The Learning Web Is Already Here
Something is happening quietly across Skool.
It doesn’t look like a movement from the outside. There are no algorithms promoting it, no curriculum guiding it, and no institution funding it. Yet thread by thread, conversation by conversation, something is forming that feels profoundly familiar to anyone who’s read Deschooling Society.
Ivan Illich called it the learning web.
He wrote that the future of real education would depend on people freely connecting to exchange knowledge, skills, and insight—outside of formal systems, driven by curiosity instead of credential. He imagined networks that would let anyone learn from anyone, anywhere in the world, without needing permission.
Half a century later, that vision is quietly unfolding inside Skool.
What looks like a collection of small groups, entrepreneurship circles, parenting hubs, spiritual communities, creativity labs, is actually a living ecosystem. Each community has its own rhythm and language, but together they form a decentralized network of learning.
People follow questions, not degrees.
They teach by doing.
They learn by reflecting.
They connect because something inside them recognizes truth when they see it lived out loud.
It’s messy, unstructured, and deeply human.
Skool wasn’t built to be a school, and that’s exactly why it works. It gives people permission to gather around meaning rather than metrics. You can feel it in the way communities evolve: how one person’s curiosity sparks another’s, how a comment becomes a collaboration, how ideas travel freely without needing to be approved.
This is what Illich meant when he said learning must return to living systems. He wasn’t predicting technology, he was describing a pattern of life. Skool just happens to be the first platform that mirrors that pattern: one that honors connection over control, reciprocity over hierarchy, and experience over instruction.
When I look across the platform, I see the threads forming. Entrepreneurs helping parents. Artists learning from scientists. Coaches and philosophers crossing paths over shared questions about purpose, freedom, and what it means to live authentically.
It’s not organized. It’s alive.
And maybe that’s the point.
Real learning has always spread this way, through curiosity, relationship, and trust. What Illich could only imagine, we’re quietly building in real time.
The learning web isn’t coming.
It’s already here.