I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most ingenious cheating technology ever devised. But for me, the deeper question is: What should schools be teaching at all? A.I. is going to make the future look very different. How do you prepare kids for a world you can’t predict?And if we can offload more and more tasks to generative A.I., what’s left for the human mind to do?Rebecca Winthrop is the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is also an author, with Jenny Anderson, of “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.” We discuss how A.I. is transforming what it means to work and be educated, and how our use of A.I. could revive — or undermine — American schools.Mentioned:Brookings Global Task Force on AI EducationWinthrop’s World of EducationBook Recommendations:Democracy and Education by John DeweyUnwired by Gaia BernsteinBlueprint for Revolution by Srdja PopovicThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Alexander Gil Fuentes and Switch and Board Podcast Studio. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Are kids today reading less for enjoyment?
Here's a statistic I've been thinking about recently. So in 1976, if you ask high school seniors, have they read some books in the last year for fun? Around 40% of them had read at least six books for fun in the last year. Only about 11% hadn't read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed. About 40% haven't read a single book for fun.
If you are looking for this, you see it everywhere right now. There are all these headlines about how kids are not reading the way they once did. There are all these stories quoting professors, even at Ivy League universities, about the way in which when they try to assign the reading that they've been assigning their entire careers, their students, they just can't do it anymore.
And so the professors are adjusting. They're changing the books, making them shorter, making them simpler, making the reading just less burdensome. we're losing something. We can see it on test scores that over the last decade, we just see the number of kids reading at grade level slipping. And then of course the pandemic accelerated that.
So if you were simply asking, how are the kids doing on some of these intellectual faculties that we once thought were the core of what education was trying to promote, they're not doing well. And then as if we summoned it, as if we wrote it into the script.
Chapter 2: How is generative AI challenging traditional education?
Here comes this technology, generative AI, that can do it for them, that'll read the book and summarize it for you, that'll write the essay for you, that'll do the math problem, even shown its work, for you. We know gen AI is being used at mass scale by students to cheat. But its challenge is more fundamental to that. Of course, using it that way, we call it cheating.
But to them, why wouldn't you? If you have this technology, then not only can, but will be. doing so much of this for you, for us, for the economy. Why are we doing any of this at all? Why are we reading these books ourselves when they can just be summarized for us? Why are we doing this math ourselves when a computer can just do it for us?
Why am I writing this essay myself when I can get a first draft in a couple minutes from Claude or from chat GPT? I have a three and a six-year-old, and one of the ways that my uncertainty about our AI-inflected future manifests is this deep uncertainty about how they should be educated. What are they going to need to know?
I don't know what the economy, what society is going to want from them in 16 or 20 years. And if I don't know what it's going to want from them, what it's going to reward in them, how do I know how they should be educated? How do I know if the education I am creating for them is doing a good job? How do I know if I'm failing them? How do you prepare for the unpredictable?
My guest today is Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. Her latest book, co-authored with Jenny Anderson, is The Disengaged Teen, helping kids learn better, feel better, and live better. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Rebecca Winthrop, welcome to the show.
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Chapter 3: What should education aim to achieve in the age of AI?
Lovely to be here, Ezra.
So I have a three and a six-year-old. I feel like I cannot predict with AI what it is society will want or reward from them in 15, 16 years, which makes this question in the interim, how should they be educated? What should they be educated towards? feel really uncertain to me. My confidence that the schools are set up now for the world they are going to graduate into is very, very low.
So you study education. You've been thinking a lot about education and AI. What advice would you give me?
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?
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?
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.
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.
Well, I have a lot of hopes and dreams for my kids. I would like them to live happy, fulfilling lives. I think I'm not naive. And certainly in my lifetime, the implicit purpose of education, the way we say to ourselves, did this kid's education work out, is do they get a good job? Right. That's really what we're pointing the arrow towards. Right.
The fact that maybe developed their faculties as a human being, the fact that maybe they learned things that were beautiful or fascinating, that's all great. But if they do all that and they don't get a good job, then we failed them. And if they do none of that, but they do get a good job, then we succeeded. So I think that's been the reality of education.
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Chapter 4: What role does student engagement play in learning?
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?
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.
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
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
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.
You have in your book these four modes of engagement. Do you want to talk through them?
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.
What part do you want to dig in on?
Well, why don't you go through them? I think passenger mode is particularly interesting here. So why don't we start there?
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Chapter 5: How can AI support personalized learning in schools?
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.
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.
These kids are getting good at something. I'm not sure that's what we want them getting good at, but they're getting good at something.
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.
So we cannot out-technologize ourselves. So what we need to do is shift what we're doing in our teaching and learning experiences.
I have very personally complicated feelings on the question of AI and education, just question of education generally. I hated school, hated it, did terribly in it. Starting in middle school, going through high school, failed classes, just found the whole thing impenetrable.
And not because I wasn't smart, not because I wasn't interested even in things related to it, just somehow the whole construct didn't work for me and I couldn't make it work for me. It wasn't exactly that I was bored. I think today I probably could have muscled through it. But for whatever reason, then I couldn't. But I was voracious outside of school.
I spent three or four nights a week at Barnes & Noble's. I loved reading deeply into things that I was interested in. And I've related this story before. And one of the sort of reactions I get is, well, you should really then... recognize the way school fails kids. And in a way, I do. But it's just not obvious to me at all that school should be tuned for me.
Like, one thing that I recognize as somebody who studies bureaucracies is that if you just think of U.S. public education, to say nothing of also private education, to say nothing of global education, it's educating a lot of kids. And its ability to tune itself to every kid is going to be pretty modest.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential changes to the role of teachers in the AI era?
Just can't seem to get the homework in. Right. Can't seem to do things he's not that interested in doing. And can't even seem to do the things he is interested in doing in a way that fits what we want from him. I read every book in English class. And I enjoyed doing the essays. Yeah. And I'm a good writer. I think I'm willing to say that at this point in my life.
And I still did badly on the essays because it wasn't what they wanted for me in some way or another. Right. And over time, I just don't have that. I mean, that was the broad experience of my life that I couldn't fit what I did to what the world wanted for me. And now I'm just much better at doing that in ways that are not related to my course of interest.
I'm not trying to over extrapolate my experience. It's actually important to me not to over extrapolate my experience. But something I've seen you talk about is this quality of when students find the teacher, find the subject, find the approach that activates them.
that all of a sudden the things that are not that activating to them become easier, that there is a sort of lock and a key dynamic to learning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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