Opinion | ‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’

Here’s a statistic I’ve been thinking about recently: In 1976, about 40 percent of high school seniors had read six books or more for fun in the last year. Only about 11 percent hadn’t read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed. About 40 percent haven’t read a single book for fun. If you are looking for this, you see it everywhere right now. There are all these headlines about how kids are not reading the way they once did. There are all these stories quoting professors, even at Ivy League universities, about the way in which, when they try to assign the reading that they’ve been assigning their entire careers, their students, they just can’t do it anymore. We’re losing something. We can see it on test scores — that, over the last decade, we just see the number of kids reading at grade level slipping. Then, of course, the pandemic accelerated that. So if you were simply asking: How are the kids doing on some of these intellectual faculties that we once thought were the core of what education was trying to promote? They’re not doing well. And then, as if we summoned it, as if we wrote it into the script, here comes his technology, generative AI, that can do it for them. Imagine you could read any book in less than 30 seconds, no matter how long it is. They’ll read the book and summarize it for you. Any style nonfiction book in 10 minutes that’ll write the essay for you. ChatGPT is going to do the bulk of the writing. Copilot is good for factual information and GPTZero helps you not get caught. That’ll do the math problem, even showing its work, for you. And it doesn’t matter if the question is typed out or handwritten, it works on both. Yeah, the future is crazy. Of course, using it that way we call it cheating. But to them, why wouldn’t you? If you have this technology that not only can but will be doing so much of this for you, for us, for the economy, why are we doing any of this at all. And this intersects with an anxiety I have as a parent of a 3- and a 6-year-old. I don’t know what the economy, what society is going to want from them in 16 or 20 years. And if I don’t know what it’s going to want from them, what it’s going to reward in them, how do I know how they should be educated? How do I know if the education I am creating for them is doing a good job? How do I know if I’m failing them? The purpose of education in schools is profoundly shaken to its core. My guest today is Rebecca Winthrop. She’s the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. Her latest book, co-authored with Jenny Anderson, is “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.” As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Rebecca Winthrop, welcome to the show. Lovely to be here, Ezra. I have a 3 and 6-year-old. I feel like I cannot predict with AI what it is society will want or reward from them in 1516 years. Which makes this question in the interim, how should they be educated. What should they be educated towards. I feel really uncertain to me. My confidence that the schools are set up now for the world they are going to graduate into is very, very low. So you study education. You’ve been thinking a lot about education and AI. What advice would you give me. So approximately 1/3 of kids are deeply engaged. 2/3 of the kids are not. So we need to have learning experiences that motivate kids to dig in and engage and be excited to learn. So when friends or relatives ask me the same question, I usually say, look, we have to think about three parts to the answer. Why do you want your kids to be educated. What is the purpose of education. Because actually, now that we have AI that can write essays and pass the bar exam and do AP exams just as good or better than kids, we have to really rethink the purpose of education. The second thing we have to think about is how kids learn. And we know a lot about that. And the third thing is what they should learn. What’s the content. What are the skills. People always think of education as a transactional transmission of knowledge, which is one important piece of it, but it is actually so much more than that. Learning to live with other people. Learning to know yourself and developing the flexible competencies to be able to navigate a world of uncertainty. Those are kind of the whys for me. But I might ask you, what are your hopes and dreams for your kids under the why. Before we get to the details of the skills. Well, I have a lot of hopes and dreams for my kids. I would like them to live happy, fulfilling lives. I think I’m not naive, and certainly in my lifetime, the implicit purpose of education, the way we say to ourselves, did this kids’ education workout is do they get a good job. That’s really what we’re pointing the arrow towards, right. The fact that it maybe developed their faculties as a human being, the fact that maybe they learned things that were beautiful or fascinating. That’s all great. But if they do all that and they don’t get a good job, then we failed them. And if they do none of that, but they do get a good job, then we succeeded. So I think that’s been the reality of education. But I also think that reality relies a little bit on an economy in which we’ve asked people to act very often as machines of a kind. And now we’ve created these machines that can act or mimic as people of a kind. And so now the whole transaction is being thrown into some chaos. The skills that I think are going to be most important are how motivated and engaged kids are to be able to learn new things. That is maybe one of the most important skills in a time of uncertainty that they are go getters, they’re going to be wayfinders, things are going to shift and change, and they’re going to be able to navigate and constantly learn new things and be excited to learn new things. Because when kids are motivated, that’s actually a huge predictor of how they do. And we’re going to want kids absolutely to know enough content so that they can be a judge of what is real and what is fake. But we’re also going to want them to have experiences where they’re learning and testing how to come up with creative new solutions to things, which is not really what traditional public education has been about. I think sometimes about this distinction between education as a virtue and education is something that is instrumental. Education is training. Studying the classics was important not because it made it likelier that you got into law school, right. But because it had deepened your appreciation of beauty. It deepened your capacities as a human being. And I think for reasons that make a lot of sense, in many ways, we drifted away from that. And I don’t know that you build a society off of people just enjoying what they’re studying. And at the same time, I worry now that we have pulled people into a conveyor belt, that when they get to the other side of it, there’s not going to be that much there. And I don’t even think you need to imagine. I fear that that’s already happening to a lot of people. I think one reason you see a lot of anger among young people today is that the deal often doesn’t come through. You do all