What Schools Still Don’t Teach

Classrooms talk about AI, climate, even geopolitics. But rarely about the system that frames all of it — the digital architecture students rely on every day. How it works. Who owns it and who gets to decide.
That part stays missing and it starts to be obvious why.

Students learn to code before they understand the systems they’re coding into. They use platforms without questioning the data flows, the identity systems, or the incentives behind the tools. They’re online every day but without a map of the terrain.

This feels like a deliberate gap.

Because once you teach people how the web is built — who owns what, who governs what, who profits from what you can’t go back to training them just to be compliant users. It means you’d be raising critics.

Without that knowledge and critical thinking, they’re easy to shape.

According to the OECD, digital skills education remains “uneven and fragmented,” and most school systems still don’t teach data agency, digital identity, or decentralized models as core concepts. Some introduce “media literacy” but that’s not the same thing. Knowing how to spot fake news isn’t the same as understanding the deeper mechanics of platform power, surveillance capitalism, or how protocols shape freedoms.

And now, with biometric ID systems being rolled out in public schools, with student behavior tracked across platforms, and with AI tools creeping into assessment, grading, and even behavior analysis the urgency is obvious.

You can’t build a democratic digital society on passive digital consumers.

You need people who understand consent in code. People who can question infrastructure. People who besides knowing to use tools also know how to choose or reject them.

This is where SourceLess Labs Foundation places its attention. On creating collaboration across institutions, researchers, and communities to bring critical Web3 education to the table. To ask: how do we prepare people for a future where identity, agency, and access are all mediated by systems and most of those systems aren’t built for them?

We’re not there yet. But we’re working on it — curriculum by curriculum, partnership by partnership.

Because a generation that learns how to build the web differently might just refuse to be shaped by the old one.