Ask an AI to help you learn something and it just does it for you. You get the answer, you keep none of the skill. That’s not the model being dumb — it’s the default behaviour, and there’s a specific instruction set that flips it.
Companies sell that flipped version as an education plan and check whether you’re a teacher first. You don’t need to be. Here’s the whole ladder, free.
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LEVEL 1 — 60 seconds, nothing installed
What changes: it stops handing you answers and starts asking you questions until you get there.
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The exact prompt — the real instruction set the paid education plan writes for you, published word-for-word by a university. “Use leading questions rather than direct answers.”
│ ↳ copy the 7 blocks → paste into a free Claude Style/Project, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Done.
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Google’s tutor mode — already free, and the gate points backwards: it’s blocked on school accounts, works on personal ones. Type @OpenStax and it answers from real textbooks. (US + English, 18+)
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More versions — pull gemini-2.5-pro-guided-learning.md and study-and-learn.md; works on any chatbot, even a small local one. (second archive)
LEVEL 2 — 10 minutes, now it knows you
What changes: it stops teaching in general and starts teaching what you personally keep getting wrong.
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Anki + MCP — no terminal: drag the .mcpb file into Claude Desktop. It reads your actual review history, works out what you keep failing, and drills that.
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165 teaching skills — memory science, self-testing, spacing. One of them runs live while you study and reshapes how it answers you.
│ ↳ lazy path: open any single .md and paste it in. Proper path: drop the folder into ~/.claude/skills.
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Free courses + certificates — 21 of them, and in their own words: “you don’t need an Anthropic account.”
LEVEL 3 — own it, nothing can take it away
What changes: no login, no limits, no “your plan changed” email.
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DeepTutor (31.8k
) — docker run ghcr.io/hkuds/deeptutor:latest. Drop in your own PDFs → it tutors you on them, builds quizzes, turns a book into an interactive one, and remembers what you don’t know yet. Runs on free or fully offline models.
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SocraticLM — a model where the refusal to just-give-the-answer is baked into the weights. No prompt trick talks it out of teaching you.
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SOLA — an accredited university’s own learning coach, open-sourced.
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Claude Code styles — Learning mode leaves TODO(human) gaps for you to fill instead of writing it all. 
/output-style was removed in v2.1.91 → use /config.
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Fuel — free credits so you never hit the wall
None of these ask what you do for a living:
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$1,000 in credits — one Google Form, answered the first Monday of every month · what it is
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Ambassadors — monthly credits, worldwide, “no developer title required”
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AWS Activate — up to $5,000, “apply directly if you’re bootstrapped”
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Startups — “with or without VC backing” · 
AI for Science — the rules page doesn’t require an institution, whatever the marketing says
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$8/seat — nonprofit pricing, min 2 seats, ~3-minute self-serve check · 
$15/seat — research labs
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Claude Corps — $85,000/yr, “no education requirement” · Fellows — $3,850/wk, no PhD (both between rounds — watch them)
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🍎 If you actually teach, tutor or build courses — the paid plan's tools are on GitHub
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k12-teacher-skills — Anthropic’s own lesson-planning + re-levelling tools, free licence. Their README shows the install for everyone without the badge. npx skills add learning-commons
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Every US state’s standards — one 293 MB open-licence file, plain download, no account. Or click the connector and let Claude read it live.
└─ Wharton’s prompt library — tested tutor/coach/mentor/simulator prompts, licensed so you can reuse and even sell them · the paper with full text
🪪 Before you skip it — you may already qualify for the paid plan free
Nobody can sell you the “teacher” row, but plenty of people bounce off the word while already on the list:
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60-second test: type your work/org email at claude.ai/login instead of your personal one — your workplace may already have a seat waiting → why
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Anthropic counts “instructional coaches, specialists, interventionists, librarians, counselors” → list · verify (open to 30 Jun 2027)
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Campus staff are inside the licence too — IT, admissions, library → page
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Trade instructors count: welding, HVAC, CDL, cosmetology, culinary, IT — plus grad TAs → FAQ
└─ Send the right proof — a teaching certificate is rejected; a paystub or a screenshot of your own staff-directory page is accepted → rules · full job-title list
Don’t bother with these
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Workspace for Education rules out community centres, corporate training, mentoring nonprofits, exam and job-training companies
├─ UNiDAYS staff accounts are real but give Apple discounts only — the rest stays student-only
├─ Credits don’t stack — Anthropic’s startup credits “can’t be used on AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, or other third-party platforms”
└─ No US entity? Most nonprofit doors are US-shaped — 417 fiscal sponsors can carry a project’s status without you incorporating; that’s the fact Microsoft (libraries + museums qualify) and AWS ($5k/yr) actually check
Stop asking it for answers. Make it hand you the skill.
!