When Answers are Abundant, Thinking Becomes Essential: Lina Ashar on Education.

When Lina Ashar came to India from Australia as a young teacher, she entered a classroom shaped by older assumptions. Children wore polyester uniforms and ties. Desks sat in rows. Classrooms had white walls, brown wooden furniture and straight-backed order. Teachers carried formal authority. Subjects moved through fixed periods. Children copied, memorised, prepared for tests and absorbed early lessons about rank, approval and worth.

Lina saw a system carrying history without examining it. The uniforms reminded her of colonial inheritance. The rows reflected a factory model of schooling. The “sir” and “ma’am” culture, in her view, carried a residue of hierarchy that made children feel smaller in the presence of authority. School looked orderly, yet much of its order came from habits designed for another age.

The greatest skill I have is looking at something and challenging the status quo as to why it exists.

That instinct became the beginning of her work in education. Kangaroo Kids and Billabong High International School grew from a teacher’s discomfort with inherited schooling. Dreamtime Learning, her current venture, comes from a more contemporary pressure: knowledge has become abundant, AI can generate answers instantly, attention is being trained by platforms outside school, and parents are trying to create certainty for children who will inherit uncertainty.

For more than a century, schools gained authority from the scarcity of knowledge. Teachers had information, textbooks organised it, examinations tested it, and credentials translated it into mobility. The child entering school today will need more than content retention. Advantage will sit in the quality of thought, emotional steadiness, discernment and agency a young person can bring to abundance.

The hidden curriculum of external validation

Lina’s critique of schooling begins with identity.

We have learned to define our sense of self and identity from an external perspective. Everything else flows from that first assumption.

Ranking flows from it. Standardisation follows. Parent anxiety grows around it. A social order built on career labels, salaries, school names, brands and visible achievement reinforces it. For a child, the report card becomes a moral signal, the school interview becomes a family event, and the parent’s fear becomes the child’s pressure.

Lina values achievement, and Dreamtime keeps academic seriousness inside the model. Her concern is imbalance. Schools have become highly skilled at evaluating what can be tested quickly, while many capacities that shape adult life remain underdeveloped, under-measured or treated as enrichment.

The AI era sharpens the problem. A child may produce answers and lack judgment. A child may complete assignments and struggle to direct attention. A child may score well and remain unprepared for uncertainty, disappointment or independent thought. When knowledge was scarce, content mastery carried greater economic value. As knowledge becomes abundant, the premium shifts toward interpretation, discernment, adaptability and inner steadiness.

“For me, education’s always been about how do I help a child become fully human?”

Inside Lina’s work, the phrase has operating consequences. If education’s purpose is human development, the school day, teacher role, curriculum, assessment, parent relationship and business model all need scrutiny.

From parent anxiety to institution-building

Kangaroo Kids began against a practical form of parent anxiety. Preschool was widely treated as preparation for admission interviews at established schools. Parents wanted two-year-olds made ready for Bombay Scottish, AVM or Jamnabai. The questions children were expected to answer could be abstract enough to miss the child entirely.

Lina refused to build a preschool around parroted preparation. Parents had to be persuaded that activity-based, constructivist learning carried more developmental seriousness than rehearsal for interviews. Kangaroo Kids began with a small number of children, and Lina recalls reaching 150 children by the end of the first year across multiple batches.

The lesson travelled beyond demand. Parents may enter an education decision with fear, yet fear can be redirected when an educator has conviction, explanation and operating clarity. Kangaroo Kids proved that Indian parents could accept a child-centred model when someone explained the developmental logic and built systems to deliver it. Billabong High extended that belief into a wider institutional network.

That phase also taught Lina how scale reshapes incentives.

A former franchise partner broke away and eventually became part of the Vibgyor group of schools. Lina’s interpretation is revealing because she moved beyond a simple betrayal narrative. She asked why the partner might have acted as he did. From his perspective, a school dependent on the Billabong brand would face limitations while raising capital, building enterprise value or preparing for a possible sale. The educational work may have been strong, yet the brand layer sat above the local institution.

That insight changed Dreamtime’s design.

The “Powered by Dreamtime” model allows a school to keep its own name and institutional identity while using Dreamtime as curriculum and learning infrastructure. Lina compares the role to a service provider, textbook provider or outsourced specialist. The school gains access to the model without becoming commercially trapped by another brand.

For education entrepreneurs, the lesson is precise: scale depends on more than the number of sites, learners or partners. It depends on whether the model respects the future incentives of those expected to carry it.

Dreamtime and the opportunity beyond school improvement

Dreamtime reflects three shifts in Lina’s thinking.

