A new private school opening this fall in Oklahoma has no classroom teachers at all. Instead, students work through personalized software for two hours a day and spend the rest of their time on life-skills workshops, guest speakers, and small-group coaching, all for a tuition price that rivals many traditional private schools. It’s an extreme version of a question more families are starting to ask: how much of a school’s value comes from its content, and how much comes from the adult standing in front of the room?

Supporters of this model point to genuine advantages. Software can adapt instantly to a student who is ahead or behind, something a single teacher managing thirty kids can rarely do in real time. Removing lecture time can also free up hours for the kind of mentorship and real-world skill building that traditional schools often struggle to fit into the day.

The tradeoffs are just as real, though. Childhood development research consistently points to unstructured peer interaction and consistent adult relationships as central to how kids build social and emotional skills, not just academic ones. A model built around independent screen time for a large part of the day places a lot of weight on the coaching and community-building happening around it actually being strong, not just marketed well.

If you’re considering a school like this, the questions worth asking go beyond the technology. Ask how much daily interaction your child will have with the same trusted adult, how conflicts between students get handled, and what a typical Tuesday actually looks like hour by hour. The price tag tells you what the school costs. Only those details tell you what your child’s days will actually feel like.