Rebecca Winthrop
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
They've lined up the evidence to create a thesis, and they've presented it in logical order on their own. And that is the art of thinking. And that's why we assign seventh graders to write essays or 10th graders to write essays. It's not that they're going to create incredible works of art. It's to train them how to think logically and how to think in steps.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And that is a core component of critical thinking. So As long as kids are mastering that and the AI is helping, that's a good use. But a lot of kids are using it to do exactly like you said, shortcut the assignments. So an example, one kid I talked to said, well, you know... This is a high school kid. For my essay, I break the prompt into three parts.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I run it through three different generative AI models. I put it together. I run it through three anti-plagiarism checkers, and then I turn it in. Another kid said, I run it through chat GPT, and then I run it through an AI humanizer. which goes in and puts typos in and makes it, you know.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Kids will find a way, no matter what. Kids will find a way. We cannot outmaneuver them with technology. So the first response when Gen AI came in was ban it, block it, get anti-plagiarism checkers in, which are bad, by the way. Like I talked to one kid who showed me he had this essay and the plagiarism checker flagged 40% of it and he changed two words and then it went away.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So we cannot out-technologize ourselves. So what we need to do is shift what we're doing in our teaching and learning experiences.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I am not sure I agree. I agree with several things. One, you are not alone. There are many, many kids who currently today are going through the system and feel like you. Two, I agree with you that as sort of a bureaucratic system that is actually quite miraculous if you think about it, like in every community across our country,
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Kids as young as 3 to 18 at the same time of day are getting themselves to a place Monday through Friday for a certain amount of days in the year. I mean, that is an organizational feat. And the thing I don't agree with is that once you're there... you just have to design for the mean and the average.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I think there's lots of examples that are relatively big scale, or at least not just one little school in a corner by one fabulous homespun teacher that do things differently. And I think it actually just gets down to how we orchestrate teaching and learning experiences.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I'll give you a couple. So there's an example of schools in North Dakota that have created studios for their adolescents. And what are studios? They are self-created classes that a student can design and And they have to tell you, or tell the teacher, what standards they're meeting. I'll give you an example.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We have a great character in the book I've done with Jenny Anderson, the disengaged teen, named Kia. And she was totally disengaged, doom scrolling in middle school, and then these studios showed up. She got super into it because she was learning history and science, and she decided to design an escape room.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And she had to list out for herself, these are the standards I'm meeting for whatever grade she was in, 10th grade, I think, history and science. And she did an escape room around the assassination. of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. But she had to design this escape room. That turned her on like nobody else. And she got super excited. And she did several of those.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And then she actually said she was so motivated, she went back to sort of normal classes. They're doing that across the district. That's one small example. There's other examples of schools that, we're talking about AI, do sort of tech-based education on core subjects for a couple hours a day. math, science, reading, social studies.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And then for the rest of the day, they are doing projects together on whatever it may be that they so decide. And there's a curriculum, there's things, you know, the teachers want them to learn. It's not a every kid do whatever you want, but that's super motivating. There's no reason that we couldn't do that with the existing staff and people and school buildings and infrastructure.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We just have to have the willpower to decide to do things differently.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I love that. What's an example? So you started political blogging and then what happened?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And this is something we talk about around finding your spark. Kids need to find their spark. And they may have many sparks and their sparks may change. But when kids find their spark, for Kia, it was this idea of doing an escape room around historical residential assassinations. For other students, they find sparks in other places.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
One of the characters in our book, Samir, absolutely loved local politics and dove in, getting himself on the school board, ultimately, in high school. Another student, Mateo, was super excited and turned on by robotics, and that's what really turned him around. And when you're motivated, this internal drive, it makes you engage more. You lean in more. You enjoy it more.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