The first is the shift from school as place to learning as system. The model includes online schooling, micro-schools and partner-school integration. The online school began with 23 children and, according to Lina, has reached around 2,000 learners in three years. Growth with lower dependence on real estate changes the economics of reach.

The second is the shift from content delivery to capability formation. Dreamtime still covers board-aligned academic expectations, yet Lina describes the larger curriculum as self-mastery. Children are meant to understand how their minds work, how attention gets captured, how emotion affects learning, how gratitude and reframing change internal states, how media influences perception, and how AI should be used without weakening human thought.

The third is the shift from school branding to education infrastructure. Through the “Powered by” model, Dreamtime can enter existing schools while preserving their identity. Instead of only building alternatives outside the system, Dreamtime can work inside the current footprint of schools.

“I am not even education first. I am human transformation first.”

The opportunity Lina sees in education sits there. The next wave of value may come from systems that help existing schools redesign curriculum, attention, teacher practice, emotional learning and AI use without forcing a full institutional reset. Schools carry owners, principals, teachers, parents, boards, timetables, fees, regulation and habit. Dreamtime’s seriousness will depend on its ability to change practice across those layers.

AI, attention and the return of human thought

Lina’s view of AI is practical. AI has arrived, and education must decide what human capability should surround it.

Her strongest example comes from internal work with school leaders. She asked micro-school principals to create detailed manuals for how different parts of a school should operate, so another leader could step in without confusion. The early output was flat. When she used Claude to help produce a manual, the quality improved only after she fed the tool with philosophy, purpose, behaviour science and intended culture.

A morning gathering, in her view, is a system. It can set energy, build community, develop student leadership and shape the emotional tone of the day. AI can help document such a system when the human prompt carries the philosophy.

“So you still have to have the thinking even to prompt Claude.”

The AI age exposes the difference between shallow thinking and serious thinking faster. A weak prompt produces generic output. A strong prompt requires judgment, context, philosophy, ethics and intent. The tool extends the mind using it.

Schools that teach tool use without teaching the quality of thought behind tool use will mistake fluency for capability. In companies, universities and schools alike, AI will reward people who know how to frame problems, examine assumptions and decide what good looks like. The future will belong less to those who retrieve answers and more to those who shape the questions worth answering.

Attention is part of the same shift.

You’re not competing with another school. You’re competing with Netflix. You’re competing with video games.

Lina’s curriculum design takes attention seriously because children now live in attention markets. Platforms study the brain with commercial intensity. They understand hooks, pacing, reward, repetition and emotional momentum. Many classrooms still rely on authority and timetable discipline to hold attention.

During the interview, Lina opened a grade-three lesson plan on sound, music and film. The lesson moved through a Marvel clip, emotional response, music in cinema, composers, science, history, art, Spotify-style application design, group work and presentation. Videos were short. Questions arrived before attention dropped. Learning outcomes were mapped to board requirements and Dreamtime’s own developmental outcomes.

The purpose was instructional design informed by how the brain engages. The pressure point is real: the same brain science that supports engagement can support manipulation. Lina’s answer is purpose. Education should use the same understanding of the brain to create curiosity, depth and learning, while staying alert to the difference between engagement that builds agency and engagement that creates dependence.

Parents, certainty and the discipline of alignment

The parent is the most complicated stakeholder in education because the parent pays, while the child lives with the outcome.

Lina speaks about parent anxiety with unusual directness. Parents want certainty around children at the exact moment certainty is disappearing from the world. They want safety, opportunity, confidence, achievement and happiness, often without accepting the discomfort through which those qualities are built.

Her example is simple. A baby reaches for a toy, struggles and gets frustrated. A caregiver immediately places the toy in the child’s hand. The gesture looks like help. Developmentally, Lina sees the removal of effort, delay and agency.

The more certainty you’re trying to build around a child, the more fragile they become in a world that is uncertain.

For education companies, the dilemma is commercial. Parent reassurance sells faster than long-term child development. A school can please the buyer in the short term while weakening the beneficiary over time. Lina’s decision filter is blunt:

“Is this decision in the best long-term interest of the learner?”

The same filter appears in how she thinks about public image. Lina recalls being told that a magazine cover or award could be bought for several lakhs. Her response was refusal.

“If I succumb to that, I’m going against everything I’m preaching.”

In an education market crowded with awards, rankings and bought credibility, that refusal tests whether the adult institution can resist the same external validation it asks children to outgrow.

The most personal illustration of Lina’s emotional-regulation thesis came when she spoke about grief.

