Kim had been magnificent in class that morning. Eyes bright, voice rising and leaning in, she argued with a fierce delight I hadn’t seen from her before – sometimes bursting out laughing at herself when she tangled herself up in her own logic. It wasn’t that she was nailing everything, but something was waking up in her and she looked about a foot taller than the quiet girl who had walked in at the start of term. Her sheer abandon lifted everyone, so I dropped my lesson plan and let her run until the bell caught us all off guard.
There was a parents’ evening later on and her father asked me what job that Theory of Knowledge class might lead to. It’s a fair question, but I hesitated – because I was still thinking about his daughter in that classroom. What I wanted to say was: you should have seen her! But he hadn’t asked that, and so I mumbled something about critical thinking and transferable skills. It was true enough; but it also felt like an apology because I was using the language of the labour market to defend the most alive learning in the building. I have been thinking about that ever since. And I think what bothered me was the way we both seemed to be working on the assumption that the point of learning was what it led to.
That assumption runs deep in education and it has served us well for two centuries. I understand why we’ve held onto it. But with the rise of AI, it may be about to collapse – and it may not be a bad thing if it does.
The Engine of Human Progress
For most of human history, we had genuine material needs (and of course, many still do); hunger, disease, the basic problem of not dying. The problems were real and the stakes were high, and these needs gave direction and urgency to our innate curiosity. Nobody had to motivate early humans to understand fire or irrigation.
I wonder, though, if we are now reaching the stage where the spectacular progress, some of which I outlined in my previous post, may be sidelining the very curiosity that created it. Material prosperity was a by-product, but somewhere along the way we made it the goal. We’ve built cultures that measure success and status by material acquisition, and we track everything that can be counted, and more besides. But not every valuable thing can be valued in this way; the toddler stacking blocks is not pursuing material progress; she is doing it because something in her drives her to. We’ve looked at what that drive produced, and we’ve mistaken the product for the purpose.
What happened to education
This approach is especially damaging in education, because the drive to understand is right at the heart of the whole enterprise. So what do we make of syllabuses designed around employability, of exams that sort students by cognitive output, of university rankings that function as a proxy labour market? It would not be surprising if the intrinsic satisfaction of curiosity-driven learning starts to fade, ‘crowded out’ as the psychologists would say, by these systems which reward extrinsic performance. Hence, perhaps, the modern phenomena of burnout, lying flat, quiet quitting, and the evidence that among wealthy families, a materialist orientation predicts unhappiness. I don’t know if the drive has actually declined, or simply gone underground, or is as strong as ever but harder to see, but the signs seem clear enough to worry about.
The incentive structure has become learn this, get a good job: work hard, doors will open and for two hundred years, it’s worked. For billions of people, the instrumental model of education has been the route out of poverty, to better lives. I write this from Singapore, from a well-funded school; I appreciate that my argument may land very differently if you’re a struggling parent trying to get your child into a job that will feed the family, where the instrumental model has, at least until now, been a lifeline.
But instrumental education was always a narrowing of something older and richer. Aristotle distinguished between making something for an external purpose and activities that are valuable in themselves; centuries later John Newman argued that knowledge is its own end. These aren’t, I think, quaint but irrelevant ideas; they’re descriptions of something real that you can see on any nursery floor. And yes, I know that before the instrumental project, learning for its own sake was largely the preserve of a wealthy elite and that universal education is itself an achievement of instrumentalism. So I’m not arguing that we should go back to a pre-industrial model; to do so would be both impossible and unjust. But the coming of AI might mean that education has to face the removal of its economic rationale.
If AI does what its makers say it will, and what we fear it might, then the instrumental deal is in serious trouble. It may take one year or ten, which is the difference between sharp disruption and slow erosion, but it raises the same underlying problem. Machines that outperform humans on the cognitive tasks the economy currently rewards will do more than disrupt the job market; they’ll undermine the rationale on which most education is built. It’s possible, of course, that AI will augment cognitive work rather than replace it, or that it will open new kinds of opportunity, as previous disruptive technologies have done. If so, the instrumental model may survive in altered form, and much of what follows is premature. That’s the comfortable position, and it may be right. But as I argued in part one, Russell’s chicken was comfortable too, right up until the morning the farmer came with an axe instead of grain.
The instinctive response from educators like me is that human qualities like creativity, character, and ethical reasoning will be more valuable than ever in an AI world. But if by that we mean that these are the new qualities of economic value then that’s just instrumentalism once more, trading under a different name.