There's a virtuous upward cycle. And there's lots of evidence to show that it often spills over. So Kia talks about doing these studios for a couple years, which really helped her re-engage and care about school. And then she went back and did some high school college credit courses, which were very traditional structure.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And she said she didn't love the structure, but she had enough motivation to figure out how to bend the class to her interests. So, that's the best case scenario. It doesn't always spill over automatically. What you talked about when you said you enjoyed it, you loved it, you loved English, but you didn't give the teachers what they want, it's probably because you're a total explorer.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And we do not reward engaging in school in a way that supports explorers in general. Some schools do. And that is what we have to change.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I think we're on the same page. Schools exist. They're important. They're important for many reasons. We need to change what we do inside of them, particularly because of Gen AI, and we need to do it quickly. In addition to, I would say, regulating Gen AI so it isn't so massively in students' and young people's hands without being designed for that purpose.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I would say those are the two big things we need to do. But I don't think our goal inside schools when we're educating young people is to have a 100% personalized learning journey for every kid. What I think you're talking about is actually the ability for Gen AI to help teachers, which I think is very real.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I think there's a big difference and we need to make a big distinction between AI supporting educators in doing what they do versus going direct to young people.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
But the question is better at what? So teachers do many, many things. Kids learn in relationships with other humans. We've evolved to do that. I do not think that we will go away from that or we may go away and then we'll be like, oh my God, that was a huge mistake and 10 years later go back. So there's a question around skill development and knowledge transmission.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
That is one thing a teacher does. And I think that's what you're talking about. That is an area where I think technology can be good, can be really good. And actually, we see it even without generative AI. There's adaptive learning software that helps kids really learn to read. Which is incredibly helpful, especially if you have access gaps. You don't have good teachers. You have large classes.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
You have substitute teachers that aren't trained on how to teach kids to read. So that complemented with... Things that motivate kids, get them excited, and see the relevance of what they're doing, which is often in person, could be a great thing to do inside the classroom. We see private schools doing that.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
There's a group of schools that I have not visited and I don't know up close, but alpha schools. are doing this. They do. And they've been doing it for 10 years, actually, pre-Gen AI. They do a couple hours of sort of adaptive learning on key academic subjects.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And then the rest of the time, kids are working together to build bridges or learn about financial literacy or play sports or identify a passion that they want to go learn about in their community. It's together. It's alone. What we don't want to do is bring AI in and have every kid sitting in front of a
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
AI tutor alone at their desk for eight hours a day, that's not the future that is going to help our kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
The role of the teacher in traditional public schools is damn near impossible, honestly. They have to master a certain subject. They have to get kids to grade level and And usually we have a wide difference of grade levels in school between three and four different grade levels.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So they've got to differentiate and figure out who needs what, the bored kid who's the passenger, the struggling kid who's also the passenger, both of them silent and quiet and you don't even know. And they've got to manage classroom dynamics. Like kids have to not, you know, hit each other or disrupt each other or ruin the furniture. And they have to increasingly be social workers.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Kids are not doing well, lots of mental health problems. They've got to spot that, they've got to help it. They also have to be relationship managers. They've got to work with parents, et cetera. So it's very hard for one teacher to do this all. Absolutely, I think the wave of the future is a different model where you have multiple people and one of those could be an AI tutor.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
helping support our kids' growth and development. The interaction with AI can help with skill development, knowledge acquisition, but that is one slice of what happens in a classroom, and it is one slice of what it really means for kids to be educated. Kids are learning all sorts of things. They're learning how to self-regulate emotions in a group.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
They're learning how to understand different perspectives from kids who are different from themselves. They're learning how to ask for help when they need it. There's a whole bunch of things that kids are learning that is much more person-to-person that we want to maintain, I would argue.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I agree with you 100%. It was a massive uncontrolled experiment and our kids were the guinea pigs. We just had a wait and see approach. We cannot take a wait and see approach again. And I think that there's lots of lessons. I would say, first off, do not use generative AI Unless you really know what you're using it for.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
There is a real sense of FOMO among educators, parents, young people even, that there's this thing happening out there and I should use it because it's the newest thing. I saw that with groups who were working on student well-being. And they had done teacher training around well-being curriculum for teachers. And they said, oh, we need to train parents how to do it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So their idea was, let's use Gen AI. It'll be great because parents also do need to reinforce well-being messages that teachers are giving in school, which is true. And what we'll do is we'll create an app. And so this is what they had suggested, Ezra. Imagine you sitting down around the dinner table.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
