In 1994, a small, upstart Irish airline had been struggling to compete with the powerful duopoly of British Airways and Aer Lingus on routes between the United Kingdom and Ireland for ten years. It had a small fleet of elderly planes and growing debts. It had successfully drawn passengers away from the larger carriers by undercutting their prices, but its operating costs were outstripping its revenues. Its name was Ryanair.1

Enter entrepreneur Michael O’Leary. Taking inspiration from the successful U.S. budget airline Southwest, he transformed the small company, implementing an approach not seen before in Europe: He slashed Ryanair’s operating costs by removing all the “frills”—business-class cabins, complimentary food and drinks, inflight magazines—effectively turning its planes into flying commuter buses. He also standardized the company’s fleet on a single aircraft type, massively cutting maintenance and training costs.2

Since then, O’Leary has grown Ryanair into Europe’s largest airline. Between March 2025 and March 2026, it carried 208.4 million passengers on 647 aircraft to more than 200 destinations, generating an eyewatering profit of €2.26 billion.3 Its remarkable success has inspired others, with Europe’s low-cost carriers (primarily Ryanair, EasyJet, and WizzAir) now accounting for around 40 percent of all flights on the continent.4

Ryanair has achieved all this while slashing passenger fares to some of the lowest available anywhere in the world. Its prices typically start around €14.99 ($17.36) for a one-way ticket and go as low as €5 during sales.5 This is far cheaper than the fares that O’Leary’s inspiration, Southwest, offers on U.S. domestic flights, which typically start around $59.6 Newer U.S. budget carriers have taken inspiration from Ryanair, including Frontier and the recently collapsed Spirit Airlines, but none has been able to fully replicate its ultra-low-cost model in the U.S. market.

O’Leary is often asked whether Ryanair has any interest in expanding into the U.S. domestic market or other markets such as transatlantic routes, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. His recent answer to this question at the 2026 Norges Bank Investment Conference shines a light on why U.S. budget airlines have struggled to replicate his success in the American market:

We work very well in Europe because we have pretty much incompetent competition in Europe, like Lufthansa, Air France/KLM . . . The U.S. airlines are a bit more aggressive; they are much stronger and much more well-embedded. . . .

The only good thing about Europe is it is a deregulated market for air travel. So, thankfully I get very little government interference. The minute I go outside of Europe, to the Middle East, to Asia, to the U.S., it is hugely government regulated. [Air travel in] the States is already reasonably well-run, although it’s quite expensive. [Operating there] wouldn’t work, and it would undermine Ryanair.7

O’Leary deserves kudos for pointing to government interference as the key barrier to improving the quality of air travel around the world. In the United States, regulations have caused the high fares that would make Ryanair’s model unviable and draw the company’s resources away from Europe, whereas in Europe, past and present government control of airlines has created a market in which challengers can outcompete them easily, as O’Leary says:

[European national airlines] are all useless. Government-owned, heavily regulated, hugely government-subsidized. All the [legacy carriers] are running around at the moment trying to get bailouts. . . . It’s not a hypercompetitive industry. . . . So, all I have to be is modestly competitive to be better than the rest of the competition in Europe, but that’s not setting the bar very high.8

Imagine the improvements that would be possible in a market that combined the best of both worlds—the better management of established U.S. airlines with the less-regulated market of Europe. O’Leary has no time for the way governments hamper business and restrict freedom, and he’s not afraid to make his derision public. Indeed, O’Leary credits his willingness to speak and act in accordance with his honest views as a factor in Ryanair’s success:

The advantage of not being overly sensitive about my reputation or our image or being culturally popular is that we’re ruthlessly low cost, and that gives us huge freedom to chase those kinds of cost-saving measures or to reinvent the way we drive the airlines, and then ultimately all the other morons will follow us along. The American airlines have just discovered charging for bags 15–20 years after we started doing it. Now they’re trying to do it as a way of gaining revenue whereas we did it not as a way of generating revenue but as a way of eliminating cost.9

Michael O’Leary deserves credit for his unabashed honesty in calling out government regulations for the way they constrain business and make us all worse off. His clarity on this issue, his willingness to say what he thinks without concern for others’ reactions, and his integrity in running his business in line with his ideas should be an inspiration to all.

