The Future of Education, and the Bank That Does Not Yet Exist
By Shlomi Selim "Sally" Benbasat, Editor in Chief column. Prepared 2 September 2026. Source: Salvator Mundi Café No. 2, Sunday 30 August 2026.
The Future of Education, and the Bank That Does Not Yet Exist
Notes from the second Salvator Mundi Café, where a two hour conversation about learning ended somewhere none of us expected.
We started the Salvator Mundi Café for a simple reason. Our members meet at conferences, on panels, in boardrooms, in places where everyone is performing. We wanted a place where nobody performs. Every Sunday at 15:00 CET we open a room, someone from our community talks about what they know, and the rest of us interrupt them. That is the whole format. Meet, share, connect.
Two Sundays in, it is working better than I expected.
This past Sunday we hosted Prof. Dr. Maurits van Rooijen, Chairman of our Global Council for Education Transformation and Chief Academic Officer of Global University Systems, a group of some thirty five institutions with around 150,000 students on campus. We asked him for twenty minutes on the future of education. He gave us two hours, and I would have taken a third.
He refused to predict
The first thing he did was decline the question.
"I'm not here in half an hour to predict the future," he said. The useful question is not what education will look like. It is what future we want, and then, working backwards, what education has to do to help build it.
That reframing carried the whole afternoon, and it produced the line I have not stopped thinking about since. Artificial intelligence, he argued, is a car. It is impressive to know how fast it goes and what engine sits under the bonnet. But the only question that matters is where you want to drive it. "If we are just driving without thinking, we are not getting anywhere. In fact, we probably most likely get into an accident."
He was equally firm on what AI is not. "AI is not causing anything. AI is only a catalyst." It accelerates and amplifies what was already happening. It does not set the direction. That remains, uncomfortably, our job.
What worries him is not the technology. It is three things the technology makes easier: amplifying prejudice, serving as an instrument of control, and producing mental laziness. On the last he was blunt. You get the answer, so you stop thinking. He extended his own analogy without mercy: if the car drives you everywhere, you stop walking, and something comparable happens to a brain that never has to work.
His answer is not to keep AI out of the classroom. He compared that to schools trying to ban calculators. His answer is that education has to stop transferring knowledge and start teaching people how to learn, how to ask the right question, and how to fail. He was serious about the last one. Education is built around dread of the big F, when learning to fail well is precisely what produces people who can innovate.
Where the room pushed back
One of the most interesting parts was not just the talk. It was what happened after it.
Prof. Mirsad Hadžikadić, our Country President for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a professor at UNC Charlotte and the founding director of its Complex Systems Institute, drew on thirty years of teaching in the United States to say he is more worried than the speaker. He has watched education redefined almost entirely to supply industry with what it needs, and university presidents turn from public intellectuals into fundraisers. His closing line deserves to be quoted widely: "The education cannot be superb and the society is rotten. It is a reflection of what we value."
Michal Zeevi-Bender, founder of Beyon-D Innovations in Israel, asked the question the AI industry keeps avoiding. Machine learning learns from whoever feeds it, so the majority shapes the model. What happens when the majority is not harmonious? Prof. van Rooijen agreed this is close to a taboo topic, and said he was glad the Vatican had spoken on it, because reassurance of the "don't worry, it will all be fine" variety makes him nervous.
Mary Arnal, a Board Member of our Global Council for Education Transformation, founder of Mary Arnal Education and for many years an international headmistress in the United Kingdom independent sector, now building an affordable university from scratch in Lahore, brought everyone back to earth. Education is for young people. It is their future, not our theory. She also insisted on something that too many strategy documents omit: mental health and wellbeing have to be looked after from kindergarten to tertiary level, because social media has changed what a childhood is.
Dr. Björn Söderberg, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, named a group nobody is serving: people over thirty five, including decision makers, who need somewhere to learn and argue with no right or wrong answer. He is right, and I would add that the Café is an accidental prototype of exactly that.
