An invitation to founding membership in North 37 Academy

To the seafarers who teach each other between watches, and to the teachers, academies and schools who have spent their careers getting mariners ready for the sea,

This letter is for both of you, because I think you have been doing the same job from opposite ends of the gangway.

A small irony to start

This month, the man who runs SpaceX posted that next year he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America, with no details yet on how [1][2]. Meanwhile, the federal government has opened Trump Accounts for children, with a one-time $1,000 contribution for eligible kids born from 2025 through 2028, and Robinhood Securities listed by the IRS as the brokerage provider [3][4]. Rockets and brokerages are handing the next generation a stake in the future.

And here I am, a working second mate and barge captain — responsible for the barge’s stability at sea, writing from that room underway — offering a school that starts at twenty dollars a month and a promise to show you exactly where every one of those dollars goes. My long-range plan for bringing the maritime academies together is to rent a cruise ship: the one kind of vessel built so that nobody aboard has to stand a watch, learn a light, or plot a fix. I want to fill it with people whose whole lives are about watches, lights and fixes, and let them argue about education until the buffet closes.

I know how that sounds. I also know that the trade has never been short of free knowledge. What it is short of is a way through the gate. Education is free; the tools to get the credential often are not. That’s the bottleneck. A school that costs almost nothing, aimed at a bottleneck that can cost a career, is the kind of unreasonable idea I want to try.

To the seafarers: you are already the faculty

You already run the oldest school on the water. Every time an able seaman shows a new deckhand how a line comes off a bitt, every time an engineer explains a system to the oiler who asked, a lesson happens that no classroom can schedule. Most of it goes unrecorded, and most of it walks off the boat at crew change.

North 37 Academy is built to catch that knowledge and put it to work. It is a philosophy school, because a mariner has to think clearly. It is a navigation school, because that is our craft. And it is an AI and rocket-tech school, because the tools of navigation have always been the frontier tools of their age, from the astrolabe to the chronometer to satellite positioning.

The curriculum is free. Members study together, at sea and ashore, and the membership fee covers the administration and the structure that keeps you on track for a rigorous exam you may end up sitting far from any classroom. The aim is an education that lines up with the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW), with as much of the learning and assessment as possible done aboard the vessel, the way it once was [5]. Our materials are still being reviewed against those requirements, and nothing here replaces an approved course or a Coast Guard credential.

Founding membership is open to seafarers and to new mariners just stepping aboard. It starts at $20 a month. What you get is a crew to study with, a path to follow, and a voice in how the school is built.

To the educators: meet us halfway across the water

Now to the second half of this invitation, and it is not a footnote.

If you teach at a maritime academy, a community college, a high school with a marine program, or you simply care about how mariners learn, I am asking for something different from you. I am not asking you to give up your classroom. I am asking you to extend it.

Researchers have been telling us for decades what mariners know in their bones. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger described learning as a newcomer’s gradual move from the edge of a working community toward its center, and among their cases was the training of U.S. Navy quartermasters [6]. Edwin Hutchins spent time aboard a Navy ship studying how a navigation team computes a position together, and argued that the knowledge lives in the team and its tools, not in any one head [7]. Seeing together is what a good bridge team does, and it is what a good school does.

So here is what I would ask of educators:

• Review us. Read our curriculum against the standards you know and tell us, plainly, where it falls short.
• Teach with us. Join as faculty, or offer a single lesson in the subject you know best, delivered to mariners wherever their boats happen to be.
• Assess with us. STCW expects competence to be judged by qualified people [5]. We need qualified assessors who can see shipboard work and say whether it measures up.
• Talk with us. Help shape the gathering of academies, and tell us what a real conversation between sea and school should cover.

Seafarers bring the hours, the vessels and the questions. Educators bring the standards, the method and the habit of checking our work. Neither side can build this alone.

How the money works, in daylight

The model is simple to say: members help pay for each other’s education. The mariner who is further along helps the one just starting, and the one just starting will one day help the next. That is a goal and a model, not a promise of any return. A financial projection is being prepared, and when it is shared it will be a projection, not a guarantee.

The school’s finances are meant to be public, and that includes what the authors are paid. That is a principle I am setting now, before there is much money to look at, so that nobody has to wonder later. Volunteers who take on leadership may be thanked with trips. And yes, free Starlink aboard is a campaign goal. It is not a promise. No one has agreed to it. But a fast connection at sea would let a lesson, a teacher and an assessor reach a vessel anywhere, and that is worth asking for out loud.

Why North 37

The name is a latitude. Sagres, in Portugal, the headland tied to Prince Henry the Navigator and the age of discovery, sits at about 37.0 degrees north. Cape Henry, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, sits at about 36.9 degrees north. Lisbon lies a little farther north, at about 38.7 [8][9]. A Henry at each end of one line across the Atlantic. To me it says that the Old World’s school of navigation and the New World’s working waterfront were always on speaking terms.

Who is writing

I am Wayne, founding member and president of North 37 Academy in Lexington, Virginia. I write this for myself and for North 37. I work with a team of AI agents that help me research, draft and organize; I decide, I correct, and I am responsible for what goes out under my name.

What I am asking

From seafarers: your feedback and your membership. Tell me what you wish someone had taught you, and help write the first chapter of this school.

From educators: your scrutiny and your partnership. Tell me where we are wrong, and come meet us halfway across the water. There may even be a cruise ship.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, and he did his teaching by asking questions [10]. So I will end with one, for both kinds of teacher reading this:

If the classroom and the ship were one place, what is the first thing you would teach there, and who would you want standing beside you when you did?

Fair winds,

Wayne
Founding Member and President, North 37 Academy, Lexington, Virginia

Sources

[1] Associated Press, “Elon Musk pledges a share of his SpaceX company to ‘every kid in America’,” Oct. 2026. https://apnews.com/article/musk-spacex-anthropic-donation-ai-b3312da37a0e340be275295073055e00

[2] Nicol-Schwarz, K., and Kolodny, L. “Elon Musk says he’ll give a SpaceX share to every child in America next year.” CNBC, 19 Oct. 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/19/elon-musk-spacex-shares-giveaway-kids.html

[3] Internal Revenue Service, “Trump Accounts: Frequently asked questions” (Q5, $1,000 pilot contribution; Q10, financial agent and brokerage provider). https://www.irs.gov/faqs/trump-accounts-frequently-asked-questions

[4] U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Announces the Completion of Automatic Enrollment Today for Trump Accounts,” press release sb0642, 1 Oct. 2026. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0642

[5] International Maritime Organization, “International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW), 1978, as amended” (see Regulation I/6, Training and assessment). https://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/HumanElement/Pages/STCW-Conv-LINK.aspx

[6] Lave, J., and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[7] Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[8] U.S. Geological Survey, Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), “Cape Henry,” Virginia (approx. 36.93 N, 76.01 W). https://www.usgs.gov/us-board-on-geographic-names

[9] U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, GEOnet Names Server, entries for Lisboa (approx. 38.72 N) and Sagres (approx. 37.01 N), Portugal. https://geonames.nga.mil/

[10] Plato, Apology 38a.