"The name is wrong. It's not artificial intelligence. It's not intelligence. Intelligence would involve consciousness. Well, if it's a machine, it's not conscious.

"I think people have lost the plot. They've lost it in the power of computing. The thing is that computers have got so powerful that they've lost the thread of what they're doing. But I think consciousness is something different. It's not computational. 

"People are so hypnotised. The trouble is that AI is a bad term. It means 'artificial intelligence.' Now intelligence in my view is conscious. That's what intelligence is about. .. call it Artificial Cleverness. How about that: AC, not AI. 

"You can see the difference when you have mathematics students. Some of them understand what they're doing. Some are just clever. They can repeat what they've learned. They know how to do it very cleverly. They can calculate very well, but they don't necessarily understand what they're doing."

~ physicist Roger Penrose from a recent interview 

Debates over the purpose of education rarely stay rooted in educational principles. Researchers and publications, The Daily Economy included, often scrutinize test results, fight over funding formulas, blame this faction or the other, or argue there is too much or too little something in the classroom. All those questions matter. They also detract from a more fundamental one, especially in this American anniversary year.

What kind of public education did the American Founders believe a free republic required?

Unconventional Education and America’s Founding, edited by Nasiyah Isra-Ul at the Foundation for Economic Education, arrives at an opportune moment because it approaches that question historically, instead of politically. Putting aside whether homeschoolers should get tax credits or if public charters improve math scores, the book asks what an educated public meant to at least a few architects of the American experiment. 

True to its purpose, the text is available free of charge for individual enlightenment.

Contributed chapters are devoted to individual founding figures, with an emphasis on the educational development — very decidedly not the schooling — of John Adams, James Forten, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Mercy Otis Warren, Benjamin Banneker, and Abigail Adams and her children.

Educating the Founding Generation 

Among these narratives of pre-industrial learners, selection and survivorship bias are impossible to ignore. Their learning was sought and chosen, rather than required or received. A majority of Americans at the time did not have the luxury of even an eighth-grade education. We cannot entirely credit Alexander Hamilton’s reading about self-determination, then, with his willingness to chart his own course — he was already a rare young man to have scrounged for books and devoured those lofty ideas in the first place. And Hamilton (essay by Denise Lever), as an orphan immigrant to New York, had a very different education than Washington and Jefferson (essays by Nasiyah Isra-Ul and Angel Sobrino). Their leisure to study Locke and Plutarch was, as customary for men of their station, purchased with inherited wealth of land and human beings. In the libraries afforded them by productive plantations, they read histories of failed states and studied enduring philosophies of human flourishing, and cooked up a new nation.

John Adams (essay by Kelsy Achtenberg) frustrated his father by avoiding his studies and the structure of formal schooling. He begged to be apprenticed to a farmer before discovering a love of antiquity. His independent obsession with Greece not only had him wrestling with big concepts of judgment, virtue, and personal growth, but reflecting on the characteristics of stable, balanced, peaceful governments. A schoolmaster fueled this passion, but the very action of having sculpted and chosen his education, rather than passively receiving it, shaped the character of a man who would persuade so many others to shoulder the risk and responsibilities of independence. 

A clear pattern emerges through these historical biographies. Education in the colonial period was conducted close to home. Families taught children. Churches operated schools. Private academies flourished. Young people learned trades through apprenticeships, including strict and dangerous ones. Reading societies, tutors, self-directed study, and local associations all contributed to a young person’s education. Many students attended a patchwork of schools as their needs changed. Children studied the bible, the almanac, the atlas, and the apothecary. No single institution claimed exclusive responsibility for producing good citizens.

That arrangement likely looks haphazard to the modern reader. But it reflects the same Enlightenment individuality and distrust of central authority that sculpted our constitutional order. The best protection against public manipulation, in other words, is competing institutions and discourse communities. Educational pluralism was considered ordinary to the Founders, not exceptional.