the extracurriculars, you get your good grades, you show up on time, and then you graduate college and the good jobs and the interesting life you were promised just aren’t there. And so there’s something there that feels like it is getting thrown into question. If we don’t know what the future is going to ask of us. How can we be instrumental in the way we train people for it. We can’t be super instrumental, so we have to come up with a new plan. I mean, we did not collectively us, the world, that we would have generative AI that could basically write every seventh grade essay or college essay to get into University or the whole host of exams that are being administered and are being passed by AI just as well or better than kids. So we have to come up with a new plan. Like that is not the plan for success. And we need to have kids build that muscle of doing hard things, because I worry greatly that AI will basically make a frictionless world for young people. It’s great for me, I’m loving generative AI. But I have said several decades of brain development where I know how to do hard things. But kids are developing their brains. They’re literally being neurobiologically wired for how to attend, how to focus, how to try, how to connect ideas, how to relate to other people. And all of those are not easy things. And I want to push back on something you said. You said, I don’t know if kids just enjoy what they’re learning. It’s going to help or people are really going to benefit from that. Engagement is very powerful. It’s basically how motivated you are to really dig in and learn, and it relates to what you do. Do you show up. Do you participate. Do you do your homework. It relates to how you feel. Do you find school interesting. Is it exciting. Do you feel you belong at school. It relates to how you think. Are you cognitively engaged. Are you looking at what you learn in one class, applying it to what it might mean in your real in your life, outside or other classes. And it’s also how proactive you are about your learning. And all those dimensions really work together in education. That’s a very powerful construct to predict better achievement, better grades, better mental health, more enrollment in college, better understanding of content, and lots of other benefits to boot. So you have in your book these four modes of engagement. Do you want to talk through them. Absolutely So we found, after three years of research that kids engage in four different ways. Their passenger mode kids are coasting achiever mode. They’re trying to get perfect outcomes resistor mode they’re avoiding and disrupting and explore mode is when they are really love what they’re learning, and they dig in and they’re super proactive. So that’s the high level framework. What part do you want to dig in on. Well why don’t you go through them. I think passenger mode is particularly interesting here. So why don’t we start there. So passenger mode is difficult to spot often for parents and sometimes teachers, because many kids and passenger mode get really good grades but are just bored to tears. They show up to school, they do the homework. They have dropped out of learning. So passenger mode is when kids are really coasting, doing the bare minimum. Some signs of this are your kid comes home and they do their homework as fast as possible. Another sign is that they say oh, school is boring. It’s just boring. I learned nothing. Kids are in passenger mode because school is actually too easy for them. We talked to so many kids who said, look, I’m in class and the teacher’s going over the math homework from yesterday, and I got everyone. And I know the answers, and it’s 45 minutes of that. And I understand the kids who don’t get it. They need the help. But I’m going to shop online or I have kids who say, well, I got the homework home and I know all I know how to do this stuff. So I just put in ChatGPT and it did my problem set for me. And then I turn it in. So that’s when it’s too easy. Another version of why kids get into passenger mode is when it’s too hard. School is too hard. You could have a neurodivergent kid. Kids don’t feel they belong. And so they’re not tuning in. They’ve missed certain pieces of skill sets that they really need knowledge and education is cumulative in many ways, and they get overwhelmed and they need particular special attention. So that’s what’s going on in passenger mode. One reason I wanted to start in passenger mode is that when I think about ways, I probably is now, but can be very harmful, it’s the connection with that mode. Because in passenger mode, what you want to do, and many of us have done passenger mode at work and many of us have done it at school. In some ways, passenger mode was what I aspired to be at school. I just wasn’t able to achieve it. But you’re reading something you think is boring. You’re reading something you don’t want to be reading, but you want to get a good grade. So maybe at an earlier point you would buy the SparkNotes, right. But now you just have ChatGPT summarize it. And more than that can have ChatGPT write the essay. Kids are getting better at telling me no, you actually wrote too good of an essay. Like dumb it down a little bit that you basically hired your own fill in student who can help you Coast, and that will help you get if you’re able to do it adroitly enough. Decent grades, but also whatever meta skills. Forget the knowledge, whatever meta skills are being taught, how to read a book how to write an essay, you’re not actually learning them. And that’s I think when people think educationally about I a bit of the fear and something that I believe everybody believes is happening now. So how do you think about that interaction. I think you’re 100 percent right. I’ve talked to kids all over the country. I’ve seen lots of incidents or cases of highly motivated, highly engaged kids who are using I really well, they’ll write the paper themselves. They’ll go in and use AI for research and help them copy, edit. They’re doing the thinking, and they’ve lined up the evidence to create a thesis, and they’ve presented it in logical order on their own. And that is the art of thinking. And that’s why we assign seventh graders to write essays, or 10th graders to write essays. It’s not that they’re going to create, incredible works of art. It’s to train them how to think logically and how to think in steps. And that is a core component of critical thinking. So as long as kids are mastering that and the AI is helping, that’s a good use. But a lot of kids are using it to do exactly like you said, shortcut the assignments. So an example, one kid I talked to said, well, this high school kid for my essay, I break the prompt into three parts. I run it through three different generative AI models. I put it together, I run it through three anti-plagiarism checkers, and then I turn it in. Another kid said, yeah, I do it. I run it through ChatGPT and then I run it through an AI humanizer, which goes in and puts typos in and makes it your kids are getting good at something. I’m not sure that’s what we want them getting good at, but they’re getting good at tell you, kids will find a way no matter what. Kids