Conventional university education is obsolete. The typical student earning a bachelor’s degree studies the equivalent of roughly forty textbooks over eight semesters. Today, however, any intelligent teenager with access to ChatGPT — trained on millions of books and articles — can surpass that graduate in a contest of factual knowledge. The model of education we follow was shaped by the needs of an earlier age; those needs have now changed. We need to rethink education from the ground up.

The two world wars reshaped modern society in profound ways. Science and technology proved decisive in their outcomes, and technical expertise therefore moved to the center of education in the postwar era. As Harvard educator Julie Reuben shows in The Making of the Modern University, universities rapidly shifted away from the older goal of forming character and judgment, and toward the newer goal of producing specialized knowledge. This transformation made sense in a world where knowledge was scarce, expertise was difficult to access, and modern states and economies urgently needed trained professionals. The system was built for the needs of its time.

The hidden logic of this system was to treat students as containers for the contents of books. Its ideal product was the idiot-savant: rich in specialized information, but poor in judgment, perspective, and practical wisdom. The teacher transmitted knowledge, the student stored it, and the examination verified the transfer. This model served the needs of its age so successfully that it helped create the scientific and technological world which has now culminated in AI. It has, in effect, made itself obsolete.

The wartime and postwar university sought to produce highly specialized experts — the human equivalent of the “mentats” in Dune — because modern states and economies needed people who could command technical knowledge at high levels. That model served its purpose brilliantly. But once machines can outperform human beings in storing, retrieving, and reorganizing information, we are free to recover an older and deeper understanding of education: not the production of human resources, but the formation of human beings capable of judgment, purpose, and meaningful lives.

For much of the modern period, universities increasingly came to see students as future inputs into the labor market — units of skill, productivity, and specialized function. The language of education shifted accordingly: from the formation of persons to the production of “human resources.” But now that machines can shoulder many of the technical and informational burdens that wartime and postwar societies once placed on human beings, education is free to recover its older and deeper vocation: to help us confront the most important questions we face as human beings — how to live well, and how to build a good society.

These questions sound abstract, but their practical consequences are everywhere. The capacities most needed in professional and social life — building trust, working in teams, handling disagreement, resolving conflicts, exercising leadership, and communicating with clarity and sensitivity — are largely absent from formal education. We send students through years of schooling without teaching them how to collaborate, how to listen, how to manage tensions, or how to contribute to healthy institutions. Later, when these absences begin to damage workplaces and organizations, we try to repair them through executive seminars, leadership workshops, and corporate training programs. What education neglects in youth, employers are forced to patch up in adulthood.

Modern education resembles a driving school that teaches students everything about the mechanics of a car — the engine, the transmission, the chemistry of fuel — but never actually teaches them how to drive. Students learn theories about the world while their own lives are pushed to the margins. Yet the most important questions we face are not merely technical ones about how the world works, but practical ones about how to navigate it: how to make choices, how to bear responsibility, how to act well under pressure, and how to live with others. Just as driving requires judgment, attention, and practice rather than abstract knowledge alone, education must once again take seriously the cultivation of the capacities required to live a human life.

This transformation of purpose also changes the meaning of learning. When a student can ask ChatGPT to produce a polished essay on climate change, economic policy, or Shakespeare in seconds, the old educational model breaks down at yet another level. A student can now submit work that looks sophisticated while learning almost nothing. This does not mean that AI should be banned from education. It means that we can no longer mistake polished output for genuine understanding. The central question is no longer whether a student can produce an answer, but whether they have developed any real ownership of the ideas, arguments, and judgments that the answer contains.

Artificial intelligence is a golden opportunity to rethink education from the ground up. By relieving human beings of the burden of storing and processing vast quantities of technical information, it frees education to return to the largest questions now confronting our species: how to build a just society, how to create peace in a fractured world, and how to avert environmental catastrophe. These are not problems that can be solved by technical specialists working in isolation. They require judgment, cooperation, moral imagination, political wisdom, and the capacity to think across disciplines and across divisions. The task of education in the age of AI is to cultivate the human beings capable of using this new power to reshape our world. How this can be done will be the topic of our next article.

Postscript: For a guide to my posts and articles on education, see: From the Mirage of Western Education to the Wellspring of Eternal Revelation, and also Education, Pedagogy, and Decolonizing the Mind

This is an expanded version of article in DAWN: Education in Age of AI (https://www.dawn.com/news/amp/1983268)

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