Education Is Much Bigger Than Schooling 

No wonder parents squabble at school board meetings: they are arguing for control over which voices will play in their own children’s heads for decades to come. But we only get to this point if we choose to surrender so much education to government schools, and limit what counts as “education” to what government schools choose to measure. For much of American history, education pursued many ends at once: literacy, craftsmanship, moral formation, natural sciences, civic responsibility, practical judgment, and intellectual curiosity. Standardization gradually narrowed those aims into measurable outputs. And even those outputs haven’t measured up.

Even if a student is willing to learn, and someone is available to teach him, he may not absorb even half of what is offered for his consumption. If our current public educational setting is proof of anything, it is that sitting in a room with a qualified teacher for 20,000 hours is no practical guarantee of literacy, much less preparation for citizenship. And preparation for citizenship is allegedly the purpose of subsidized education. 

Perhaps Jefferson best captures what we imagine the American public school system to provide. The self-taught genius wanted to offer the same advantages to all, for all: 

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. . . . An amendment of our constitution must here come in aid of public education. The influence over government must be shared among all the people. 

If Unconventional Education has a weakness, it may be the relative rarity of quotes from the primary sources whose stories it tells. As editor of The Daily Economy, I routinely counsel writers to reduce block quotes, which readers tend to gloss over (Did you skip the quoted paragraph just above this one? Be honest). But the depth of original sources matters. 

The rich personal letters, journals, and public writings of the featured autodidacts, no doubt consulted by the contributing authors, are not shared with readers. John Adams wrote “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people,” and precious few of Phillis Wheatley’s words are familiar to us. In bringing us the stories of their exceptional educations, the book’s contributors may overestimate the reader’s familiarity with the influence and contributions of its subjects as adults.

School Choice Was the Default

Modern debates often treat educational pluralism, as a recent or radical policy idea. Unconventional Education clearly shows it is neither. America’s educational diversity, the liberty to learn, preceded the republic itself, and in fact contributed to its founding principles. The Constitution, with its limits on government, emerged from a society already accustomed to solving educational challenges through families, private initiatives, local institutions, and voluntary cooperation.

The question Unconventional Education asks us to consider reaches beyond vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling, or education savings accounts. It asks more, even, than whether today’s schools are succeeding or failing to prepare a populace to govern itself. And it asks virtually nothing of the government. 

Instead, the model of education presented as formative for the American character is a responsibility that lies in each of us. We can be the conduit for civic virtues, instead of asking overworked schoolteachers to hold that sacred duty for all of us. We are too quick to shift responsibility for students’ education onto government schools. Unconventional Education should kindle many ideas of how to engage with the development of young people around us.

We can slow down, bend down, and explain our tools to the little boy from across the road when he wanders into the garage. Volunteer at Junior Achievement or an after-school club or your niece’s community theater. Coach. Mentor. Reclaim pride in the knowledge transfer, skills practice, and moral formation of the next generation, who, after all, will guide the future.

The education of our youth is far too big, and too important, a task to be left to a black box full of harried strangers on the other end of a bus ride. But the core failure, Unconventional Education argues, is how much we’ve relied on schools to do. Perhaps because most parents, too, are products of that system that cultivates learned helplessness and intellectual dependency, we feel unequal to the task of teaching our own. What we learned, then, is the one thing the Founding generation would have abhorred most: a cocoon of simple ignorance, civil indifference, and the illusion of consent.

There is no one right way to educate young people. But when individuals retain meaningful authority over their choices, as this book’s many examples show us, both the process and the contents of that study serve as practice for responsible, informed citizenship. Independent thinking, by nature, can’t be force-fed. It must be earned.

HELL — The Prince of Darkness admitted he may have made a big mistake, as Satan reportedly wondered if he had gone too far when he orchestrated the modern feminist movement.

MEDINA, OH — In a terribly unlucky break, local sixth-grader Mackenzie Warner completely flunked her geography test after President Trump renamed everything right in the middle of the exam.

SACRAMENTO, CA — After months of speculation about Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei's health, suspicions of his demise arose once more after his name was discovered on the California voter rolls.