Brothers Navid and Nadeem Nathoo are on a quest to create “unicorn people.” That is, young people who want to learn about nanotechnology, blockchain, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and more, and who welcome questions with no possible solutions. “We want to get kids comfortable with ambiguity,” said Navid. And so, seven years ago, the Nathoos created The Knowledge Society, a 10-month-long program to expose youth to new technologies and new (if unsolvable) business problems.

TKS is one in an exploding category of alternative primary and high schools, labs, fellowships and intensive summer programs designed to groom future innovators. The overarching ethos of these alt schools—which range in tuition as well as available scholarships and financial support—is to learn by doing. “No one is going to tell you what to do,” said parent Lina Yee, whose sons attend Design Tech High School, or D.Tech, located on Oracle’s corporate campus in Redwood City, Calif. The objective at schools and programs like these is less about learning the basics of code or the foundations of an enduring business than it is about stoking problem solving, promoting failure and iteration, and pushing the value of agency over conformance.