will find a way. We cannot out maneuver them with technology. So the first response when I came in was ban it, block it, get anti-plagiarism plagiarism checkers in which are bad, by the way I talked to one kid who showed me he had this essay and the plagiarism checker flag, 40 percent of it, and he changed two words and then it went away. He’s all good. So it is worrisome. So what we need to do is shift what we’re doing in our teaching and learning experiences. I have very personally complicated feelings on this. On the question of AI and education. Just the question of education generally. I hated school, hated it, did terribly in it. Starting in middle school, going through high school, failed classes just found the whole thing impenetrable. And not because I wasn’t smart, not because I wasn’t interested even in things related to it. Just somehow the whole construct didn’t work for me and I couldn’t make it work for me. It wasn’t exactly that I was bored, I. I think today I probably could have muscled through it, but for whatever reason, then I couldn’t. But I was voracious. Outside of school, I spent three or four nights a week at Barnes Nobles. I loved reading deeply into things that I was interested in, and I’ve related this story before, and one of the reactions I get is, well, you should really then recognize the way school fails kids. And in a way, I do, but it’s just not obvious to me at all that school should be tuned for me. Like one thing that I recognize as somebody who studies bureaucracies is that if you just think of US public education to say nothing of also private education, to say nothing of global education, it’s educating a lot of kids, and its ability to tune itself to every kid is going to be pretty modest. And what kids need is different. But somehow you have to be orienting towards something that works for most of them, even if you’re not sure how to make it work for all of them. I’m curious how you think about that. I am not sure I agree. I agree with several things. One, you are not alone. There are many, many kids who currently today are going through the system and feel like you two. I agree with you that as a bureaucratic a system that is actually quite miraculous if you think about it. Like in every community across our country, kids as young as 3 to 18 at the same time of day are getting themselves to a place Monday through Friday for a certain amount of days in the year. I mean, that is an organizational feat. And the thing I don’t agree with is that once you’re there, you just have to design for the mean and the average. I think there’s lots of examples that are relatively big scale. That or at least not just one little school in a corner by one fabulous homespun teacher that do things differently. And I think it actually just gets down to how we orchestrate teaching and learning experiences. Give me one of those examples, one of those examples of a schooling system able to educate in a personalized way at scale that seems to you to be replicable. I’ll give you a couple. So there’s an example of schools in North Dakota that have created studios for their adolescents. And what are studios. They are self-created classes that students can design and sew. And they have to tell you or tell the teacher what standards they’re meeting. I’ll give you an example. We have a great character in the book I’ve done with Jenny Anderson, the Disengaged Teen named Kia, and she was totally disengaged, doom scrolling and in middle school. And then these studios showed up. She got super into it because she was learning history and science, and she decided to design an escape room, and she had to list out for herself. These are the standards I’m meeting for whatever grade she was in 10th grade, I think, history and science. And she did an escape room around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy. But she had to design this escape room that turned her on nobody else. And she got super excited. And she did several of those. And then she actually said she was so motivated, she went back to normal classes. They’re doing that across the district. That’s one small example. There’s other examples of schools that you do really we’re talking about. I do tech based education on core subjects for a couple hours a day math, science, reading, social studies, and then for the rest of the day, they are doing projects together on whatever it may be that they so decide. And there’s a curriculum. There’s things, the teachers want them to learn. It’s not a every kid do whatever you want, but that’s super motivating. There’s no reason that we couldn’t do that with the existing staff and people and school buildings and infrastructure. We just have to have the willpower to decide to do things differently. I’m going to Zoom in on something in that story, which is that when the student you brought up found the thing that lit her up, she was then able to do better in all the other classes that maybe didn’t. This was a little bit of my own experience of life. For me, it was political blogging of all things, which I found as a freshman in college. And once I activated, then I became much better at doing things that I didn’t want to do or didn’t exactly see the point of. And even unrelated fields, I love that. So you started political blogging and then what happened. I think that what would have been the conventional line on me from the adults who knew me with smart kid. Can’t get it together. Just can’t seem to get the homework in. Can’t seem to do things he’s not that interested in doing and can’t even seem to do the things he is interested in doing in a way that fits what we want from him. I read every book in English class and I enjoyed doing the essays, and I’m a good writer. I think I’m willing to say that at this point in my life. I think you’re allowed, and I still did badly on the essays, because it wasn’t what they wanted for me in some way or another. And over time, I just don’t have that. I mean, that was the broad experience of my life that I couldn’t fit what I did to what the world wanted from me. And now I’m just much better at doing that in ways that are not related to my course adventures. I’m not trying to over extrapolate my experience. It’s actually important to me not to over extrapolate my experience. But something I’ve seen you talk about is this quality of when students find the teacher, find the subject, find the approach that activates them, that all of a sudden the things that are not that activating to them become easier that there is a lock and a key dynamic. There is. And this is something we talk about around finding your spark. Kids need to find their spark, and they may have many sparks, and their sparks may change. But when kids find their spark for key was this idea of doing an escape room around historical residential assassinations. She got excited. Other students, they find sparks in other places. One of the characters in our book, Samir, absolutely loved local politics and dove in getting himself on the school board. Ultimately, in high school, another student, Mateo, was super excited and turned on by robotics, and that’s what really turned him around. And when you’re