You may never have heard of Jimmy Donaldson, but if you have unsupervised children they almost certainly have. He’s a billionaire YouTuber who specialises in inane viral challenge videos with eye-popping prizes. He has 468 million subscribers. Easily-pleased children love him like they love cans of Monster. His alias is MrBeast which, if Dan Brown were writing an eschatological thriller, would seem a little too on the nose. But Donaldson has drawn fire from a constituency normally unbothered by his risible online capering: teachers.
Easily-pleased children love MrBeast like they love cans of Monster
Ironically it happened because of a recent viral interview clip where he railed against modern schooling with the confidence of a man who just watched half a TED talk at 3am. ‘Education is silly,’ he grumbled on the Good Guys podcast. ‘We need more hands-on learning…more modern tech.’ His rancour seemed to stem from the fact that he didn’t enjoy school himself, characterising it as all boring lectures and terrible books. He doesn’t specify which terrible books, but you get a sense of what trends with him when he suggests that Walter Isaacson’s books on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are two of his favourite. Ah, the canon.
MrBeast explains why the education system is completely broken
“Why are students today being taught the same way their parents were? Look at how much everything else has advanced. When I was in school the teacher would just stand there, read out of a book and write on a… pic.twitter.com/9Fjgf4EDNW
— Jack (@Jackkk) February 24, 2026
‘Why are students today being taught the same way their parents were?’ he complained. So, how should they be taught? The kind of short videos he likes: dynamic content, simple, punchy explanations, exciting pay-offs, and the kind of hi-energy delivery associated with a mariachi band on cocaine. Edits so sudden and vertiginous they should come with a warning for viewers affected by strobe lights.
He’s convinced that were school more like that, students would retain information more, more efficiently, and have more time for other things. ‘I’m a visual learner,’ he says as innocently and earnestly as someone who also believes that we only use ten per cent of our brains. ‘I retain information three times more effectively when I see it.’
Which is great apart from the fact that he isn’t, and Learning Styles is a completely discredited theory of learning that not only has no evidence base to back it up, but never did. Because everything we know about learning suggest that it is often hard work, and no amount of lipstick can change that. This is going to shock you, but MrBeast is not an expert on pedagogy.
But why should he be? I don’t know how to monetise other people’s online humiliation at an industrial scale, so I suppose we all have our lanes. But we know a good deal about how we learn, and teach, and little of it maps onto MrBeast’s views, which probably represents a lot of people. We know that learning requires effort (desirable difficulties), which is often hard. It needs repetition and review (retrieval practice). It needs scaffolded, structured incremental explanations (cognitive load theory). It needs high-quality feedback (formative assessment). Donaldson is like a man walking into an operating theatre and telling the doctors, ‘Why don’t you just make the patient better?’
Interestingly, Donaldson’s career probably helps us understand his views on pedagogy. He claims he spent years learning why videos went viral, like some kind of digital Jedi autodidact (which has real ‘While you were out partying…I studied the blade’ energy). He’s also candid about why some videos catch fire: they usually contain a simple challenge, an easily understood concept, in a finite timeframe. The challenges are amusing or novel. They lean heavily on extreme, variable reward loops (who will win? What’s the next twist?) which is very BF Skinner. The stakes are high; the drama is human. There is almost no dead air in which to get bored; every edit and cut is aimed at pace, like a TikTok video. His business model is obsessed with the algorithm and how it works, what gets clicks, what gets duration etc, and then optimises for that. Let’s be frank: they are not designed for an audience of rocket scientists.
Learning cannot be replicated by clamorous, dazzling videos soaked in money and enthusiasm
But this is nothing like learning; this is distraction. Learning requires struggle. It doesn’t provide the same, metronomic dopamine hit you get from doomscrolling people you hate getting dunked, or grazing videos about labradors making poor choices. The pleasure, the absolutely delicious satisfaction of learning is something grown and harvested over time, not instantly. Reading Ulysses or The Tempest may not have the same sugar rush as playing Angry Birds or Brawl Stars, but they are infinitely more enriching. The former changes you as a person; the latter plugs you into a Matrix where your attention is the commodity and you are the product.
In other words, learning cannot be replicated by clamorous, dazzling videos soaked in money and enthusiasm. The information they do provide rushes through your awareness like a disagreeable curry. You engage with them with as much depth and permanence as a grass seed growing on the runway of Heathrow. There are few short cuts in genuine learning. You cannot teach a baby to be musical by playing Mozart in the womb. You cannot learn a language subliminally through recordings as you sleep. You cannot trick yourself into learning. The brain is a stubborn sack of porridge with no cheat codes.
These are the luxury beliefs of a billionaire who is immunised from reality by a force field made of money. The rest of the world’s children need to know a little science, history, art, literature, and so on, in order to navigate not only their own lives but their lives in a world unattended by celebrity status or privilege.
So, here’s my extreme challenge for Donaldson: make a video called I taught myself to fly a helicopter using videos and then tried to fly one over the Grand Canyon, and see how secure he feels the learning is. Hit like and subscribe!
