The Covid lockdown helped me fall in love with learning. When my public middle school in China went online and everyone complained about Zoom fatigue, I, free from bells ringing every 50-minutes and a constant stream of new instructions, reveled in this newfound time to focus. My laptop quickly evolved beyond a video-calling interface to my second brain. I spent hours in note-taking apps, building infrastructure to not just capture ideas but also connect and integrate them: for example linking notes on the French Revolution (which I was learning about in school) to mob psychology (which I was reading a book about) and social media algorithms (on which I just watched a documentary about). When I showed people the node graph of my entire note-taking database, they joked I was a god building a universe. Soon my love (obsession) for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) -- the study of how knowledge is captured, organized, and resurfaced -- lead me to code plugins that integrated AI agents into note-taking apps, self-train to become a certified Notion Consultant to help new users design their Notion workspaces, and eventually develop my own note-taking app that integrates my unique understanding of the learning process. Then the lockdown was over and I went back to school. No laptops allowed. Back to “raise your hand to ask questions” and “read paragraph 2 to the class”. My questions were dismissed because they were “not in the curriculum”. So instead, I printed out pages of books I actually wanted to study and hid them inside textbooks. And then I changed schools twice -- first to UWC Changshu, then to UWC Maastricht. I thought moving to an international school and even a new continent will change things up. But it was all pretty much the same story: 50-minute periods, rigid curriculum, impersonal PowerPoint lectures. Looking out the window in Maastricht, I felt like I was back in China preparing for the big exam -- except now it was the IB. It seemed that everywhere I went, people only cared about top-down education and not student-lead learning. I talked with my teachers and academic coordinator to try to find some kind of workaround, but quickly realized that it’s not that individual teachers don’t care, but that the entire school system optimizes for standardization. When you need to move 30 students through the same curriculum at the same pace, there’s little room for what teachers do. I explored alternative education models such as Sudbury and Waldorf and thought about changing schools again. But what keeps me here is the people. My friend who jailbreaks iOS systems with me until midnight. A teacher who read my book “The Education I Want” and spent an hour talking about how she wishes she could teach differently. An old friend who asked me for the app with excitement after reading my online notes. These moments remind me that education can be human, shared, and alive. Of course, being able to switch schools, or even being able to keep learning during Covid is a huge privilege. And yes, kids in so many parts of the world still lack the most basic education. But what I saw is that even students with access to well-funded schools still can’t find an “education” that actually supports their learning. Last month, a friend of mine who was still stuck in a public school in China complained, “Don’t just give me answers -- help me learn.” It was beautifully phrased, and it stayed with me. Maybe I can build something different. Not just an app, but a community and space for learners fighting to keep their love of learning alive. I’m not a naive techno-optimist believing that an app will solve everything. But I do believe curiosity is universal, and the capacity for self-directed learning is far more widespread than our institutions assume. Because learning has always been bigger than school. --- 先读罢。 下次聊聊背后的一些思考和放弃了的思考。