Yesterday, Neil Postman's The End of Education called to me from my bookshelf, and it felt like the right book at the right time. My wife and I are expecting our first child, and as a programmer, my economically valuable skillset suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son? And to what end?
The history of predicting education's demise is long. Thomas Edison said in 1913 that books would soon be obsolete in public schools and that the system would be completely changed within ten years. Back in 2013, I boldly predicted that MOOCs would upend education. Ah, my past self, you sweet summer child. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Lindy Effect suggests that things that have lasted a long time are likely to keep lasting. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded to educate the clergy, and schools survived what happened to religion. They have also survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.
We often confuse the stated reason an institution exists with the forces that actually perpetuate it. The stated purposes of schools may be to glorify God or to prepare citizens, but the real forces are subtler and more prosaic: endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one's kids. It has been a surprisingly good bet that schools will continue in roughly their current form for many years to come.
Still, this time may be different. We have captured intelligence in a bottle, and it is hard to imagine that "Turn to page 17" and "Does anyone know how to solve for x" will still be around in the 2030s. Education rests on many shifting purposes, from becoming a good person and citizen to earning a living and making the world better. I once proposed that "resourceful" was education's single purpose, but AI agents now embody that vision. I realize how central earning a living is to me only now that it has started to wobble.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing