In the Age of AI, What Should Schools Teach?

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture . . . to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. — John Adams, 1780

S ometimes, the purposes of schooling align with individual and social needs of the time; other times, they don’t. Reflecting the best management thinking of 1918, when local communities rapidly expanded and institutionalized schooling, today’s public schools take a minimalist, utilitarian approach to knowledge, aiming to teach only the knowledge that graduates seem likely to use in their jobs and their homes. That approach never made much sense, and even less so now, at a time when artificial intelligence might render much of our “practical” knowledge obsolete, with household tasks and jobs from clerk to investment manager increasingly likely to be done without humans. If schools are to continue, what might history tell us about what schooling should do next?

The first U.S. public schools, taxpayer-funded and with mandatory attendance, were authorized by Massachusetts’s 1647 “Old Deluder Satan Act” — so named since schools taught literacy for young people to read the Bible, spreading its individual and shared meaning to interpret the world and one’s place in it. Religion remained the dominant goal of schools until the American Revolution, when at the urging of leaders like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush, schools began teaching “politics and war,” promoting love of country in addition to love of God.

In 1894, the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten — leaders of prominent colleges led by Harvard University’s Charles William Eliot — proposed that secondary education realign to teach classical humanities, foreign language, and modern science to create informed citizens through the broad “liberal education” today championed by traditionalists like E. D. Hirsch and Mark Bauerlein. For the Ten, knowledge was a good thing in and of itself, so every subject “should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease.” In other words, students should learn as much as possible, whatever their future vocation, because more knowledge makes one a better citizen, a better decision-maker, and often a better person. Further, in a statement as true in his day as ours, Eliot complained that Americans “habitually underestimate the capacity of pupils at almost every stage of education.” In the 1890s, Eliot’s Committee of Ten raised the bar.

Just a generation later, as public schooling grew rapidly, a very different NEA committee, which critic Richard Mitchell later dubbed the “gang of 27,” dominated by school bureaucrats and leaders of colleges of education, issued “The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.” Influenced by the best science of the day, this report’s authors believed that most students (particularly minorities) lack the capacity for liberal education, so schooling’s purpose should realign to social utility — applied knowledge for vocation and home — as well as custodial care to keep students off the streets, to keep crime and unemployment low, as my school superintendent helpfully explained in the 1970s. After all, as Thomas Sowell observed in “The ‘Need’ for More ‘Education,’” a young person sleeping in class is a “student,” while a young person sleeping on a park bench is an unemployment statistic. As a rule, education leaders and elected politicians prefer the former to the latter.

Academic rigor further eroded in the late 20th century, when talented women and African Americans could increasingly (and rightly) find jobs more lucrative than teaching — a social revolution great for America but bad for education. After a limited recovery in the 1990s and 2000s school reform era, academic achievement continued falling post-2010 — perhaps in part because of smartphones but also because educators increasingly assumed that young people’s individual or social traumas prevented their learning.

In short, in a sharp break from the first 250 years of American public schooling, in the century since 1918, most public schools have prioritized custodial care and rudimentary levels of learning for vocation and household management — a sharp, shallow contrast to the prior regimes that taught love of God, country, and knowledge for its own sake. This almost certainly explains our collective failure to reform public schools to raise achievement. Academic rigor has not been a core purpose of public schools for decades, if not a century. From sports to food to fads like socio-emotional learning, practically everything else takes priority.

As artificial intelligence replaces more workplace jobs and homeplace tasks, 20th-century utilitarian philosophies that justify dumbing down schooling will go from contested to archaic, since ignorance cannot provide meaning to unemployed and underemployed citizens. Today’s public schools fail to teach painting and poetry, much less religion or philosophy, leaving little reason for people who lack social utility to find individual reasons to go on living. Society may end up resembling Kurt Vonnegut’s sardonic dystopian novel Player Piano, in which machines and a tiny number of elite engineers do all the work, leaving everyone else depressed, drunk, and ultimately rebellious. Even if things don’t go that far, the sheer amount of entertaining misinformation pumped out by AI will require citizens to have sufficient knowledge to tell fact from fiction if our democracy is to survive.

As a former school board member who was barely able to get an award-winning principal to hire math teachers who know math, I can attest that public schools cannot reform their core missions, which are nonacademic. Accordingly, I propose two choice-based alternatives, which through parent decisions can incrementally replace our 1918-era public schools with schools that can prepare young people for life under AI. In the spirit of 1647, publicly funded education savings accounts (ESAs) increasingly enable parents to choose schools aligned with their religious traditions, resembling the state-funded education markets common in Europe, teaching young people modern meaning in our postmodern age.

For those of us who tend secular, in the spirit of 1894, traditional liberal arts education advocated by the Committee of Ten can give students the knowledge and work ethic to navigate the social changes brought by AI, and the patriotic connections to Western (and American) civilization enabling students to find meaning in life. Classical schools, which fill this niche, are growing rapidly to meet parental demand, enabled by the spread of both ESAs and charter schooling. It is no surprise that the two largest and most academically rigorous liberal education charter school networks, BASIS and Great Hearts, came out of Arizona, the first state to embrace large-scale school choice.

Competition for students between these and other types of schools can return meaning to schooling, in turn educating American students to navigate the AI world. In their 1918 realignment, public schools became larger and more standardized, purposely copying factories to “batch process” students, training young people for their social roles in an industrial era. Today, we need many different types of smaller, personalized, academically challenging schools chosen by parents to educate young people for the postindustrial era, when AI and AI-powered machines may eventually take over vocational and household tasks from coding software to cooking. Schools will need to instill in young people intellectual and spiritual depth to adapt. As Adams put it, students might learn “Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine” after we no longer need to focus on agriculture and commerce.

Public education superintendents, school boards, and most teachers are just not up to making the changes needed to navigate the AI era. Since education is always a coalition of the willing, only schools of choice with religious missions, academic missions, or both can prepare our kids for what seems certain to come.