A few days ago, Sait Tuzel posted We've Been Teaching Kids for a Job Market That No Longer Exists. It is an important provocation for everyone who is or wants a seat at the education table.
TĂĽzel argues that for 250 years, education had one clear purpose: To prepare humans to sell their labor. But AI is quickly rendering that model obsolete and educators are not talking enough about what might replace it.
His generalization is a bit of an overstatement. Along with employment imperatives, there have always also been religious (moral) and assimilationist foundations underpinning formal education.
But, there is no arguing that current schooling has been significantly shaped by job prep priorities. I completely agree with Tüzel that educators aren’t talking enough about what we are preparing students for, and when we do talk it’s often about peripheral details rather than “big picture” issues raised by a future with AI.
What I don’t share is Tüzel’s certainty that the AI takeover is quite as imminent as he suggests. AI has already begun to change the need for some types of job skills, but I don’t think it will end paid labor as a core piece of human identity for the current generation of middle and secondary school students.
Part of my skepticism is the long history of unfulfilled promises made by corporate leaders with very big egos. If we believed everything that the tech industry has promised to its investors and regulators, everyone would have access to endless, cheap power provided by nuclear fusion and we’d already have colonies on Mars.
Observation also leads me to believe that the tech and business bros leading the growth of AI are actually awful at understanding human nature. Reference, for example, Amazon being forced to close its Amazon Go stores because people rejected a human-free shopping experience. What the bros have learned to do in place of deep understanding is to manipulate through fear and ego-stroking. In the long run, most people come to recognize that pattern as abusive and they reject it.
Add the fact that major tech companies are funding and organizing their work using current structures of consumer capitalism, which relies on traditional (often exploitive) labor models, and I’m not convinced that we are headed away from work-as-identity as quickly as Tüzel suggests.
Still, given the astronomical resources that billionaires are currently pouring into AI (and the consequent need to justify that investment and block regulatory obstacles), I have no doubt that monumental change is coming. It is a good bet that AI will eventually alter humanity’s relationship to paid labor in ways that are greater than the changes wrought by industrialization in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
As Tüzel recognizes, this leaves educators with a lot to figure out and our current structures, already under stress and beginning to collapse, aren’t up to the task. The challenges will most certainly not be adequately addressed by simply adding "AI literacy" to the existing curriculum.
TĂĽzel is on to something when he imagines shifting focus from skills needed for lucrative employment to developing capacities for reflection, ethical decision-making, exploration of human purpose, and self-actualization. But we need a practical way to get from here to there because, whatever we envision for the future, we still have a responsibility to prepare students for the now. And right now, universal basic income doesn't exist (and neither does the political will to institute it), AI isn't reliable enough to control essential systems, and we haven't figured out a way to sustain human life and simultaneously provide the energy and water resources that an all-encompassing future AI would need.
We are all on a train that feels like it is gaining speed, but none of us can describe with any degree of certainty exactly where we are headed. We don’t even agree on where we should be headed. But we’re asking educators to lay track anyway so we can keep moving.
So what can educators do? It would be the height of hubris to suggest that I have a complete answer to that question, but I have a practical starting point: Identify the current things we teach that are likely to be evergreen, i.e., the skill sets, habits, and knowledge will be needed no matter the ways in which technology changes our lives. Then build school curricula around the things we identify. Here are a few examples of what that might look like:
1. Integrate more opportunities to explore and think deeply about new possibilities for organizing society by giving science fiction and fantasy a more prominent role in the curriculum.
We already use literature to help students explore the human condition. Let’s expand that to include discussions of books, films, and TV series that help students explore how different types of people benefit or are disadvantaged when societal organization is based on principles and precepts that differ from our own. Unlike studying this question through history or sociology, science fiction allows students to explore possibilities with no constraints. What can humans achieve when anything is possible? And comparing our experience to other sentient (fictional) species is an excellent – and manageable – way to explore what it means to be human in a public school context.
2. Educate for citizenship rather than employment.
In place of an outsized focus on STEM and the marginalization of student journalism as an extracurricular, rebalance the curriculum to offer more time studying social studies. Require every student to learn how to be a journalist and understand the role of a free press in a democracy. In the U.S., expand civics education beyond learning about the three branches of government and the Bill of Rights to include thinking about what constitutes the “public interest” and which current government structures best support the common good.
In every subject area, prioritize the information and skills that students need to know in order to vote as an informed citizen. To start, every student, not just prospective college applicants, would learn
- how to interpret basic statistics and represent data in infographics;
- the relationship between chemistry, the natural environment, and human health;
- what constitutes scientific expertise in various disciplines;
- inquiry-based media literacy analysis of news, textbooks, research reports, and other media sources that influence public opinion.
Ideally, schools would begin to teach in interdisciplinary ways with civics and as the common thread tying together subject areas that we now treat as separate.
Sometimes it feels like educators are being asked to walk on water – to perform miracles even when the terrain we must traverse is constantly churning. We can’t perform miracles. But we aren’t without resources. By its nature, education changes slowly. That’s not always a bad thing. Rather than succumbing to the pace set by AI investors, let’s take some time to imagine how we might use what we know in new ways, including ways that make sense within current structures.
Faith Rogow, Ph.D., independent scholar and author of Media Literacy for Young Children: Teaching Beyond the Screen Time Debates (NAEYC, 2022), is an internationally respected leader and curriculum developer who has been an innovator of media literacy education practices for more than 30 years.
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