The Purpose of Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Black and white photo of early 20th century classroom

By Garrett Smiley

Traditional school is not even preparing students for this modern world, let alone for the bizarre sci-fi future that’s about to knock down our door.

AI is the Swiss Army knife that will replace all other tools. Right now, it’s helping us tidy up our data, proofread our emails, and whip up some stunning graphics. But soon, it’s going to take over entire jobs. One day, a civil engineer won’t just use AI to test their blueprints or create snazzy 3D models like they are now; they’ll just blurt out what they need and get a bunch of ready-to-go projects to choose from. And it won’t stop there. A couple of generations down the line, AI and its robot minions will be the ones building the bridges.

Swiss army knife phone with picture of child holding strings on screen

Now, this might sound scary, like a bad episode of Black Mirror. But hold onto your hats, because it’s actually going to be awesome. Instead of thousands of people breaking their backs to build something like the Golden Gate Bridge, we could just collectively decide we want it, and our robot army will make it happen. And it’ll be done before you can say “Skynet.” Remember how Edison said genius was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration? Well, AI’s about to flip that on its head. The real bottleneck now is inspiration. Good ideas just became gold, and with this power, we’re going to reshape the world so fast it’ll make your head spin.

But there’s a catch. In a world where the cost of building new stuff approaches zero, we still must decide how to use our limited resources and attention. Should we demolish the Empire State Building to make room for a giant water park? Do we need a single-payer healthcare system? Should we invade Canada for fun? (Just kidding, Canada. We love you.) These are decisions AI can’t make for us because machines don’t understand what it’s like to be human. They won’t know what it feels like to stroll down a beautiful boulevard, to hear Beethoven’s Ninth, or to lose someone they love. They’ll understand how our bodies work, but they won’t know what it means to be us.

Unfortunately, our traditional education system is setting students up to flounder in this future. It’s cranking out kids who can parrot facts about math, literature, and history, but who don’t have a clue why any of it matters. They see education as a chore, a ticket to avoid trouble, not the collective effort of millions of their ancestors striving for a better life. This traditional approach trades the passion and curiosity of a student for technical proficiency, a skillset soon to be overshadowed by machines. In the future, the “why” will become significantly more important than the “how”.

What the kids of the future really need is the ability to use empathy and logic to untangle complex problems. We need a generation of critical thinkers with the tools to overcome their biases and seek truth. These AI tools will pose a particular challenge in that respect. Even today, we now live in a world where AI can churn out misinformation at the speed of light. And, with the power of this technology, it’s all tailored to play right into our individual biases, like a perfectly tuned violin playing the symphony of our own ignorance. ChatGPT was not our society’s first brush with a superintelligent AI: Facebook was, and we failed horribly. Social media is not about what’s real, but what makes us feel good, what confirms our beliefs, what keeps us in our comfy little bubbles. That personalized misinformation will only become more persuasive and more damaging. If we don’t equip our kids with the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see through the smokescreen and challenge their own biases, we’re setting them up for a lifetime of being manipulated. Education, then, isn’t just about understanding the world. It’s about interrogating it, questioning it, pulling it apart and putting it back together again. It’s about teaching our kids to be thinkers, not just consumers.

Thus, while it’s still necessary to learn the fundamentals like fractions, the periodic table, and important historical events so we can understand the world around us and combine ideas into new insights, they must be removed from the pedestal on which traditional education has placed them. If we wish to prepare our students for this brave new world, we must shift our focus from content knowledge to skills like critical thinking, empathy, and agency–and we’ve got to give those as much attention as we currently give to math scores and spelling tests. We’ve got to show students that learning isn’t just about ticking boxes and passing exams. It’s about understanding the world, questioning the status quo, and making a difference. That’s the education our children deserve.

About the author

Garrett Smiley is the Founder and CEO of Sora Schools, a revolutionary online private middle and high school that’s completely revolutionizing how students learn and achieve. Garrett is a brilliant education innovator and a wealth of information on all things online education, education tech, non-traditional education, the future of education, school choice, student development (personally and academically), skills-based learning, career exploration education, and so much more.

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