The Future of Education

Maybe it’s because I’m working in the learning space now, so my mind is more primed to pay attention to news related to learning. Or maybe people are actually worried about education more than ever before. For not a week goes by during which I don’t read articles taking on at least one of the following forms:

• Teachers are quitting because students no longer seem to care about learning

• Test-taking and homework have been entirely undermined by ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools

• Technology has outsourced reasoning

• College is becoming less important and formal higher level education is at risk of collapsing

• Gen Alpha is doomed

And so on.

I myself got disheartened a few months back when sitting at a coffee shop and seeing a student next to me taking an online quiz. One half of his laptop screen: the quiz. The other half: Gemini (Google’s LLM). The student copied questions from the quiz into Gemini. Then copied answers from Gemini into the quiz. Back and forth and back and forth for every single question, without a moment’s pause to reflect on what was being asked.

As the father of two young kids, I’m staggered by the uncertainty of where we go from here. Where does this trend lead? How will it impact schools? How will it impact knowledge?

Education vs. Learning

When I first began describing Oboe to other people, I’d say something along these lines:

After spending several months actually building the thing, I changed one word in the description:

A subtle change, but one that corresponded to a shift in my own thinking. Education and learning are two distinct things.

Learning is expanding one’s understanding of the world. Education is a system whose stated objective is learning. But the means by which it achieves this objective is often mired by the equally strong economic incentive to treat all students the same, to force students to embrace subject matter they may not enjoy, and to assess student’s skills in some standardized way.

A great explanation of this was recently offered in an interview with Freakonomics author Steve Levitt:

Do we want tomorrow’s students to be “educated”? I think we want them to learn. And what’s more, we want them to love learning. We want them to be curious, the type of curiosity that I discovered in my early 20s when I started teaching myself how to create software from nothing, or in my early 30s when I started devoting serious time to writing.

I’m alarmed by the urgency with which education needs to be redefined, in the hope that it might rediscover its original purpose: learning. But I’m equally excited by the prospect that the ubiquity with which knowledge is now freely available may mean that the hurdles in the way of true learning may finally come down.

In a world in which everyone can get everything, there is no longer an excuse for not enabling every student to enthusiastically explore that which sparks their curiosity. And that may not be Shakespeare or Roman history. It may be taking apart radios or gardening or playing the ukulele or inventing new board games.

It may be everything we’ve never thought of as education. But again, it’s not about education, is it? It’s about learning.

A Final Note

I mentioned in the opening of this article that my working in education makes me more likely to notice people talking about education. This cognitive bias is called the Frequency Illusion or the Baader-Meinfof Phenomenon. And of course, now that I mentioned it here, you’re probably going to start seeing references to it all over the place. Both the psychological effect and the group after which it’s named.