You pull up your phone and you have an app and your kids have their phone and you say, okay, how are you feeling today? And you're looking at your phone and they're telling you how they feel. And then you click through and ask, you know, why are you feeling that way? Like mediated through a phone. It's crazy. It's crazy. Like we've lost our mind. like that we need AI to talk to our kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So if there's not a real problem you're trying to solve, don't use it is number one. Number two, any, I really do believe this, any company that wants to work with kids in schools should be a benefit corporation. Because legally, you have a lot of companies who are creating perhaps really good stuff, if used well, that they have to maximize profits.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
They can't maximize social benefit and well-being.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
This is a really tricky question, and you point on something that is a real issue, which is around the deep equity issues that have already emerged. So think about the schools that ban AI for a kid who has no access to AI at home. versus a kid who goes home and has full access to all the AI tools. That right there is a huge cleavage in our country.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
It also, there's a huge equity gap in terms of language. Large language models work off of language that is written down. There's a lot of languages that aren't written down that much. They have very little written down. And so there you're seeing a global gap across the globe between sort of African and indigenous languages and communities versus English speaking or other large languages.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So equity is a huge one. Your question about sort of public versus private, I would say to public education systems, do not have FOMO. Because that is what the gut instinct is when a new technology comes. I'm missing out. I have a fear of missing out. And I need to adopt it. And I see this. So don't have FOMO. Don't use it unless it's a real problem you want to solve.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Do give it to the adults in the school building. Give it to teachers. Have them use it and figure out how it will help them today. Then give it to sort of really, you know, novel school leaders to think about how they could maybe restructure the teaching and learning experiences. What are the things that AI can do? There's so much that AI could actually do to help make public schools work better.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Bus schedules, calendaring, school meals, cafeteria. I mean, assessment input. There's so much time that could be really freed up.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I think it is 50% right. And I think the 50% depends on the age of the child. I absolutely 100% think you should send your kids to the Waldorf School with the wood blocks when they're young. You know, we know that early childhood, the more screen time they have, the less language acquisition they have. We know that when infants are learning language, they learn a lot of language from...
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
human-to-human contact. And if you put the same sentences on a screen, they don't learn it. Our neurobiology is not going to change in, you know, five years. So we have to work with—that's the only confines I think we really have to work with, and everything else I think we can reimagine. But it's true that when kids get older— You do want to teach AI literacy.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
When kids understand this is true for social media too, when kids sort of learn about, oh, these big companies are trying to addict me. They're doing it for free, but I get with my attention and staying on it longer is how they make money. You tell that to teenagers. Actually, there's been great research on this and they get pissed off. I think we need to do the same with AI literacy.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Like this is how it works. It's not some magical thing. It's not another human being. So when kids get older, we need to teach them about that. And then they need, when they get older, they need to start playing with it, playing with it, using it. But my huge caveat is with AI that is designed for kids. Right now, there is a spring fling race by the large AI labs to get students to sign up.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
You've got ChatGPT giving two months free of GPT Plus. Then you got XAI come in, two months free for SuperGrok. And then Google, not to be outdone, is like, well, you can get a year free and I'll give you two terabytes of storage. And these are largely for college students. And Google just made Gemini available for kids through Parents with Family Plan. And they are racing.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
to get allegiance of young kids. This is terrible because those products are not designed for children and for learning.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So I think that AI has real potential for very specific use cases, particularly around access gaps. And in Nigeria, what was done was after school, twice a week, an AI tutor helped kids learn English. And it was for six weeks, which is not long. It was June, July, I think. And it was a randomized controlled trial.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We're still waiting for all the evidence to come through, but 0.3 standard deviations, which is pretty good, equivalent to maybe two years of average sort of English learning. And we see that difference with other technologies, too. It doesn't have to be Gen AI. It can be rule-based AI. It could be predictive AI.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We've seen sort of similar benefits, for example, in Malawi, teaching literacy and numeracy to kids with offline tablets where teachers have maybe 80 to 100 kids in a class. And each kid is having sort of a personalized adaptive learning experience. That is hugely beneficial as well. So that's one use case. Another use case that I think is really great is neurodivergent kids. Super helpful.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