motivated this internal drive, it makes you engage more. You lean in more enjoy it more. There’s a virtuous upward cycle, and there’s lots of evidence to show that it often spills over. So Kia talks about doing these studios for a couple of years, which really helped her re-engage and care about school. And then she went back and did some high school, college credit courses, which were very traditional structure. And she said she didn’t love the structure, but she had enough motivation to figure out how to bend the class to her interests. So that’s the best case scenario. It doesn’t always spill over automatically. What you talked about when you said you enjoyed it, you loved it loved English, but you didn’t give the teachers what they want. It’s probably because you were a total Explorer, and we do not reward engaging in school in a way that supports explorers in general. And that is what we have to change. So then this gets to the I optimist case. And I take the I optimist case is something like this. It’s pretty hard to do personalized learning even if you have examples that you’ve seen work because you have one teacher. It’s a classroom of 20 or 30 kids oftentimes. But I makes this completely different. I gives you more tutors than there are children. It allows you to have tutors who adapt to that kids individual learning style in any way you want it to in any way they wanted to. If this kid is a visual learner, it can do visual learning. If pop quizzes are helpful for them, they can do pop quizzes. It can turn it into a podcast they listen to if you are more audio focused. Everything can be turned into a poem if you absorb information better through the sonnet form that as we get better at this and as we build these systems and tune them better, although they’re already pretty capable here, that our ability to personalize education using artificial intelligence as tutors will be like nothing ever seen before in human history. It’s a complete quantum leap in educational possibility, and as such, it allows you to bring every child into their educational utopia, whatever that is, to spark them, to turn them on, to make them into an Explorer. How do you feel about that more utopic vision. I think we’re on the same page. We schools exist. They’re important. They’re important for many reasons. We need to change what we do inside of them, particularly because of Gen AI, and we need to do it quickly. In addition to I would say, regulating GenAI. So it isn’t so massively in students and young people’s hands without being designed for that purpose. I would say those are the two big things we need to do. But I don’t think our goal inside schools when we’re educating young people is to have a 100 percent personalized learning journey for every kid. What I think you’re talking about is actually the ability for GenAI to help teachers, which I think is very real. I think there’s a big difference, and we need to make a big distinction between AI supporting educators in doing what they do versus going direct to young people. Well, let me push you on this for a second before you go here, because if I’m taking the position of the AI optimist, what I’d say is, no, I’m not saying that. I’m saying the AI will be better than the teachers. Better what if we are saying that AI is going to be better than the median for many people at many kinds of work. Why would we not assume that this system, we will be able to build in six years, given how fast these things are developing, won’t per kid be better than the teacher. I’m not saying I believe this, but I want to make you argue. You’re pushing on it. I get it the I optimist case. But the question is better at what. So teachers do many, many things. Kids learn in relationships with other humans. We’ve evolved to do that. I do not think that we will go away from that. Or we may go away and then we’ll be like Oh my God, that was a huge mistake. And 10 years later, go back. So there’s a question around skill development and knowledge transmission. That is one thing a teacher does. And I think that’s what you’re talking about. That is an area where I think technology can be good, can be really good. And actually we see it even without generative AI, there’s adaptive learning software. That helps kids really learn to read. Which is incredibly helpful, especially if you have access gaps. You don’t have good teachers. You have large classes, you have substitute teachers that aren’t trained on how to teach kids to read. So that complemented with things that motivate kids, get them excited and see the relevance of what they’re doing, which is often in person. Could be a great could be a great thing to do. Inside the classroom, we see private schools doing that. There’s a group of schools that I’ve not visited and I don’t up close, but alpha schools are doing this. They do. And they’ve been doing it for 10 years. Actually, they do a couple hours of adaptive learning on key academic subjects. And then the rest of the time, kids are working together to build bridges or learn about financial literacy or play sports, or identify a passion that they want to go learn about in their community. It’s together. It’s alone. What we don’t want to do is bring AI in and have every kid sitting in front of an AI tutor alone at their desk for eight hours a day. That’s not the future that is going to help our kids. I guess another way you might think about it is that this changes the job of the teacher quite substantially. Absolutely so. And I will say, I think I don’t believe what I’m about to say. So I don’t want to get yelled at by everybody for no, no, for every take I’m talking about. I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to my beloved audience. My beloved audience. Fair enough. But one thing I’ve observed is that it seems to me that where AI is going to push is towards the skills of the manager, the editor, the supervisor, the fact checker, in a way, and often away from the skills which are right now more numerous and needed in more numerous quantities of the worker of the writer of in this case, maybe the teacher. So if you think about that world that you were just describing as the one we don’t want a second ago, where you have 25 kids in a class, they’re all staring at a screen. They’re all working with an individualized eye tutor. You could imagine a world if you think about every one of those screens as a junior teacher, as an individual tutor, that there’s some master teacher in the room who the kids can go talk to who can be pulled in to oversee the learning to reshape what’s happening there is testing. There are things that are trying to help us evaluate how the kids are doing. But the teacher who’s already managing a classroom of students is now also, in a way, managing a classroom of helpers, of tutors. I think that would be the kind of vision you would hear from the more I pilled among us. The role of the teacher in traditional public schools is damn near impossible. Honestly they have to master a certain subject. They have to get kids to grade level. So if you have. And usually we have a wide difference of grade levels in school between 3 and four different grade levels. So they’ve