A pupil has been sweating over his philosophy essay for an hour. The one next to him finished in 4 seconds. His name is ChatGPT.
Faced with AI, schools often respond with repression: ban, detect, punish. But if an artificial intelligence can get top marks in an exam designed for humans, perhaps it is the exam that needs questioning.
For fifty years, our education system has mostly rewarded memory and faithful recall. Exactly what the machine does better than us. And just as critical thinking becomes the most sought-after skill on the job market, we have made maths optional in sixth form and relegated philosophy to a nice-to-have.
In this article, I look back at the industrial legacy of schooling, at what Feynman, Stiegler and Graeber had already seen coming, and at what we could teach differently.
One question kept nagging at me throughout: were we really taught to think, or mostly to give the right answer?
This episode brings together the three parts of the article:
Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: School trained executors. AI will replace them.