What will school look like?

“I can’t imagine having to do all this without AI” is a sentiment many of us share. A master’s student at Stanford said this to me, as he was telling me about how he was finishing up his last quarter of the master’s. Simultaneously, he was running what seemed, to me at least, a pretty successful startup.

What will school look like five years from now? Or two? This might be just how cultural evolution happens where the conversations around whether education is an indicator of success shift because “knowing” information yourself is less important. But learning, education, and “school” are different. Had he had access to the proliferation of AI that we have now from the beginning of his learning career, would he still be successful? And if he didn’t go to Stanford, would he still be running a startup?

AI has made learning easier than ever, and it has also made every coding project in middle school, every history paper in high school, and every problem set in college completely unrepresentative of how much someone knows.

“Automate work” is, rightfully, a tagline for AI. Never doing work is funny to think about, and perhaps you could definitely never write an email yourself again. Though, the way we reward people in our culture has never changed. The allure of a school is so entrenched in decision-making. Merit in American society is something that is an ongoing conversation, and to change decision-making doesn’t come from a structural or policy choice. No amount of philosophizing will change how people choose talent in every part of society, because you’d have to brainwash people to do it.

Learning, now with AI, will reward students who motivate themselves more than ever before and is creating a breeding ground for obsessive, demanding parents who push their kids to achieve at any cost.

A few years ago, if you weren’t good at something like math, you might spend hours with YouTube videos of mixed quality and even more time with tutors and teachers. It’s remarkable that you can now learn a structured subject like math step by step with an LLM. But learning this way is hard, because you need the discipline to not let AI just give you the answers. When higher education can rethink its structure by cutting down take-home assignments and bringing back oral exams, “lower education” will not be able to change. It’s simply an insurmountable lift from state standards and teachers being unable to implement an oral exam for every student. For now, it’ll be easier than ever to get through school without learning anything unless you’re internally motivated.

The phrase “tiger parent” used to describe a narrow group of parents whose methods ran against most Western philosophies of parenting. The Western ideal was gentler. Children should follow their curiosity, find their own passions, and build motivation from the inside. Pushing too hard risked burnout, and that worry was fair. In some ways, this approach always leaned on school. The way school was structured made it a good partner for this philosophy, because assignments took authentic effort, and finishing one meant you had learned something, whether you wanted to or not.

Some of us already feel this change ourselves when we think about things we used to do on our own, like drafting an email or planning a meeting. We don’t necessarily have those skills anymore, and the same goes for writing a paper. Intuitively, these are all thoughts that everyone is having about the generation growing up with AI and what we teach in “lower education.”