There is a point he's not making that's important here: the ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are young. What you do around that time matters. If you waste your time, you never get it back later.
The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations. Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education hasn't really improved that much.
We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with that and they kind of drop out or fail.
The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even. Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of people just coast through high school so they can finally start their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most important quarter of it.
I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact with modern LLMs.
> There is a point he's not making that's important here: the ability to learn and absorb knowledge peaks when people are young.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.
Either way, at 60, on a daily basis in my life, almost all the skills I use were thing I learned after I turned 25 (and most of them after 30). That includes cooking, woodworking, programming, swimming and host of others.
My stepfather used to say (he probably still would if given the chance) that the point of school (by which he meant what in the US is called K-12) is learning how to learn. I agree with 100% (surprise!) - the reason I have been able to learn things in later life is because I got an excellent opportunity to learn how to learn when I was younger.
> The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now.
I don't even know what this means. The best education consists of a situation (sometimes created by a teacher) that provides a given individual with the opportunity and motivation to acquire some knowledge about something. I do not see what AI can possibly have to do with creating such situations.
You no longer have to learn anything, you can just ask.
I feel there are also a lot of urban myths about learning and the human brain out there. You hear it all the time everywhere: I’m too old to learn this language/instrument/skill now.
There are the things you can ask about, and there are things you have to do.
You cannot just ask how to build or cook or paint or weld something. AI cannot help with this (certainly not yet) beyond the sort of information that the internet (and youtube in particular) is already providing.
Don’t throw the babies with the bath water, education as a group thing is good as long as all in the group are at the similar level, it becomes even efficient when students stimulate one another. Also being part of the group students learn more about interacting in groups. Then problem is that these groups are mostly made up of students at different levels, abilities and so on.
> Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things
The problem with self-directed education is one does not know which direction to go. By following a program, you're following a path of learning what you need to know that you don't know you need to know.
For example, what kind of math would you need to know to do mechanical engineering? Hydraulics? Electronics? Physics? Astrogation? Signal processing? It's all different.
It doesn't have to be self directed but it can still be individualized. One on one teaching is the goto solution for the rich and wealthy. With AI that can be extended to everyone.
Schools don't really adapt to the individual currently. It works for the average student but there are lots of students that don't do well with that. And it doesn't really get the best out of people.
Introducing AI into education will be non trivial. This is difficulty is observable already in my experience.
When offering advice on how to learn how to program, I have to heavily recommend that students try their best to avoid the use of AI. Whereas previously the best advice I could give was to "build something", it is now possible to build a piece of software without understanding it at all. I have observed this myself with Rust; I have built a few programs now by repeatedly prompting AI models. I have even been quite engaged in designing the architecture, guiding the programs towards patterns that my intuition as a programmer says will be good for Rust too. The software works, but I can't help but feel I have learned nothing at all. Building something is now insufficient to learn, at least in the domain of programming.
I feel there will be far more compilations we will have to address in order to benefit from AI in education. That said, I am still optimistic that it will be a net positive force.
In reflecting on the history of formal education, it's necessry to separate the Oxbride tradition of grooming future aristocrats and nobles from the rise of compulsory public education at the end of the 19th century, which is a responds to a variety of challenges raised by both industrialization and modern cities.
For a retrospective review of that history, with extensive citations, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society can get you started on your own research. His book is fundamentally polemical because he was invested in his opinions about the past, the present, and the future, but the bibliography and citations prove useful for this topic even if you don't buy his summary perspective.
There are of course many other primary and secondary treatments contemporary to the time, that you can review without reading through Illich's polemics, some of which are very easy to find in the Harper's Magazine archives.
What you'll find, broadly, os that there was very little said of the idealism we now attribute to enlightment and almost all of the dialog about modern public education, especially compulsory -- by both proponets and critics -- was quite practical, focused on what schooling and education would acheive (or sacrifice) for industry, social cohesion, cultural diversity/uniformity, crime, child welfare, political alignment, and national identity.
IOW, "I've never seen any evidence" is understandable (we each only have so much time to study), but it's not for some lack of that evidence.
The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations. Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education hasn't really improved that much.
We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with that and they kind of drop out or fail.
The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even. Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of people just coast through high school so they can finally start their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most important quarter of it.
I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact with modern LLMs.