There's all sorts of kids that have different learning differences that struggle in school, don't have access to the specialists that they need, that would benefit greatly from being in a classroom where they could have a little assistant to help them navigate. My youngest son has dyslexia and they sort of read and write, text-to-speech, speech-to-text has been game-changing for him.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So approximately a third of kids are deeply engaged. So two thirds of the kids are not. We need to have learning experiences that motivate kids to dig in and engage and be excited to learn. So when friends or relatives ask me the same question, I usually say, look, we have to think about three parts to the answer. Why do you want your kids to be educated? What is the purpose of education?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
There's also use cases here in the U.S. You see AI being used and experimented around supporting wellness advisors who kind of fill the gap for school counselors in rural school districts, for example, where they don't have school counselors. which is actually an actual person, but AI is boosting that person's ability to have a helpful conversation with a kid.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And it's bringing through tech a mental health resource into a community that didn't have one. So there's lots of use cases, actually, if done well, contained well, designed well, and we humans have our hand on the steering wheel.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Absolutely. And the key is what you said, contain the system. We can't sort of just bring commercial tech into our schools and hope it will solve these problems. It has to have guardrails. We have to make sure that the data that it's being trained on is legit and not going to create harmful prompts for kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We've seen terrible things with commercial AI companions, with young people developing relationships and being really manipulated emotionally. But you can put guardrails. It's totally possible. It's just where, who, what the, frankly, it gets back to the incentives. It gets back to the business model, which is where you, you know, regulation and government could and should step in.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So yes, if contained is the question.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We 100% want kids to have the capacity for deep attention. And you're thinking about your own kiddos who are young. And I'm thinking about my own teenagers who are 13 and 16. And I see... the undermining of attentive faculties from when my 16-year-old got his phone.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
For a long time, he didn't want a phone because I'd been droning on and on for years because he has me as a mother about addiction and opportunity costs and just that, you know, it's okay to enjoy it a little bit, but, you know, can't sacrifice sleep and physical exercise and in-person, you know, communication. And then he did get his phone and he struggles with it.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And he says, mom, this is really hard. It's eroding his ability to do his homework or to follow something he wants to do. The only thing that it doesn't seem to distract him from doing is playing the piano because he loves playing the piano. So anything that we can do to actually ensure young people are developing the muscle to And it's not just attention. Attention is the entry point.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Because actually, now that we have AI that can write essays and pass the bar exam and do AP exams just as good or better than kids, we have to really rethink the purpose of education. The second thing we have to think about is how kids learn. And we know a lot about that. And the third thing is what they should learn. Like what's the content? What are the skills?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
That's the doorway that gets you through. It's actually reflection and meaning-making, which is what you get from deep reading and reading full books, which a lot of young people struggle to do today. You also can get it from other means. You could get it from long Socratic dialogues in community with diverse people over time, but it has to be...
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
An experience where you reflect, you think about meaning, you think about different perspectives, and it changes how you see the world.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I think that's right. If I had to choose for my own kids, and I do, we would have, you know, a school that has no phones for all the reasons we know. And Jonathan Haidt has done a great job on sort of catalyzing that movement here in the U.S., and bringing it from across the globe to our schools. We should have cell phone bands in school, bell to bell.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Don't have it at recess because that's where you start interacting and playing with kids. And I think we should make school a place where kids can actually interact with each other, develop human-to-human socialization capacities because there is massive commercial tech the minute they leave school that is vying for their attention. And make sure, make sure to do some high-quality AI literacy.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
AI literacy is way, way different than using AI to learn. AI literacy is what is this? How was it made? What are the risks? What are the benefits? And let's talk about how our ethics around this new tool and how to incorporate it into our lives with an adult instructor, talking about how it works and what it is. That's AI literacy, and that's important.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
But I guess this goes back to the point you were making about— I mean, there is a question how much we will do, but your question is, will it make a difference?