got to differentiate and figure out who needs what. The bored kid, who’s the passenger, the struggling kid who’s also the passenger, both of them silent and quiet and you don’t even know. And they’ve got to manage classroom dynamics like kids have to not hit each other or disrupt each other or ruin the furniture. And they have to increasingly be social workers. Kids are not doing well. Lots of mental health problems. They’ve got a spot that they’ve got to help it. They also have to be relationship managers. They’ve got to work with parents, et cetera. So it’s very hard for one teacher to do this all. Absolutely I think the wave of the future is a different model where you have multiple people, and one of those could be an AI tutor helping support our kids growth and development. The interaction with I can help with skill development, knowledge acquisition, but that is one slice of what happens in a classroom, and it is one slice of what it really means for kids to be educated. Kids are learning all sorts of things in a classroom. They’re learning how to self-regulate emotions in a group. They’re learning how to understand different perspectives from kids who are different from themselves. They’re learning how to ask for help when they need it. There’s a whole bunch of things that kids are kids are learning. That is much more person to person that we want to maintain, I would argue. Here’s where I actually am. I think we’ve just been going through a catastrophic experiment with screens in children. And right now, I think we are starting to figure out that this was a bad idea. And schools are banning phones. My sense is that they are not relying very much on laptops and iPads. There’s a big Vogue for a while of every kid gets their own laptop or tablet. I think that’s beginning to go away if I’m reading the tea leaves of this right. And so I feel a bit better about that. As a parent of young kids. I really feel badly for the parents whose kids have been navigating this over the past 10 or 15, 10 years, let’s call it. And right now I see AI coming, and I don’t think we understand it at all. I don’t think we understand how to teach with it. I don’t think the studies we’re doing right now are good studies, yet there are too many other effects we’re not going to be measuring. I think there’s the narrow thing that a program does, and then what it does for a kid to be staring at a screen all the time in a deeper way. I believe human beings are embodied. And if you made me choose between sending my kids to a school that has no screens at all. And one that is trying the latest in AI technology, I would send them to school with no screens at all in a second. But we’re going to be working through this somehow. And what scares me. Putting aside what world my kids graduate into is in moving into schools at the exact time that they don’t know what the hell to do with this technology, and they’re about to try a lot of things that don’t work and probably try it badly. And I wonder, as somebody who’s tracked this, what you think the lessons of what I consider at least the screens and phones debacle of the 2010s or the 2000 seconds have been. I agree with you 100 percent It was a massive, uncontrolled experiment and our kids were the Guinea pigs. We just had a wait and see approach. We cannot take a wait and see approach again, and I think that there’s lots of lessons. I would say, first off, do not use generative AI unless you really know what you’re using it for. There is a real sense of FOMO among educators, parents, young people, even that there’s this thing happening out there, and I should use it because it’s the newest thing. I saw that with groups who were working on student being, and they had done teacher training around being curriculum for teachers, and they said oh, we need to train parents how to do it. So their idea was, let’s use Gen AI. It’ll be great because parents also do need to reinforce being messages that teachers are giving in school, which is true. And what we’ll do is we’ll create an app. And so this is what they had suggested. Ezra, imagine you sitting down around the dinner table. You pull up your phone and you have an app and your kids have their phone and you say, O.K, how are you feeling today. And you’re looking at your phone and they’re telling you how they feel. And then you click through. And ask why. Why are you feeling that way. Like mediated through a phone. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. Like we’ve lost our mind like that. We need AI to talk to our kids. So if there’s not a real problem you’re trying to solve, don’t use it is number one. Number two any I really do believe this. Any company that wants to work with kids in schools should be a benefit corporation, because legally, you have a lot of companies who are creating perhaps really good stuff if used well, that they have to maximize profits, they can’t maximize social benefit and well-being. One thing that worries me is the way in which this might maybe already has been widen the inequality between parents who can pay for private schools and parents who can’t. And what I mean by that is that private schools can just adapt more quickly. They are not dealing with they don’t have to go through legislatures and have the boards, and they’re just a little bit more independent. They can take the screens out, they can put them in, they can limit what comes in. Whereas the public school systems tend to be somewhat more slow moving. I just knew living out in the Bay area, a lot of tech people who were paying money to send their kids to private schools that had banned the products they made, starting many years ago. And the rest of everybody was sending them to public schools that had not done that. And when things are very, very fast moving. Being able to be fast moving is really important. So somebody who cares a lot about public education. What should the orientation of the public schools be. How do they not seem to parents who think there’s something that their kids should be getting out of this. Don’t their kids need to know how to use AI. So they’re going to need to attract parents on that level, but also how do they not end up flat footed if this is turning out to be a disaster. This is a really tricky question. And you point on something that is a real issue, which is around the deep equity issues that have already emerged. So think about the schools that ban AI. For a kid who has no access to AI at home, versus a kid who goes home and has full access to all the AI tools, that right there is a huge cleavage in our country. It also there’s a huge equity gap in terms of language. Large language models work off of language that is written down. There’s a lot of languages that aren’t written down that much. They have very little written down. And so you’re seeing a global gap across the globe between African and Indigenous languages and communities versus English speaking, or other large languages. So there is equity is a huge one. Your question about public versus private, I would say to public education systems not have FOMO because that is what the gut instinct is. When a new technology comes, I’m missing out. I