What I said, and why
For my own part, as Sally S. Benbasat, COO and Chief Editor of Salvator Mundi Global, I made one argument on the call that I want to repeat here, because I think it is underrated.
Every assumption we hold about education rests on a lifespan. We educate people for roughly two decades, then expect four decades of return. Human trials to extend healthy lifespan are already running. If biological age becomes something we can move, that whole structure collapses, and not gently. When I studied in New York I had a professor who changed career every twenty years, from the military, to an executive role at IBM, to teaching human resources. Three completely different educations in one life. That was once remarkable. It is about to become normal.
Meanwhile the generation below us has already voted. Ask a teenager today what they want to be and a striking number say influencer. I built an influencer marketing company with 250,000 people on it, and I watched a sector worth around five million euro in 2009 become a market of roughly thirty billion dollars. In that world the word education barely applies. Nobody asks for a diploma.
I see the same indifference to accreditation everywhere. Young people consume in ten minute batches, not two hour lectures. They are not against learning. They are against packaging. And I will admit my own bias: I have hired hundreds of people across many companies, and I do not look at their education. I look for intelligence, for problem solving, for whether they know how to ask a question. Everything else can be taught.
So I asked Prof. van Rooijen the question underneath all of this. Should education be free?
His answer was better than a yes. There is no such thing as free, he said. The money comes from taxpayers, alumni or employers, and even the free lecture on the internet has a business model behind it. Time is an investment too. The honest goal is not free. It is affordable. And he was visibly uncomfortable with universities competing on campuses and housing until fees become a debt that follows a graduate for life.
The bank that does not yet exist
Which brings me to the reason I am writing this column rather than simply posting the video.
Mario Diel, our Chairman and Founder, put a proposal on the table. He had been turning over the same problem from the other end. A handful of technology companies already shape what the world sees. If education concentrates the same way, then whoever holds the money does not merely own the universities. They decide what a generation is taught. And at the same time education is drifting into a luxury product, available to young people with wealthy parents, while the majority who want it most live where the money is not.
His idea: a global education bank.
There is no bank in the world dedicated purely to education. Development banks touch it. Foundations fund pieces of it. Philanthropy does extraordinary work, one scholarship at a time. But there is no institution that brings philanthropists, investors and governments into a single balance sheet as contributors and shareholders, lends to young people who have ability and no money, and replenishes itself as those graduates earn and repay.
Prof. van Rooijen liked the concept and raised the sharpest objection to it, which is why it is worth taking seriously. Giving, he said, is not rational. In his experience it is ninety five percent emotion. He told us about an alumnus who wrote a seven figure cheque and then wept at the unveiling of a small brass plaque, because he had not been able to afford to study there and had only been admitted when a president took a liking to him. A bank does not naturally hold that kind of feeling. Any structure we build has to.
Salvator Mundi Global intends to develop this concept. That is the sentence I want on the record. We exist so that conversations end in something, and this one should.
If you are a philanthropist, an investor, a development finance institution, a foundation or a government that has looked at this problem and found no vehicle to work through, we would like to hear from you. Write to us at governance@salvatormundiglobal.com.
Watch the conversation
The full two hours are on Salvator Mundi Global TV. It is worth your time, and if it is, please like the video and subscribe. The channel is new.
Prof. van Rooijen ended by saying that alongside just in time, utilitarian education there is another side we forget, which is that education is fun, and that he would like it to become "more like a fitness club for the mind."
For two hours on a Sunday afternoon, it was exactly that.
The Salvator Mundi Café meets every Sunday at 15:00 CET.
About the Author
Shlomi Selim "Sally" Benbasat
Editor in Chief, Salvator Mundi Times
Serial entrepreneur and investor in B2B e-commerce, carbon markets and emissions reduction, chemicals and raw materials trading, EPC, technology, telecommunications, digital media and real estate, with ventures built and exited across Europe, LATAM, the Middle East and Asia.
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