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Yeah. And I think you bring something up that's really important, which is these things need to be regulated. It's ridiculous that they're out there being used by kids. And it's ridiculous to say, Ezra, it's your willpower that should be the deciding factor. It's ridiculous for adults. It's ridiculous for kids. These are incredibly seductive technologies. So, you know, I...
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
This is a really tough one for me around because you do want kids to be fluent in the new technology of the time, and you do want them to have an ethics and awareness about it. You don't want them to be seduced by it. The large AI labs are perfectly capable, perfectly capable if they wanted to, of creating a gen AI product that is designed for kids that will not be as seductive
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
People always think of education as sort of a transactional transmission of knowledge, which is one important piece of it, but it is actually so much more than that. Learning to live with other people, learning to know yourself, and developing the flexible competencies to be able to navigate a world of uncertainty. Those are kind of the whys for me.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
What we are creating. Well, I would say they have to change how they're developing the products. You can't create an AI that'll be great for kids and teachers and teaching and learning without having teachers and kids and education experts and child development experts involved. in the development process with you, and so few are. So I think about what the Dutch government is doing.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
They're doing a partnership with sort of the teacher unions and the academics and the tech companies, and they're having a little lab to figure out, you know, what would AI look like in schools. But any of that sort of bottom-up experimentation is the way to go before you roll it out. Because most AI developers, although they might be good people, they're not child development specialists.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
But if they change the way they develop their products, they could.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And I think as a parent, you, yourself, but also other parents out there are right to be suspicious because I think that linear line is going to be much more complicated as the years go on with AI in our world. So what I would think about is a couple of things. One, getting back to the research I've done with my co-author and colleague, Jenny Anderson, grades don't show you how much
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
But, you know, I might ask you, what are your hopes and dreams for your kids? Under the why, before we get to the details of the skills.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
kids are engaged. I mean, schools are not designed to give kids agency. Schools are designed to help kids comply. And it's actually not really the fault of the teacher. Teachers are squished from above with all sorts of standards and squished from below with parents putting a lot of pressure on teachers about their kids' performance and outcome.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And what you really want is some feedback loops that are beyond just grades, and behavior to know, is my kid developing agency over their learning? And what I mean by that is, are they able to reflect and think about things they're learning in a way that they can identify what's interesting and they can have the skills to pursue new information? That right there is
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
is I think going to be the core skill. It is the core skill for learning new things in an uncertain world, which is I think one of the number one things we think about. In addition to that, I would say make sure kids are learning to interact with other human beings. Any school that has them working with peers, but even connecting with community members, our social networks are getting smaller.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
There's going to be a premium on human to human interaction as more and more skills get automated and done by AI, which are the more knowledge, cognitive tasks, the sort of interpersonal caregiving, teaching skills are going to continue to be important for some time. I'm not sure for how long, but for some time.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And then the last thing, which may seem silly to you, but I increasingly keep thinking about, is think about speaking. listening and speaking as the missing piece of literacy alongside reading and writing, we're going to need to show our merit and our credentials more and more through what the British call oracy skills. I think we've lost the art of listening and speaking.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So the first one is Democracy in Education by John Dewey, which is over 100 years old. And we are now seeing through lots of great neuroscience that his observations around the teaching and learning experience and what makes for a good teaching and learning experience were right.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
He has some great discussions around the importance of reflection, not just ingesting knowledge, but reflecting on it, making meaning, figuring out how to do things with it. And I love it because we didn't talk about this as much, but the role of schools in our society are more than just your and my kids' education and getting a job, even though that's what we care about most as a parent.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
They are about creating a democratic society or not. So that's an oldie but goodie. I love it. John Dewey. The second book is by Gaia Bernstein. It's called Unwired, Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies. She's a law professor at Seton Hall University. I really enjoy this book because it gives a really good overview, particularly around kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
and young people of the incentives that commercial tech has and what are some strategies for resisting that and getting to a better place. And the last one, it's called Blueprint for Revolution, How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Sergei Popovich, who is...