have a fear of missing out and I need to adopt it. And I see this. So don’t have FOMO. Don’t use it unless it’s a real problem you want to solve. Do give it to the adults in the school building. Give it to teachers. Have them use it and figure out how it will help them today. Then give it to really novel school leaders to think about how they could maybe restructure the teaching and learning experiences. What are the things that I can do. There’s so much that I could actually do to help make public schools work better. Bus schedules, calendaring, school meals, cafeteria. I mean, assessment input. There’s so much time that could be really freed up. Let me try to sharpen the FOMO argument or the argument that will be used to give people FOMO. The argument goes something like this if AI is a very potent technology that’s going to be integrated into virtually everything in the future, not literally everything, but quite a lot, then not just your literacy, but your competency in it becomes paramount. You’re not going to be replaced by an AI. You’re going to be replaced by a person who knows how to use AI. And so what you need to learn is to use the AI. You need to learn how to manage it, how to prompt it, a sense of what it can and can’t do. And there’s no way to do that other than relentless familiarity and experimentation and exposure. And so a kid who goes to some Luddite school, or when they’re young, the toys are made out of wood. And when they’re older, the books are all printed on paper, and there’s not a Gen AI in sight is going to lose out. And it will be like having not taught them mathematics right, or having not taught them how to drive, or something of that, or how to type. How do you take that argument. I think it is percent right. And I think the percent depends on the age of the child. I absolutely, 100 percent think you should send your kids to the Waldorf school with a wood blocks. And when they’re young, we know that kids early childhood, the more screen time they have, the less language acquisition they have. We know that babies when infants are learning language, they learn a lot of language from human to human contact. And if you put the same sentences on a screen, they don’t learn it. Our neurobiology is not going to change in five years. So we have to work with. That’s the only confines I think we really have to work within everything else. I think we can reimagine. But it’s true that when kids get older and you do want to teach AI literacy, when kids understand this is true for social media, too. When kids learn about Oh, these big companies are, trying to addict me there. I’m doing it for free. But I get with my attention and staying on it longer is how they make money. You tell that to teenagers. Actually, there’s been great research on this and they get pissed off. I think we need to do the same with AI literacy. This is how it works. It’s not some magical thing. It’s not another human being. So when kids get older, we need to teach them about that. And then they need when they get older, they need to start playing with it, playing with it, using it. But my huge caveat is with AI that is designed for kids right now, there is a spring fling race by the large AI labs to get students to sign up. You’ve got ChatGPT giving two months free of Plus. Then you got come in two months free for Super grok and then Google, not to be outdone, is like, well, you can get a year free and I’ll give you two terabytes of storage. And these are largely for college students. And Google just made Gemini available for kids through parents with family plan. And they are racing to get allegiance of young kids. This is terrible because those products are not designed for children and for learning, I guess. Then to go back to your equity point, there’s the argument from the opposite direction in equity, which is that it is the kids with the least access to all kinds of enrichment materials to tutors. I mean, we know what Rich kids in urban centers get and then what you’re getting, I mean, in parts of America that are rural and don’t yet have broadband or don’t have wide access to broadband, to say nothing of a kid in Nigeria, in rural Nigeria, that is where at least a well-structured Gen AI tutor might be able to make a difference, really fast. You’ve talked a bit about a study in Nigeria that I never quite know how seriously to take these studies yet. But why don’t you say what it did and what it found. So I think that AI has real potential for very specific use cases, particularly around access gaps. And in Nigeria, what was done was after school twice a week, an AI tutor helped kids learn English. And it was for six weeks, which is not long. It was June, July, I think it was a randomized controlled trial. We’re still waiting for all the evidence to come through. But 0.3 standard deviations, which is pretty good, equivalent to maybe two years of average English learning. And we see that difference with other technologies too. It doesn’t have to be an AI. It can be rule based AI. It could be predictive AI. We’ve seen similar benefits, for example, in Malawi teaching literacy and numeracy to kids with offline tablets, where teachers have maybe 80 to 100 kids in a class, and each kid is having a Personalized Adaptive learning experience that is hugely beneficial as well. So that’s one use case. Another use case that I think is really great is neurodivergent kids. Super helpful. There’s all sorts of kids that have different learning differences that struggle in school don’t have access to the specialists that they need that would benefit greatly from being in a classroom where they could have a little assistant to help them navigate. I see my youngest son has dyslexia and they the read and write text to speech, speech to text has been game changing for him. There’s also use cases here in the US. You see AI being used and experimented around supporting wellness advisors who fill the gap for school counselors in rural school districts, for example, where they don’t have school counselors, which is actually an actual person. But AI is boosting that person’s ability to have a helpful conversation with a kid. And it’s bringing through tech mental health resource into a community that didn’t have one. So there’s lots of use cases actually, if done well contained, well designed, well. And we humans have our hand on the steering wheel. Ethan Mollick, who’s an AI expert, he’s got this idea that has been influential for me about the best available human. Is AI better for you in a certain purpose. Not than the best human, but the best human available to you at a given moment. Exactly so Yes, having a professional, excellent editor like my editor at the New York Times’ would be better. But most people don’t have that available. So AI is a better than the best available editor to them. There’s a lot more demand for therapy than there are therapists, so oftentimes AI is practically where it’s going, even for me. Sometimes it’s a better therapist than the best available therapist I have available at a given moment. It certainly seems plausibly true in education, too. There’s all kinds of times when you are confused by what you are