What is the purpose of education in the age of AGI?

October 19, 2026

Yesterday, the title The End of Education by Neil Postman called to me from my bookshelf, whispering that it might be the right book at the right time. It was. Published in 1995, it was surprisingly appropriate balm for the soul of a confused programmer and soon-to-be father.

My wife and I are expecting our first child. My economically valuable skillset – programming – suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son? And to what end?

Mr. Edison says
That the radio will supplant the teacher.
Already one may learn languages by means
Of Victrola records.
The moving picture will visualize
What the radio fails to get across.
Teachers will be relegated to the backwoods.
With fire-horses,
And long-haired women;
Or, perhaps shown in museums.
Education will become a matter
Of pressing the button.
Perhaps I can get a position at the switchboard.

– Quoted in The End of Education by Neil Postman, quoting Teachers and Machines: The Use of Technology Since 1920 by Larry Cuban

In Edison’s own words:

Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools… Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.

– Thomas Edison, The New York Dramatic Mirror, 1913

Back in 2013, I boldly predicted that MOOCs would upend education. Ah, my past self, you sweet summer child.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has helped me appreciate the staying power of staying power, sometimes called The Lindy Effect. Merely staying alive implies some anti-fragility to adapt and survive. Consider that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded to educate the clergy. From The End of Education:

In the Western world, beginning in the thirteenth century and for five hundred years afterward, that God was sufficient justification for the founding of institutions of learning, from grammar schools, where children were taught to read the Bible, to great universities, where men were trained to be ministers of God.

Schools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they’ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.

We typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we’d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one’s kids.

It has been a surprisingly good bet that schools will continue to exist in roughly their current form for many years to come. Ironically, there also seems to be some staying power to technologists boldly (and so far incorrectly) doubting the staying power of schools! I myself have contributed to this grand tradition multiple times, and find myself at risk of doing it yet again.

Surely this time must finally be different, right? We have captured intelligence in a bottle, and you’re telling me that “Ok class, turn to page 17” and “Does anyone know how to solve for x” are still going to be around in the 2030s?

There are many shifting purposes to education, which underpin how it has survived this long. As the times change, so do its purposes shift and adapt, such as:

• become a good person

• become a good citizen

• earn a living

• make the world better

• learn basic facts

I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful”, because I reasoned that if you “were able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems”, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.

Imagine education as a table held up by its many purposes. I didn’t realize how centrally important “the ability to earn a living” was for me until it started to wobble. A big reason is because I’m looking for a more objective arbiter of “good” in education. Education’s own tests and measures can feel stifling. The market offered a counterpoint. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good. Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. With recent advances in AI mathematics, both of these paths to glory are under fire. Clara Collier makes similar points in her exceptional essay “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other.”

If AI takes our ability to contribute, what’s left for our children?

Neil Postman offers a few suggestions for positive purposes for education that I found heartening, not mainly for their content, but for the fact that it’s possible to make up new purposes for education and advocate for them. My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are:

• Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet

• The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be

• The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us

At the risk of going too meta, I do strongly believe in Postman’s point (in his other education book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity) that “the medium is the message.” That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what. And likewise, I believe in Dr. Alfie Kohn’s notion that we should relate to our educational charges as humans, not objects – “doing with” vs “doing to”. Thus, I believe it may be most honest and effective to invite our children to help us craft the purpose for their education as we figure it out together.

Wish me luck.