The Ezra Klein Show
‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
was the student sort of leader, Serbian student leader that started a movement to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic and now is doing quite a bit of work on nonviolent protest against authoritarianism. And to me, this book is sort of like the updated version of nonviolent activism. He really gets media. He really gets social media. And I just think it's incredibly relevant today.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
The skills that I think are going to be most important are how motivated and engaged kids are to be able to learn new things. That is maybe one of the most important skills in a time of uncertainty, that they are go-getters, they're going to be wayfinders, things are going to shift and change, and they're going to be able to
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
navigate and constantly learn new things and be excited to learn new things. Because when kids are motivated, that's actually a huge predictor of how they do. And we're going to want kids absolutely to know enough content so that they can be a judge of what is real and what is fake. But we're also going to want them to have experiences where they're
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
learning and testing how to come up with creative new solutions to things, which is not really what traditional public education has been about.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We can't be super instrumental. So we have to come up with a new plan. I mean, we did not know, collectively, us, the world, that we would have generative AI that could basically write every seventh grade essay or college essay to get into university or the whole host of exams that are being administered and are being passed by AI just as well or better than kids.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So we have to come up with a new plan. That is not the plan for success. And I wanna push back on something you said. You said, I don't know if kids just enjoy what they're learning. It's gonna help or people are really gonna benefit from that. Engagement is very powerful. It's basically how motivated you are to really dig in and learn. And it relates to what you do. Do you show up?
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Do you participate? Do you do your homework? It relates to how you feel. Do you find school interesting? Is it exciting? Do you feel you belong at school? It relates to how you think. Are you cognitively engaged? Are you looking at what you learn in one class, applying it to what it might mean in your life outside or other classes? And it's also how proactive you are. about your learning.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
And all those dimensions really work together in education that's a very powerful construct to predict better achievement, better grades, better mental health, more enrollment in college, better understanding of content, and lots of other benefits to boot. And we need to have kids build that
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
muscle of doing hard things, because I worry greatly that AI will basically make a frictionless world for young people. It's great for me. I'm loving generative AI, but I have said several decades of brain development where I know how to do hard things. But kids are developing their brains. They're literally being neurobiologically wired to
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
for how to attend, how to focus, how to try, how to connect ideas, how to relate to other people. And all of those are not easy things.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Absolutely. So we found after three years of research that kids engage in four different ways. They're passenger mode, kids are coasting, achiever mode, they're trying to get perfect outcomes, resistor mode, they're avoiding and disrupting, and explorer mode is when they really love what they're learning and they dig in and they're super proactive. So that's the high level framework.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
What part do you want to dig in on?
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
So passenger mode is difficult to spot often. for parents and sometimes teachers, because many kids in passenger mode get really good grades, but are just bored to tears. They show up to school, they do the homework, they have dropped out of learning. So passenger mode is when kids are really coasting, doing the bare minimum.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Some signs of this are your kid comes home and they do their homework as fast as possible. Another sign is that they say, oh, school's boring. It's just boring. I learn nothing. Kids are in passenger mode because school is actually too easy for them.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
We talked to so many kids who said, look, I'm in class, and the teacher is going over the math homework from yesterday, and I got everyone right, and I know the answers, and it's 45 minutes of that. And I understand the kids who don't get it. They need the help. but I'm gonna shop online.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
Or I have kids who say, well, I got the homework home and I know how to do this stuff, so I just put in chat GPT and it did my problem set for me and then I turn it in. So that's when it's too easy. Another version of why kids get into passenger mode is when it's too hard. School's too hard. You could have a neurodivergent kid. Kids don't feel they belong, and so they're not tuning in.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
They've missed certain pieces of skill sets that they really need. Knowledge and education is cumulative in many ways, and they get kind of overwhelmed, and they need particular special attention. So that's kind of what's going on in passenger mode.
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‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’
I think you're 100% right. I've talked to kids all over the country, and I've seen lots of incidents or cases of highly motivated, highly engaged kids who are using AI really well. They'll write the paper themselves. They'll go in and use AI for research and help them copy edit. They're doing the thinking.