reading, what you are learning. Morning Yep. And you’re in a big class, and it’s embarrassing to ask 55 questions, or there isn’t even time to ask 55 questions. And you don’t want to seem stupid, but if you could contain the system somehow, and that seems more plausible here, where there’s a fundamental prompt at the core of them. Then if we got that right, it in a lot of these use cases, it could be really. Absolutely and the key is what you said contain the system. We can’t just bring commercial tech into our schools and hope it will solve these problems. It has to have guardrails. We have to make sure that the data that’s being trained on is legit, and not going to create harmful prompts for kids. We’ve seen terrible things with commercial AI companions, with young people, developing relationships and being really manipulated emotionally. But you can put guardrails. It’s totally possible. It’s just where who. What the. Frankly, it gets back to the incentives. It gets back to the business model. Which is where you regulation and government could and should step in. So Yes, if contained is the question. So then let me ask you about the other impulse somebody might have, which is not that you’re going to be replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI, but that in a world where we have AIs, the most important thing for human beings to be is as human as possible. And that what we need to do is return to more classical education, that what we need to do is be reading the great books, developing the attentional faculties that a lot of data and anecdata suggest that even very elite students are losing to read a long book and think about it, to write a long essay, to be educated in the way that was considered high civilization education 70 years ago. And you might get at a Saint John’s or a U of Chicago or certain private schools today. But actually what we should do is retreat somewhat. School should be a place not where we learn how to partner with machines, because the rest of society is going to tell you how to do that. School should be a place where we develop specifically human faculties, such that we are capable and flexible and attentive in moving through a world that we just cannot predict. We 100 percent want kids to have the capacity for deep attention. And you’re thinking about your own kiddos who are young. And I’m thinking about my own teenagers who are 13 and 16 and I see the undermining of attentive faculties from when my 16-year-old got his phone. For a long time he didn’t want a phone because I’d been droning on and on for years. Because he has me as a mother about addiction and opportunity costs and just that it’s O.K to enjoy it a little bit, but can’t sacrifice sleep and physical exercise and in-person communication. And then he did get his phone and he struggles with it. And he says, mom, this is really hard. Like it’s eroding his ability to do his homework or to follow something he wants to do. The only thing that it doesn’t seem to distract him from doing is playing the piano, because he loves playing the piano. So anything that we can do to actually ensure young people are developing the muscle, and it’s not just attention and tension is the entry point. That’s the doorway that gets you through. It’s actually reflection and meaning making, which is what you get from deep reading and reading full books, which a lot of young people struggle to do today. You also can get it from other means. You could get it from long Socratic dialogues in community with diverse people over time, but it has to be an experience where you reflect think about meaning think about different perspectives, and it changes how you see the world. But what do you think about this idea that school should be a rare, screen free oasis in a child’s life. I’ve sometimes imagined a school that I could send my kids to. I’m not saying it exists just in my head, Yes. Where what they do is they go in and somebody is watching them and helping them read books and think through math. And there’s long periods and they have a certain amount of exploratory capacity in that. You can choose between different books. You can. But that the idea that maybe one space in their life would just be a place that is trying to encourage in them that capacity for meaning making, for deep attention, for deep contemplation. It seems to me to be more valuable than it seems to be to other people, to just have a teacher sit there and watch kids read for an hour and a half at a time. And then there’s a discussion then to do a lot of what we do in school. And so this idea of schools as explicitly counter to the trends of the moment, because they need to develop things at the moment, will not naturally develop. How do you think about that. I think that’s right. I actually think if I had to choose for my own kids. And I do. We would have a school that has no phones for all the reasons we know. And Jonathan Haidt has done a great job on, catalyzing that movement here in the US and bringing it from across the globe to our schools. I think today we should have cell phone bans in school. Bell to Bell. Don’t have it at recess because that’s where you start interacting and playing with kids. And I think we should make school a place where kids can actually interact with each other, have develop human to human socialization capacities because there is massive commercial tech the minute they leave school that is vying for their attention and coming for them. And make sure to do some high quality AI literacy. AI literacy is way, way different than using AI to learn AI. Literacy is. What is this. How was it made. What are the risks. What are the benefits. And let’s talk about what. How our ethics around this new tool and how to incorporate it into our lives. With an adult instructor talking about how it works and what it is. I think that’s AI literacy. And that’s important. I hope you’re right. I’ve been in general, very skeptical of how much literacy will do. But I guess this goes back. To I mean, you were mentioning how much we will do, but your question is, will it make a difference. As phone literate as I think you can almost be. I’ve been writing about this for years. Yeah, I’m functionally extremist on this issue. And still the only way for me to modulate my. Own use, to the point I would like is to use a device that hobbles my phone, the brick, every time I touch it to the RFID chip. And that if I don’t do that, you’ll be all the literacy in the world. I have known John Hyatt for many, many years. He has been on this show. I’ve read the anxious generation. Yes it doesn’t do me that much good, because that’s just not how the brain works, any more than knowing that I shouldn’t eat so many Oreos keeps me from eating them. If they’re on the table in front of me, and I think you bring something up that’s really important, which is these things need to be regulated. It’s ridiculous that they’re out there being used by kids. Like, and it’s ridiculous to say, Ezra, it’s your willpower. That should be the deciding factor. It’s ridiculous for adults, it’s ridiculous for kids. These are incredibly seductive technologies. So this is a really tough one for me