The harder question we can ask ourselves is whether we are willing to say that these qualities matter not because of their market value but because of what they open in the person who develops them. Kim wasn’t becoming more employable that morning; she was becoming more alive. If we can’t defend that without reaching for the language of scarcity and competitive advantage, then maybe we need a new vocabulary. Now, schools like mine have been saying this for a long time. I think we were right, but we were right in a world where the cognitive deal still held; we formed the whole person and got them into good universities. If the second half collapses, the first half has to stand on its own, and we need to know that it can.
The gymnasium of the mind
If the correct response to why study a foreign language? Or mathematics? Or politics? was ever to get into College, it will not be so in future. But nor is it in case you want to be a linguist, a mathematician or a politician. So why bother? My answer has always been that nobody argues that the forklift made weightlifting pointless, and it still holds. We lift weights because of what the effort gives us – strength, discipline, a kind of self-knowledge. The point was never to compete with machines. Maybe studying language, maths or politics – or anything really – will once again be valuable for the same reason. Not because of the output, but because of what the struggle does to the person.
That idea may seem obvious to some, but it was not available to Kim’s father or to me as we spoke. I think in some contexts it even feels somewhat naive, because of the materialist culture which has gradually suppressed that way of thinking. But if AI intensifies things further, it seems to me that this idea may come back into view; if machines can handle the cognitive production needed by the economy, then the two-hundred-year learn-now-earn-later deal vanishes. So what’s left?
What’s left, I think, is the drive that was always there, the curiosity, the itch to understand. The satisfaction of getting somewhere difficult – because it’s there as the mountaineer might put it. Materialism may have damaged or obscured these things, but I have a hunch that they’re still there. The toddlers stacking blocks have not read the market signals; the TOK students who are grappling with the complexity of their paradigms are not chasing the credential. They all do it because something in them needs to, and it’s the same something that figured out the wheel, and agriculture, and, last year, how to make machines think. We built the thing that supposedly makes us redundant because we are the kind of creatures whose nature is to keep learning.
So maybe AI will not destroy education. But it won’t automatically liberate it either. What it will do is force us to make a choice that we have so far avoided. If we will no longer be able to say learn this, it’ll get you a job then we can either fight a desperate rearguard action, or rebuild education around the drive that showed up in Kim as the joy of someone figuring something out under their own steam. But when the economic rationale is under pressure, the temptation to double-down on credentials and employability metrics will be enormous – from schools, from parents, from policymakers, from the sheer anxiety of not knowing what comes next. This is exactly the kind of moment that requires nerve from those of us who know the drive is real, even if our evidence comes from rooms full of teenagers who forget to check the time.
But choosing to rebuild is even harder than it sounds, and I am not foolish enough to think that the world will suddenly want to go back to school. Even if the extrinsic rewards disappear overnight, underlying mindsets will persist for much longer. And critically, the intrinsic experience had better be genuinely good, or people will simply stop showing up. I’ve sat in enough parent meetings to know that when families invest in education, they expect a return – and likely not a spiritual one. And there is a bleaker possibility I can’t dismiss: that the burial was deeper than I think, and that without extrinsic motivation, a lot of people won’t bother with the gymnasium at all.
People who go to the gym have already opted in; they are already motivated. I am more worried about what happens to people whose curiosity was never nurtured, or worse, was systematically extinguished by the very instrumental system I’ve been describing (Ken Robinson’s TED talk is a good articulation of the role schools can play in this). I don’t know if the drive survives fifteen years of being taught to the test, or even, for that matter, if the heart of a teacher survives teaching to that test, but I’ve watched enough young people light up over a problem that mattered to them to believe it’s worth betting on. Honestly, I don’t see much alternative because if AI removes the economic rationale for education, we can either chase credentials that no longer lead anywhere, or we can rebuild around the thing that was always there. That’s not blind optimism; in fact it feels to me like the only option that doesn’t end in surrender.
Education is a place where we answer the question of what kind of human beings we would like to be, and what kind of societies we want to live in. The questions remain, and the answers don’t become any less important when the machine is smarter than us.
I still owe Kim’s father a better conversation than the one I was able to give him all those years ago.
Further Reading
- Images created with AI (OpenArt and Gemini)
- Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI.
- Levine, M. (2006). The Price of Privilege. HarperCollins.
- Newman, J. H. (1852). The Idea of a University. Longmans, Green & Co.
- Sandel, M. (2012). What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Tate, N. (2016). What is Education For? John Catt.
