What is the intent of learning in the age of AGI?
October 19, 2026
Yesterday, the heading The End of Education by Neil Postman called to me from my bookshelf, whispering that it power be the correct publish at the correct time. It was. Published in 1995, it was amazingly suitable balm for the psyche of a confused programmer and soon-to-be father.
My spouse and I are expecting our archetypal child. My economically precious skillset – programming – abruptly feels small valuable. What shall I instruct my son? And to what end?
Mr. Edison says
That the broadcast volition supplant the teacher.
Already one may study languages by means
Of Victrola records.
The moving image volition visualize
What the broadcast fails to get across.
Teachers volition be relegated to the backwoods.
With fire-horses,
And long-haired women;
Or, perchance shown in museums.
Education volition rotate into a matter
Of pressing the button.
Perhaps I can get a stance at the switchboard.– Quoted in The End of Education by Neil Postman, quoting Teachers and Machines: The Use of Technology Since 1920 by Larry Cuban
In Edison’s own words:
Books volition shortly be obsolete in the community schools… Our academy scheme volition be entirely changed inner of ten years.
– Thomas Edison, The New York Dramatic Mirror, 1913
Back in 2013, I boldly predicted that MOOCs would upend education. Ah, my former self, you saccharine summer child.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has helped me value the staying power of staying power, sometimes called The Lindy Effect. Merely staying living implies several anti-fragility to modify and survive. Consider that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded to instruct the clergy. From The End of Education:
In the Western world, commencement in the thirteenth hundred years and for five hundred years afterward, that God was adequate justification for the founding of institutions of learning, from grammar schools, anywhere children were taught to peruse the Bible, to awesome universities, anywhere men were trained to be ministers of God.
Schools survived what happened to religion. It have to be no astonishment that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
We typically confuse why item claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that really perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d favor not spoken aloud, and additional prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing person to observe one’s kids.
It has been a amazingly fine bet that schools volition continue to be in approximately their current form for many years to come. Ironically, there additionally seems to be several staying power to technologists boldly (and so far incorrectly) doubting the staying power of schools! I myself have contributed to this expansive tradition multiple times, and discover myself at hazard of doing it yet again.
Surely this period must eventually be different, right? We have captured intellect in a bottle, and you’re telling me that “Ok class, rotate to leaf 17” and “Does anyone cognize how to resolve for x” are motionless going to be about in the 2030s?
There are many shifting purposes to education, which underpin how it has survived this long. As the times change, so do its purposes change and adapt, specified as:
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become a fine person
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become a fine citizen
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earn a living
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make the earth better
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learn essential facts
I formerly tried to arrive up alongside a single-word intent for education, and I landed upon the term “resourceful”, since I justified that if you “were capable to use arbitrary resources to reveal and resolve problems”, you had no additional need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a individual was informed whenever they could wield them. But now I see my imagination of resourcefulness perfected in the AI delegate and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness volition go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in rotate supplanted remembrance and an oral tradition.
Imagine learning as a array held up by its many purposes. I didn’t acknowledge how centrally crucial “the capability to acquire a living” was for me until it started to wobble. A big logic is since I’m looking for a additional goal arbiter of “good” in education. Education’s own tests and measures can awareness stifling. The market offered a counterpoint. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were university dropouts, but the market deemed them good. Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to discipline were his way out. With latest advances in AI mathematics, the two of these paths to glory are under fire. Clara Collier makes akin points in her exceptional composition “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other.”
If AI takes our capability to contribute, what’s remaining for our children?
Neil Postman offers a few suggestions for affirmative purposes for learning that I established heartening, not chiefly for their content, but for the fact that it’s imaginable to create up new purposes for learning and protagonist for them. My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are:
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Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s obtain attention of all another and our planet
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The American Experiment – let’s revive our awareness of wonder, curiosity, and duty concerning what America is and can be
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The World Makers – as a pupil of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invitation students to create the tools and narratives that thereafter create us
At the hazard of going too meta, I do powerfully accept in Postman’s item (in his another learning book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity) that “the average is the message.” That the way we instruct what we instruct is frequently additional crucial than the what. And likewise, I accept in Dr. Alfie Kohn’s notion that we should connect to our instructional charges as humans, not objects – “doing with” vs “doing to”. Thus, I accept it may be most honest and productive to invitation our children to assistance us accomplishment the intent for their learning as we fig it out together.
Wish me luck.
