Not all of us need physics. We need to understand how people tick.

Twenty-five years in tech taught me one thing above all else. The future does not belong to the person who knows the most. It belongs to the person who understands people best.

I know that sounds like a motivational poster. Bear with me.

For most of my career, I was working on the vendor side of technology. My job was always about the future: the next innovation, what makes customers tick, how to help organisations get somewhere better faster. It taught me a great deal. I lived inside the question of what skills actually matter.

Then I became a mother, and the question got a lot more personal.

The physics problem

I want my children to do well in school. Of course I do. I want them to learn to read and write well, to be comfortable with numbers, to understand how the natural world works. These are not optional.

But somewhere along the way I started asking a harder question. Of everything we teach children, what will they actually use? Not in exams. In the life ahead of them.

Think about physics. Most of us never directly apply Newtonian mechanics after secondary school. We do not calculate forces. We do not solve for velocity. We use the world physics describes every single day, without thinking about it consciously. You do not need to have studied it to live inside it.

But consider what almost every one of us does every single day, in every job, in every relationship, in every moment of public life. We try to understand how another person sees the world. We navigate difference. We read a room. We figure out why someone we disagree with believes what they believe. We try to make ourselves understood to people who do not start from where we start.

That skill has no exam. It is barely in the curriculum. And yet it is the skill we use, every single day, for the rest of our lives.

What are kids actually being prepared for?

Schools are doing what schools were built to do. They are teaching reading, writing, and maths. They are doing that reasonably well. I have no argument with teachers. They are working in a system that was designed for a world that no longer quite exists.

That world needed workers who could follow instructions and apply known knowledge reliably. It was an excellent design for that purpose. The problem is that the world ahead of my children is nothing like that.

AI will handle enormous amounts of routine knowledge work. It already does. The question of what a child learns by heart matters less and less. The question of what a child can do with people, across difference, with curiosity intact, matters more and more.

When I look at the crises crossing every border right now, the thing I notice is not a shortage of information. There is more information than anyone can process. What I see is a shortage of the ability to genuinely understand how someone different from you sees the world. To hold their perspective in your mind without immediately collapsing it into your own.

That is not soft. That is not a nice-to-have. In a world where AI handles the routine and every hard problem crosses cultures, it is the skill that decides everything.

The gap no one is filling

Empathy is the word people use, and it is not wrong. But I think it sells the thing short. What I am describing is more specific. It is the capacity to imagine, in genuine detail, how a child growing up in Kenya or Korea or Colombia sees the world. What their family values. What they find funny. What they are afraid of. What a good life means where they are.

Not as a charity exercise. Not as tolerance training. As a skill that makes you better at nearly everything that matters. Better at working with people. Better at solving hard problems. Better at building things that actually serve the humans who will use them.

I sat with this question for a long time before I understood that it was not a parenting worry. It was a gap. A structural gap in the things we actually build for children to spend time with.

The apps and platforms my children came home to were very good at one thing. They were good at feeding each child more of what they already liked. Same kind of content, same kind of faces, same kind of world. Algorithmically comfortable. Quietly narrowing.

Nobody was building something that did the opposite. That took a child somewhere genuinely unfamiliar and helped them feel curious instead of afraid.

Why we built Unomundi

My co-founder Matt and I started building because the thing we wanted did not exist. Not as a business plan first. As two parents from two separate families, both staring at the same gap.

Unomundi is a cultural-discovery app where children aged 6 to 12 explore countries and cultures through stories, games, and conversations with Una, a warm AI guide. The name means one world.

The bet at the heart of it is simple. If you give a child a thousand encounters with how other people live, told in ways that feel like play rather than homework, you change how they see the world. Not by lecturing them about empathy. By building the habit of being curious about difference, early, before fear gets in first.

This is the skill I want for my children. The ability to meet something that looks strange, and instead of judging it, to wonder why it makes sense to someone else. That is not a small thing. It is a skill they will use every day for the rest of their lives.

It will not show up in their school reports. But I would bet on it more heavily than most things that will.

The turn I keep coming back to

Here is the thing: I could not unsee once I saw it. When AI can handle so much of the knowledge work, the specifically human skills become the whole point. Not the extra. Not the enrichment. The actual point.

Curiosity about people. The ability to understand across differences. The willingness to sit with something unfamiliar and stay interested rather than flinch. These are not soft skills. They are the skills that remain when everything substitutable has been substituted.

We do not all need to master physics. We do need to understand how other humans tick. That is not going to change. If anything, it is about to matter more than it ever has.

If that is the kind of thing you want your child to grow up practising, come and see what we have been building.

Sign up to test our beta now

FAQs

What skills will children actually need in the future?

Beyond literacy and numeracy, the skill most consistently needed across every job and relationship is understanding how people different from you see the world. When AI handles routine knowledge work, human curiosity and the ability to connect across difference become the decisive skills.

Why isn't empathy taught in schools?

Schools were designed for a world that needed workers who could reliably apply known knowledge. Understanding across cultures and difference was not the design goal. It is still largely absent from curricula even though it is one of the most used skills in adult life.

What is Unomundi?

Unomundi is a cultural-discovery app where children aged 6 to 12 explore countries and cultures through stories, games, and conversations with Una, a warm AI guide.