Her mother had died two months before the interview. Toward the end, after a final stroke, Lina began writing gratitude posts again. She had done the practice once before, during COVID, when she travelled to Australia amid uncertainty around her younger brother’s son and his diagnosis. In both periods, gratitude worked as attention training under emotional pressure.

With her mother, the practice allowed Lina to relive a life while staying steady enough to care. She would wake up and begin with what could still be held with gratitude: the ability to afford a nurse and attendant, the ability to coordinate care, the awareness that many caregivers carry far more physical burden without support.

That matters because Dreamtime treats emotional literacy as curriculum. Children are taught how emotion affects the brain, how music changes internal states, how gratitude shifts perception, how reframing can prevent the mind from getting stuck. Lina’s own life gives the argument texture because she practices under pressure what the curriculum asks children to learn early.

For schools, the lesson is significant. Emotional regulation cannot remain a weekly wellness period detached from the academic day. If children are expected to navigate uncertainty, failure, comparison, digital pressure and family anxiety, emotional literacy has to be woven into how learning happens.

Teacher identity and the proof of scale

When asked what should be fixed first for teachers, Lina chooses identity and respect.

The answer matters because teacher reform is often reduced to training or compensation. Both matter, yet Lina’s concern sits upstream. Teachers have been treated as content deliverers in a system built around syllabus completion and examination pressure. AI makes such a narrow role even less sufficient.

If content is abundant, the teacher’s value shifts toward interpretation, climate, guidance, motivation, emotional literacy and human development. A teacher has to understand attention, behaviour, technology, anxiety, collaboration and the individual child’s internal state. Lina’s own language reflects the shift. Her instructional designers are “curiosity and excitement architects.” Teachers are “cheerleaders.”

The education leader’s role also changes. Earlier principals mainly had to think about curriculum, operations and academic outcomes. The contemporary education leader has to understand neuroscience, behavioural science, technology, well-being, parent anxiety, culture and institutional economics. The sector has not fully priced that complexity.

Dreamtime’s own proof will come through evidence, scale and courage. Lina believes confidence, collaboration and engagement can be observed through behaviour: how often a child volunteers, how much talk time a child takes, how often leadership appears, whether collaboration is built into the day. Dashboards can help school leaders notice patterns traditional marks ignore.

Better evidence should make human development more legible without turning the child into another data object. Scale raises another test. Deep visibility into a child is easier in a micro-school than in a large system. The “Powered by” model is Lina’s attempt to bridge that tension by extending Dreamtime’s curriculum and operating logic through existing school infrastructure. Its success will depend on how well partner schools carry the practices, not only the content.

Dreamtime’s future will be decided less by the elegance of its philosophy and more by how consistently the philosophy survives operations.

The opportunity after access and quality

Lina’s path reflects an evolution in the question she is trying to answer.

Kangaroo Kids asked whether early education in India could move from rote preparation toward active, child-centred learning. Billabong High asked whether the philosophy could travel through a wider institutional network. Dreamtime asks whether education can develop inner capability at scale in a world where content is abundant, attention is contested and the old markers of achievement are losing predictive power.

The progression mirrors the education sector’s own shift. The first frontier was access. The second was quality. The third is human capability.

Access put children into school. Quality improved what happened there. Human capability asks whether schooling is preparing children to remain thoughtful, steady, ethical and adaptable in a world that no longer rewards old forms of preparation with the same reliability.

For Lina, the opportunity in education lies in that third frontier. It is visible in micro-schools that give teachers deeper knowledge of learners, AI tools that reduce repetitive work and allow leaders to think more strategically, curriculum that treats emotional regulation and media literacy as core learning, and partner models that help existing schools upgrade from within.

Around the world, education systems speak in future-ready language while operating through inherited structures. Parents say they want confidence, creativity and resilience, then reward signals that produce anxiety. Schools advertise holistic learning, then organise time around examinations. Technology companies promise transformation, then often deliver tools without pedagogy. Policymakers call for innovation while institutions remain governed by old metrics.

Lina’s work offers a tested argument, built from classrooms, parents, teachers, franchise lessons, technology experiments and institution-building, about where education may have to move next.

The school after answers begins with a different responsibility. Knowledge gains value when a child has the judgment, attention and character to use it well. Performance gains meaning when it grows from a stronger inner base. Technology becomes useful when the human being can decide what deserves to be asked, trusted and acted upon.

Lina Ashar’s second act is an attempt to build for the child the old system could not fully see: a child who can think when answers are easy, stay steady when attention is under pressure, and grow from an inner base strong enough to meet a future no school can script.