Education is the scrapple* of social programs: it can be exceptional, it’s usually acceptable, but when it goes wrong it’s a disaster. And like scrapple, once you start thinking about what goes into it, it’s hard to stop. Education should impart knowledge and skills, but it also serves as child care, and it usually aims to socialize, or at least domesticate, students. Education can be indoctrination, or it can foment radical skepticism. It can foster friendships and it can foster bullying. It can instill confidence and it can deepen anxiety.
*scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch food made by combining all the odd scraps of pork with cornmeal and seasoning. It is formed into a loaf, somewhat like polenta, sliced, and fried.
The defining characteristic of education, the cornmeal binding all the porky oddments, is that it looks forward. Most education these days rests on an assumption of utility in some future, however distant. Primary school leads to secondary school, which leads to college and then perhaps a graduate degree. Acquiring the appropriate skills at each level allows access to the next, until the student embarks on a career.
The most extreme example of the dynamic will have parents locking in a slot at a good daycare with the hopes that it will lead to a string of competitive schools, culminating in a lucrative career. Along the way the child must participate in a slate of carefully chosen extracurriculars in an effort to craft a resume that distinguishes them from all the other competitors in the great game of musical chairs that is admissions at elite universities.
Childhood itself is in some ways inherently forward looking, or at least anticipatory. Kids voluntarily engage in play and mimicry, which prepare them for adult life. Education formalizes this natural phase. Ideally it teaches the general skills needed to navigate the world, while also providing opportunities for each child to develop individual interests.
In practice, however, this is rarely the case. The realities of large classes and widely varying aptitudes and interests mean instruction tends towards the median, which necessarily leaves some students in a state of perpetual struggle and others while others in a state of perpetual boredom. Giving each student individualized instruction might be ideal, but it has simply been impossible; there’s no way to hire a tutor for every school age kid in America.
At least, it has been. But now AI startups and even schools are promising instruction perfectly calibrated to the individual. A recent article in New York magazine describes the largest of these. At first blush, the results are impressive. With just two to three hours of active learning a day, students at the Alpha school are able to achieve elite educational outcomes.
Before I go any further, I want to flag something that the article only mentions in passing. The success of Alpha school tells us basically nothing about the merits of AI education as a universal pedagogical tool. Things like parental income, education, and involvement have a huge impact on how kids do in school, and Alpha has clearly attracted a group of extremely wealthy ($40,000 per year tuition) and extremely motivated parents. Their kids would likely be excelling in any school, while more typical student, put into Alpha, might well struggle.
That said, education is one area where I see a genuine use for AI. A math curriculum that advances with each individual student, reinforces past concepts, and introduces new ones at the right time, would make learning much faster and easier. So long as the program does not pretend to be human, I don’t see an issue.
Indeed, it would be great if reducing all of school to a couple hours made it so kids had more time to simply be kids, with time spent oriented to no particular outcome. Unlike Alpha school, which seems to be preying on the overwhelming anxiety the elite feel in the face of an uncertain future and using it to sell the profoundly dumb idea that we can future proof our kids, a truncated time of intense education could be followed by hours of childhood life.
When we think of education as preparing for adulthood, it is generally only one piece of adulthood, namely, a career. But this leaves out something critical. Yes, play can be a field for learning some useful skill, but it is also, definitionally, an end to itself. Play must be enjoyable. Unless they are distracted by unfettered access to screens, most children are geniuses at finding pleasure in the simple fact of existence, from poking in the dirt with a stick to sledding to reading for the joy of hearing a good story. Perhaps it’s just as important as learning math for children to cultivate a capacity for joy and to carry it forward.
I’m not worried about the educational system indoctrinating my kids with an ideology. That’s my job, after all. But I do worry that by simply occupying most of the hours of the day, the competitive quest to excel in the meritocracy prevents kids, as well as plenty of adults, from simply enjoying life as it is given to us.