around because you do want kids to be fluent in The New technology of the time, and you do want them to have an ethics and awareness about it. You don’t want them to be seduced by it. The large AI labs are perfectly capable. Perfectly capable, if they wanted to of creating a Gen AI product that is designed for kids. That will not be as seductive. It’s interesting. I was just thinking about that. And I wonder. I think they are. But I also wouldn’t overstate how will they even understand what it is they are doing. They don’t fully understand the systems they’re making now. The kids are more I mean, relentlessly. The kids are more capable and ingenious than the 8 or 40 or 100 developers on any given project. When you’re building something that has a small number of hundreds of people building it, and then it’s used by 40,000 kids, I think our experience is that they are clever in ways typically that you are not. I do think that over time we can create things that are curbed. It’s just that I’m not sure we even know exactly what we are targeting, what we are creating. Well, I would say they’re the they have to change how they’re developing the products. You can’t create an AI that’ll be great for kids and teachers and teaching and learning without having teachers and kids and education experts and child development experts in the development process with you. And so few are. So I think about what the Dutch government is doing. They’re doing a partnership with the teacher unions and the academics and the tech companies, and they’re having a little lab to figure out how to what would I look like in schools. But any of that bottom up experimentation is a way to go before you roll it out. Because most AI developers, although they might be good people, they’re not child development specialists. But if they change the way they develop their products, they could. So then I want to go back to where we began, which is if you’ve got young kids now, they’re going to be going into school in the age of AI. How should you think about their schooling. So we can’t really predict the shape of society in 15 or 20 years. I don’t think that’s a question we could answer on the show. If we could. We should probably be investing, not podcasting. But what we have in education now is constant markers that are supposed to tell us as parents how well our kids’ education is going. And that’s basically grades and maybe to some degree, counselor reports. And the idea is if they get good grades and they seem happy and well-adjusted, then at the end of that process, they’ll go to a good college or go to a trade school and get a good job. And it’s going to be a pretty straight line. All A’s equal. Good job. The future is foggier. What they will need to know is maybe a little foggier. What then should a parent be trying to watch. In the meantime, how do you think about whether or not your kid’s education is going well. If you’re a little suspicious that the grades designed for and maybe even not that well designed for the society we have had are not going to correlate all that well to the society we will have. And I think as a parent, you yourself, but also other parents out there are right to be suspicious because I think that linear line is going to be much more complicated as the years go on with AI in our world. So what I would think about is a couple of things. One, getting back to the research I’ve done with my co-author and colleague Jenny Anderson. Grades don’t show you how much kids are engaged. Schools are not designed to give kids agency. Schools are designed to help kids comply, and it’s actually not really the fault of the teacher. Teachers are squished from above with all sorts of standards and squished from below. With parents, putting a lot of pressure on teachers about their kids’ performance and outcome. And what you really want is some feedback loops that are beyond just grades and behavior. Like to is my kid developing agency over their learning. And what I mean by that is are they able to reflect and think about things they’re learning in a way that they can identify what’s interesting, and they can have the skills to pursue new information. That right there is, I think, going to be the core skill. It is the core skill for learning new things in an uncertain world, which is, I think, one of the number one things we think about. In addition to that, I would say make sure kids are learning to interact with other human beings, any school that has them working with peers. But even connecting with community members are social networks are getting smaller. There’s going to be a premium on human to human interaction as more and more skills get automated and done by AI, which are the more knowledge, cognitive tasks, the interpersonal caregiving, teaching, skills are going to continue to be important for some time. I’m not sure for how long, but for some time. And then the last thing, which may seem silly to you, but I increasingly keep thinking about is think about speaking, listening, and speaking as the missing piece of literacy alongside reading and writing. We’re going to need to show our merit and our credentials more and more through what the British call oracy skills think we’ve lost the art of listening and speaking. I think that’s a good place to end. Thank you for speaking and listening with me. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience? So the first one is “Democracy and Education” by John Dewey, which is over 100 years old. And we are now seeing, through lots of great neuroscience, that his observations around the teaching and learning experience and what makes for a good teaching and learning experience were right. He has some great discussions around the importance of reflection, not just ingesting knowledge, but reflecting on it, making meaning, figuring out how to do things with it. And I love it because we didn’t talk about this as much. But the role of schools in our society are more than just your and my kids’ education and getting a job, even though that’s what we care about most as a parent, they are about creating a Democratic society or not. So that’s an oldie but goodie, I love it. John Dewey. The second book, is by Gaia Bernstein. It’s called “Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.” She’s a law professor at Seton Hall University, and she I really enjoy this book because it gives a really good overview, particularly around kids and young people of the incentives that commercial tech has and how we need to what are some strategies for resisting that and getting to a better place. And the last one it’s called “Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, LEGO Men and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World” By Srdja Popovic, who was the student leader, Serbian student leader, that started a movement to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic and now is doing quite a bit of work on nonviolent protest against authoritarianism. And to me, this book is like the updated version of nonviolent activism. He really gets media, he really gets social media. And I just think it’s incredibly relevant today. Rebecca Winthrop, Thank you very much. Thank you.