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traditional pathway failure

Traditional education rewards compliance, and discourages the critical question ‘why’.

However, in the age of AI, students who don’t embrace creativity, critical thinking and personal agency risk falling behind rapidly.

So we have a real conundrum, and it’s likely to be the student that suffers.

Why traditional education will fail in an AI world

Let’s unpack specific reasons why a traditional education approach fails in the era of AI:

Rote learning

You’re taught to memorise information, but not necessarily taking the time to fully understand it. You’ll learn facts, dates, formulas - and how to apply them on tests. Content will be framed in one subject dimension at a time.

  • Why it won’t be effective in the AI era:
    • Students can now engage with multiple knowledge areas simultaneously.
    • They can practically apply knowledge in diverse ways.
    • They can self assess and critique their own work.
    • Students can integrate concepts from multiple disciplines at once.
    • Teaching structured problem solving, truth seeking, and applied practice is now more important than rote learning.
    • Students mastering these skills will excel faster and more effectively.

Standardised testing approaches:

Students are taught once, and assessed in an essay or examination

  • Why it won’t be effective in the AI era:
    • Teachers are never going to know to what extent a student has used AI to help them with their assignment, so what are they really testing?
    • In the world of standardised tests, teachers are under pressure to ‘teach the test’ - which forces them back to point 1 around rote learning.
    • The students or other teachers, that take a more adaptive approach as articulated will learn, more, learn faster, and be way more effective. Creative projects, critical discussion and agency based learning will create smarter humans in an AI world. Period.

Educational conformity:

The system penalises students for walking outside the lines. If you challenge a text, your penalised. If you don’t follow a lab script you fail the experiment. Everything is marked within bounds.

  • Why this wont be effective in the AI era:
    • This is an extension of points 1 and 2.
    • Students that apply creativity with AI tools will be able to do more.
    • Those that do more will become more capable.
    • If we penalise increased capability, we create a moral hazard.
    • Elements of humanity will see this, and the pedagogy will split.
    • Hence traditional system is undermined.

Combined these three factors are going to lead to conflict, particularly as the real world becomes hopelessly incongruent with what’s actually happening.

And if that wasn’t enough lets walk through all the reasons the Factory Model of Education is going to be obliterated. And these are just facts:

  • Todays’ education system preferences uniformity over individual talents
  • Students with diverse talents are forced into near identical curricula
  • Age based grouping completely ignores agency levels or other markers of maturity; and
  • Passions and strengths are discouraged and sidelined by ‘mandatory’ subjects.

Now let’s examine the world students will be going into, and this is the sad bit

  • AI based automation will probably get rid of all repetitive tasks, that traditionally went to low level intellect / talent workers. So they’ll be effectively out of a job. So why train them in an old way to be obedient in the first place? You’re just setting them up for failure.
  • Remaining employers will want humans that are creative, adaptive, and have strong problem solving and agency skills. Skills that are inadequately developed in the current system.
  • There is therefore, a massive immediate skill gap. But where do you fit it in a rigid curriculum? Do you see? You cant retrofit ‘what is’ - to what is needed. We’re going to need greater levels of digital literacy, entreprenuership, and critical thinking as a society - and other curriculum areas need to make way to make that happen.

Why this is going to be so bad for students

Students wont be able to win:

  • The institutions won’t be able to keep up with the level of change required.
  • They’ll get shoehorned into learning stuff that doesn’t matter, that’ll lead them to a UBI
  • Those that work against the system will be ostresized and be misunderstood.

So what can they do?

Nothing at the institutional level. They’ll just need to adapt until the institutions figure it out or get replaced by new institutions.

In the meantime however, they might just need to take control of their own education a bit. E.g.

  • Use available resources to build your own alterative augmented approach.
  • Challenge and question the status quo, and learn how to maximise your own understanding and relevance.
  • Find a community of like minded individuals, even if remote, to support mutual growth; and
  • Take action yourself by integrating AI tools into the way you work, to accelerate your own learning and problem-solving.

I’m not advocating you up and leave school!

I’m saying you need to make a choice.

You must choose between conformity and an outdated system, and creativity and innovation in the AI age. The path you select should create as much harmony as possible in your life while maximising your opportunities and potential.

Conclusion

You might be the first generation to develop true agency - in thousands of years.

A profound opportunity.

Just know that systemic change of this magnitude will take time.

My best tip would be pragmatic and balanced.

Respect traditional education structures - they are still the bedrock of our society (if only to be a form of aggregated childcare). But as you respect it, start cultivating the adaptive mindset necessary for the AI transformed future too. That way you can’t lose.