What is School for Now?
Education should awaken what makes us human. AI is forcing us to remember that.
“College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.”– A student in Utah
A recent New York Magazine article profiled students across North America who are using AI to help with nearly every part of their education: writing papers, summarizing textbooks, answering job interview questions.
Some have stopped seeing assignments as learning experiences at all.
One student admitted that most of college felt “hackable by AI,” and that he wasn’t interested in doing the work himself.
What’s striking isn’t just that students are outsourcing their essays, but that many of them no longer see the point of what they’re being asked to do.
As one teaching assistant put it, “The students kind of recognize that the system is broken... Maybe the original meaning of these assignments has been lost.”
That’s the real crisis.
We live in a time when nearly all of human knowledge is available in our pocket.
So if education is just about memorizing facts or giving the “right” answer, we’ve already lost.
ChatGPT didn’t break that model, but it may have revealed how fragile it already was.
I think back to one of the most transformative learning experiences I’ve had: my time at St. John’s College, a tiny liberal arts school nestled in the mountains of Santa Fe.
We studied four years of math, science, literature, and philosophy through the original texts. Plato in Ancient Greek, Newton, Darwin, Euclid in their own words.
There were no lectures, no external sources. Just 20-person discussions where everyone had to engage. You couldn’t hide (though you wanted to sometimes). In math class, you demonstrated proofs at the board. In literature, you wrestled with meaning out loud. If you didn’t absorb the material or think for yourself, it showed.
It certainly wasn’t for everyone, and it didn’t offer a direct career path.
But it taught me to think, to speak, to question, to listen.
To be human in a deeper way.
ChatGPT might’ve helped me then, maybe to explore ideas, to clarify my thinking.
But it couldn’t have done the work for me. The work wasn’t about information.
It was about transformation.
Tuition keeps rising, and students are carrying debt into a market that no longer guarantees stability.
The old promise: study hard, go to college, get a job, is breaking.
So students are right to ask: What’s the value of school now?
This is why at AI4ALL we focus on project-based learning—giving students the opportunity to apply AI to real-world problems in healthcare, business, climate, and more.
That’s the kind of education that prepares someone for the complexity, uncertainty, and chaos of the world we live in.
I don’t think we can, or should, try to stop students from using ChatGPT.
And why would we?
In many fields, workplaces are now requiring team members to use AI tools as part of their jobs. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle.
But what we CAN do is help students learn how to use AI well.
Not as a way to shortcut effort, but as a tool for deeper inquiry, reflection, and creativity.
Education that equips students to think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate deeply, and adapt quickly.
Because if we keep going down this current path, we may find ourselves in a parody of learning, where, as one professor put it in the NYTimes,
“AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.”
Maybe this disruption is a long-overdue invitation to reimagine.
Education at its best has the power to transform and awaken something deeply human: That spark of curiosity, the drive to create meaning, the hunger to build a better future.
That’s the kind of education the world needs now more than ever.
Interesting topic and I feel as old as time because I have been absent in the dawn of this new technology. I have seen technology advanced from land line telephones to compact, mobile telephones which have more memory and more powerful systems than the large desktop computers I was introduced to in my college years. I believe AI as a tool should have its own course of introduction and instruction for students to learn & master its capabilities. However, i believe students should not be able to use AI during the courses in which it is meant to empower their mind and introduced them to such activities as creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking and examination.
I think the balance would need to look like a science or critical thinking class where students learn in the classroom setting the history, parameters and restraints of AI along with study of AI influence on the various arenas affected by AI. In the "Lab session" students would use their learned knowledge and apply AI in a controlled environment and test their hypothesis.and be allow to use critical thinking to analyze the various situations so they are prepared to be more productive snd successful in the real world and utilizing AI to its highest capacity and perhaps assist in its future development. However, I am not an educator in our public or private school systems nor do I pretend to know the in and outs of such systems and this is only my opinion.