Ana Lorena Fabrega's Advice on Writing: What's Wrong with Writing Education

Ana Lorena Fabrega - known as Ms. Fab - taught elementary school in New York, Boston, and Panama for five years before leaving the classroom. She is the author of The Learning Game: Teaching Kids to Think for Themselves, Embrace Challenge, and Love Learning. She writes to over 200,000 readers about alternative education. She is Chief Evangelist at Synthesis, a learning platform that grew from a school co-founded at SpaceX. She runs the Writing Superpower program for kids.

Her advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast, her Write of Passage profile, and her own writing on education reform.

School Kills Writing

Fabrega's diagnosis is blunt. In most schools, children learn an outdated, ineffective method of writing. The five-paragraph essay. The thesis statement drilled before students have anything worth arguing. Grammar rules enforced before students have anything worth saying. Grades attached to every draft. Red ink on every page.

The result: children who associate writing with punishment. Writing becomes the thing you do when a teacher makes you. It is graded, corrected, returned, and dreaded. By the time students reach college, many of them cannot write a clear paragraph - not because they lack intelligence, but because every natural impulse toward expression was systematically extinguished.

This connects directly to what Steven Pinker calls the curse of knowledge in education. Teachers who have internalized grammar rules cannot remember what it was like to not know them. They teach rules before purpose, mechanics before meaning, structure before thought. The student learns to follow the template. The student does not learn to think.

Remove the Trivial, Keep the Play

Fabrega's approach removes "grades, tests, homework, strict rules and mechanics" and prioritizes the parts of writing that already feel like play to kids. What remains: cultivating ideas, distilling them into writing, and spreading them in meaningful ways.

This is not permissiveness. It is prioritization. A child who has something to say and a desire to say it will learn grammar when grammar becomes useful. A child who has been drilled on comma placement before having anything to communicate will learn that writing is a chore.

Her Writing Superpower program teaches children to write through a "modern, active, and collaborative" method. Kids explore personal curiosities. They investigate the world. They refine ideas through a fun and simple editing system. The editing develops organically alongside the creative expression rather than preceding it.

In her final year of teaching, Fabrega ignored test prep entirely. She cultivated her students' innate curiosity instead. The result: her students outperformed their peers on standardized tests. The curiosity-driven approach produced better measurable outcomes than the measurement-driven approach. The irony is precise.

Writing Is Thinking

Fabrega enrolled in David Perell's Write of Passage course in November 2019. She almost did not. She booked the course, asked for a refund because she was convinced she was not a writer, and only stayed because her husband convinced her to try. The biggest lesson was how to unlearn - how to write in a way she had never been taught.

The transformation was not about learning new writing techniques. It was about discovering that writing is thinking made visible. John Warner, author of Why They Can't Write, puts it directly: "Writing is thinking, and I have yet to meet a writer who thinks in sentences." The idea that you must master sentences before you start writing is a lie. The hardest thing is getting ideas across. Everything else follows.

In her own classroom, Fabrega discovered this accidentally. She created a problem notebook: when kids came back from recess upset about fights or conflicts, they had five minutes to write about it on a blank page. No name required. If they wanted her to read it, they left it on her desk; otherwise they just turned the page. What she found: for many kids, the urgent thing they needed to talk about simply went away after writing about it. The act of putting words on paper was therapeutic in itself. The tantrum dissolved. The follow-up was unnecessary.

Her husband Fernando demonstrated the same principle in their marriage. Fabrega talks fast, interrupts because she is excited, dominates conversations. Fernando started writing her letters. Not because anything was wrong - just because the written form gave him space to articulate what he could not get across in verbal sparring. It transformed their communication. Writing was not a school subject. It was a way to be known.

Mental Models for Kids

Fabrega's broader educational philosophy centers on mental models - frameworks for thinking that transfer across domains. First-principles thinking. Inversion. Second-order effects. She teaches these to children, not through abstract instruction, but through stories, games, and hands-on projects.

Writing is the mental model that contains all other mental models. When a child writes about why a bridge collapsed, they are practicing causal reasoning. When they write about what would happen if gravity reversed, they are practicing counterfactual thinking. When they write a letter to someone they disagree with, they are practicing perspective-taking. The writing is not separate from the thinking. The writing is the thinking.

The pedagogy of joy: strong attention to relationships, freedom within limits to follow interests and passions, collaboration with peers, playful experimentation. Children work on projects they care about. The projects require writing. The writing improves because it serves a purpose the child chose.

Find Your Edge Through Cross-Pollination

When Fabrega started writing online, every idea she had already existed somewhere. Some teacher, some educator, somewhere in the world had written an article or a book or a sloppy blog post about the same thing. So she stopped reading books about education. She had learned her fair share. She started reading about finance, business, poker, mental models - things that had nothing to do with her subject. Because education was always in the back of her mind, she constantly found connections: this concept from sports applied to how kids learn, that principle from economics illuminated classroom dynamics.

The cross-pollination gave her writing an angle nobody else had. She was weaving in concepts from gaming, psychology, and the sports world, then connecting them to the experience of growing up in schools. It became interesting precisely because the inputs were unexpected. Her edge was not that she knew more about education than anyone else. It was that she brought in material from everywhere else.

She also stopped using big jargon. English is not her first language. She had been imitating academics with SAT words she did not even fully understand. When she switched to writing the way she spoke to her students - simple, clear, accessible - people responded. The reader felt valued rather than talked down to. Her visual instinct helped too: every idea got paired with an illustration, every chapter ended with something practical. The book was designed to be given as a gift - which it was, repeatedly.

Seven Principles to Unlearn

On the How I Write podcast, Fabrega shares seven writing principles that school teaches and that adults must unlearn to write well again. The core thread: school writing optimizes for compliance, not communication. It teaches you to write for a teacher with a rubric, not for a reader with curiosity.

The unlearning is harder than the learning. Adults carry the five-paragraph essay in their bones. They open with a thesis statement. They use transition words because they were told to. They conclude by restating the introduction. These habits do not serve the reader. They serve the rubric. And the rubric is gone.

Writing education should begin where curiosity begins: with a question the student genuinely wants to answer. Not with a format. Not with a thesis. Not with a rule. With a question.

Key Takeaways

• School writing programs teach compliance, not communication. The five-paragraph essay and the red-ink rubric extinguish natural curiosity.
• Remove grades, tests, and strict rules from early writing. Let the play return. Mechanics follow purpose.
• Writing is thinking. The clarity it produces is the primary reward. The audience is secondary.
• Teach mental models through writing. Causal reasoning, counterfactual thinking, perspective-taking - all live inside the act of writing.
• Find your edge and stay there. Specificity attracts the right audience faster than breadth.
• Unlearn school writing before you can write well as an adult. The rubric is gone. Write for a reader.

Fabrega proves that the best writing education starts by undoing the damage of the worst writing education. Athens can help you refine prose once you have something to say, but only genuine curiosity about the world can supply the something.

This post draws from Fabrega's appearance on How I Write, her Write of Passage profile, and her Writing Superpower program. For more on why clear writing requires clear thinking, see Steven Pinker's writing advice.