Let's talk about education
A letter from our founder
It always starts with curiosity.
Sometimes curiosity is simply the refusal to stop at the first answer. You keep asking, “wait — how does this really work?”
Tim Harford noticed something about the 2008 crash. The people who saw it coming weren't the ones with the best degrees. They were the ones still asking simple questions.
Where did this come from? How does this actually work? Why does everyone seem so certain?
Gillian Tett was one of them. She kept asking what everyone else had stopped asking.
That's where education begins. Not with a curriculum. With wanting to know. To look at something and think: wait. Tell me more.
It's the question every child carries — why? — until an answer arrives that's good enough to make them stop. The trick is never to quite stop. Because curiosity is what changes our minds: new perspectives, new people, new ways of thinking, and the quiet thrill of opening a door you hadn't seen before.
And with knowing yourself — how you feel, what you love, what makes you keep going long after someone has stopped telling you to.
We don't all learn the same way
We don't ask the same questions. We don't get curious at the same moment. But school often treats us as if we do.
Ken Robinson said talent is like a natural resource. It's there. But it doesn't always announce itself. You have to go looking, and make space for it to show up.
Because learning doesn't happen to us. It happens through us. We connect what we notice today to something we lived years ago.
Learning is a verb. It has an “-ing”. It never really ends.
Creativity isn't extra
For a long time, creativity was treated as a nice extra — for when the “real” work was done.
But Professor Daisy Fancourt at UCL has shown that creativity is part of how we stay healthy — a fifth pillar, next to sleep, food, movement and connection.
Not decoration on a good life. Part of how it's built.
It's how we make sense of things that don't have words yet. And how we stay connected to ourselves while everything around us keeps changing.
Learning grows on itself
Money grows through compound interest: small things add up into something big.
Learning is the same. A book changes a conversation. A conversation changes a question at work. Something you learn at work suddenly makes sense of something you read years ago.
Nothing stays in its box. Learning travels.
So a school should be built to help those connections happen.
Not a container to fill
Paulo Freire called the old way the banking model — the teacher fills the empty student with facts.
But no one is empty. They arrive carrying a whole world.
A family. A language. A way of seeing. A thousand things they don't yet know are relevant.
Real learning is a conversation. It joins what you already carry to what you're about to find.
The four schools that taught me
My real education didn't only happen in a building with “school” written on it. Looking back, I was taught by four schools at once.
What I studied — the classes, the degrees, and a real admiration for my teachers.
Where I lived — Brazil, London, Australia, Paris, Iceland, Portugal, the places I visited, the nature around me; everything that shaped me before I had words for it.
My family and friends — the love, the contradictions, and how they shaped me.
My work — the failures, the pressure, the hustle, the feedback, the conversations that stayed with me longer than the meeting itself.
None ran on the same clock. None gave grades. But they were teaching me all the time — whether I was paying attention or not.
The fifth school
And there's a fifth school: the one I built myself. The one we never stop building.
Open innovation. Venture capital. Strategy in a fintech. Creative consultancy. Watercolour, video making, animation — just because I was curious.
No syllabus. Nobody told me: now learn this, now move here, now this will become useful later. I followed questions — I dug into things just for the sake of it — and the pieces slowly connected.
It's led by curiosity. That's the fuel. And it's the school I trust most — not because it's better than the others, but because I had a hand in designing it.
So I built a school
Everyone is already being taught by something — their family, their city, their friends, the things they make, the things they love, the questions they can't stop asking.
We wanted a school that makes room for all of it. Part your own journey, part shared ground.
For the shared part, we found an idea in Mitchel Resnick and Seymour Papert — and, because I'm Brazilian, one already in my blood: the samba school.
Not the dancing — the community. People of every age around one shared project, bigger than any of them. Beginners next to masters. You learn because you belong, and because you help build it.
You find your own rhythm while moving with everyone else's. And once a year, we bring families together to show what they've made, side by side — the Creative Recital.
Education isn't one straight path. It's a shared floor — room for your own questions, your own rhythm, people to learn from, and the freedom to build a fifth school of your own.
It's for the ones who love exploring and testing ideas — the founder mind, the scientist, the innovator. Part founder school, part playground: a place where, every time you play, a new door opens.
And I'm building it now because the world is changing at the speed of light — and the thing that stays ours, curiosity, creativity, the courage to make, is exactly what school teaches least. That's what I want to give children: the fifth school, from the very start.
Because the most important school is the one you never stop building.
That's the school we're building — for children and their families and their schools: Breathe Dream Create. And for grown-ups too: a creative founder school.
I am an entrepreneur — a mix of structure and soul. A curious mind who turned it all into a school: Breathe Dream Create — the fifth school, the one we never stop building.
Come and build your fifth school with us.
— Babi