September 10 is Teacher’s Day in China, officially established in 1985 as the country’s first national Teacher’s Day after the founding of the People’s Republic. The date was chosen to fall soon after the start of the school year, underscoring respect for teachers at the very beginning of students’ learning journey.
In China, teachers have enjoyed high prestige since ancient times, because education has always been deeply valued in Chinese culture. The same is true in America, where education is also held in high regard. Here, we often see wealthy individuals pour enormous sums into founding schools that reflect their ideals—only for many of these institutions to vanish almost as quickly as they appear.
Take a few recent examples. In 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative opened The Primary School with the mission to “build a more inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.” But after nine years, the school is closing.
Kanye West launched Donda Academy in 2022, a private Christian school in California named after his late mother, blending academics, faith, and artistic expression. It shut down within a year.
And in Manhattan, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann—wife of WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann—founded WeGrow in 2018, promising a holistic, entrepreneurial education infused with yoga, mindfulness, languages, and farming. When WeWork collapsed, WeGrow closed its doors in 2020.
From stories like these, one might assume that money is the key to building great schools. Of course, resources matter. But money is only part of the story.
Education is, at its core, like parenting: it is the work of caring and nurturing human beings. And humans exist not in isolation but in relationship. Karl Marx captured this truth when he wrote in 1845, “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”
When you think about education through the lens of relationships, everything looks different. A teacher who truly cares about a student doesn’t need a rulebook or KPI to tell them what to do—they will naturally find ways to help. Good relationships, like engines, generate their own energy. They motivate people to care for real human beings.
There is no such thing as purely self-motivation. At school, it comes from the bond between teachers and students; at home, from the ties between parents and children. Ultimately, our drive grows out of the people around us and the quality of our relationships—those we teach, those who teach us, those who nurture us, and those we love. These relationships sustain us not only in learning but throughout our lives.