple cognitive styles. For the competencies people actually need. For the problems we’re actually facing.

Specifically, I’m going to show you:

• What someone needs to know to function in the modern world (and how different that is from what we’re teaching)

• What education architecture designed for multiple ways of thinking would actually look like (the specific design I would build)

• Why we don’t have it (spoiler: it’s not incompetence or conspiracy—it’s path dependency)

• How we fix it (and why professional governance architecture is the missing piece)

This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about raising them—by designing architecture that develops the capabilities we actually need instead of the ones we needed in the 1800s.

Not a people problem. An architecture problem. And architecture problems have architecture solutions.

Let’s Build It

I spent decades believing I was the problem. Then I discovered the problem was the architecture.

Right now, there are students sitting in classrooms internalizing the same lie. Being told they need “accommodation” when what they actually need is a system designed by professionals who understand that brains work in different ways.

I know how to build that system. Over this series, I’m going to show you exactly what I would build and why it would work.

Because we’re losing too many bright minds—and the problems we face are too complex to keep running a system that filters them out.

---

Next in this series: What should someone actually know to function in 2025? (And why the gap between that and what we’re teaching is bigger than you think.)