The school system we have is too constrained by its roots in the Industrial Revolution, he argued. Machines were less capable than they are today, so we filled the gap by educating people to make them more machine-like. “We had a lot of people in factories and accounting departments doing really boring things,” Ito explained. “In order for us to do that we had to create an educational system that made people punctual, predictable, obedient and all the different things we expect from workers.”