Planning my future children’s education is a fool’s errand, but I can’t help it.
Will they will grow up with manmade horrors beyond my comprehension, barely recognizable as the mutated offspring of Opus 4.n? Sure, yeah. But adapting the education system to the existence of LLMs is already a challenge. If we can’t do that, what hope do we have of adapting to whatever comes next?
I also think there is a unique opportunity, right now, for homeschoolers and private schools to create a positive model for the future. Aside from Alpha School, most “innovation” in American schooling is about turning the politics dial from left to right while frantically looking back at the parents and teachers’ unions for approval. The least bad attempts to incorporate AI into the curriculum are usually modules on critical thinking about its output. (Did Yuo Know ChatGPT can hallucinate?) This is a vitally necessary skill, but framing it this way is an unnecessary overcorrection for a radically anti-AI Gen Z. Those efforts won’t do jack shit about anything that matters. Wouldn’t it be fun to imagine a form of schooling that might?
I used to be a fraud.
I was homeschooled through middle school and as much of high school as I could stand to attend. Usually when I say this, people imagine diligent self-study or lectures from your parents (the ones I received were rarely academic in nature.) Mostly, I was a proto-COVID kid. I took online high school and college courses and had video-call tutoring, sometimes one-on-one, often small-group.
There were two big problems with this setup. One is undoubtedly a personal problem: my childhood felt like a jumpscare-heavy yet tedious video game cutscene. I tried to fast-forward to age 18 by reading posts online. I sincerely loved learning when I paid attention. But the available stimulus (listening to another kid try to translate some Catullus without mentioning the poem is gay) would not suffice to cut through my fog of misery. I checked out even when I was really interested in a course, because I had forgotten how to do otherwise.
The other problem is universal. Open-ended, unstructured, passion-guided education is great. When it’s executed well, structured learning with schedules and assessments and feedback is also great. But when you try to combine the two, the stress of keeping up with structure and hard deadlines makes it almost impossible to pursue your curiosity and fulfill softer obligations. (Adding looming deadlines with zero external structure to the mix, like standardized testing or studying for olympiads without a team, is a special kind of torture.)
(It is true that white-collar adulthood requires you to manage your time. I am skeptical that time management is a coherent skill, let alone that expecting so much of it from children and teenagers is developmentally appropriate.)
I did what many people do when faced with choices that feel impossible: procrastination and avoidance as a totally useless compromise. When courses assigned homework and reading and actually checked whether I finished it, I learned the material. When tutors trusted me enough to stop asking whether I’d done last week’s exercises, I stopped doing them. As a result, people around me assumed I knew a lot of subjects I couldn’t tell you the first thing about.
I expected to be exposed in college, but the reckoning never came. It turns out that if you can compute integrals and derivatives and prepare chicken without getting salmonella, you are ready for university. Sure, I was far behind the olympiad winners and international students from rigorous education systems, but I met many students who—worse than frauds—thought they knew everything until they got iced by their first major classes.
A less severe version of my problems from high school remained. Efforts to really understand a subject had to squeeze into the gaps between homework deadlines and exams. I was lucky to attend a college where the problem sets were mostly well-written and rigorous enough to encourage intuition. Still, I think procedural knowledge (how to do something) and conceptual knowledge (why it works and what it means) are just different things, that trade off against each other if you’re under a lot of time pressure. In office hours, there usually wasn’t much time for conceptual exploration after everyone got through urgent homework questions. Sometimes, I would go long enough without deeply understanding a topic from early in the course that I got too embarrassed to ask for help by the end.
LLMs are a double-edged sword, accelerating learning for motivated students while providing unmotivated students with an opportunity to avoid learning entirely.
I love having access to a tutor for (almost) every subject with infinite compassion and patience. I don’t think most people have come to terms with how powerful that can be. When used with discipline—adding reference texts and papers for structure, asking Claude to avoid hints until you’re completely lost—AI lifts a tremendous burden of stress and shame, while preserving enough intellectual struggle for learning to occur.
On the other hand, they make it really easy to cheat on almost any assignment. You have an imagination and access to the news, so I will not belabor this point.
I don’t know whether I would have benefited on net from access to LLMs as a child. If the iPod Touch I used to secretly read fanfiction at night had Claude, I would have stayed up for hours every night asking it questions. I had a firm line in the sand against cheating, but I might have wanted too many hints or never learned how to check my work by hand. A lot of students have no moral objections to cheating at all.
Oral exams are the best possible measure to address all of these issues. If I were currently choosing between schools for my children, this is by far the #1 thing I’d select for—yet in most cities in the US, it isn’t even an option.
The recent trend of reinstituting paper exams is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough. In addition to being even harder to cheat on, an oral exam tests true comprehension in a way nothing else does. In my PhD, I could usually guess which other students had them in undergrad by how well they knew the basics and how confidently they worked problems out at the board. Yes, they are scary, but you get used to it. They provide repeated exposure therapy to “looking stupid” that builds courage and maybe, prevents you from developing intense shame or feeling like a fraud in the first place. (They should be, and in my experience usually are, bolstered with generous partial credit.) Yes, they are resource intensive. But there is so much resource expenditure in schools toward things that definitely won’t save the brains of a generation.
After that, it’s kind of like, well, I don’t know, I hope my kids have desks and a roof over their heads? Well, not quite. I also have a strong preference for integrating as much practice work into the day as possible, or at least assigning no homework over the weekend, so there is some time kids are truly free to think, dream, and make connections between facts. While I wonder whether Alpha School’s gamified curriculum is frying kids’ dopamine receptors, I can only applaud their efficient use of time. Having nothing to procrastinate on also prevents procrastination from becoming an addictive habit. Of course infinite scrolling stems from deeper dissatisfaction with life, and it falls to the parents to provide a life worth living—but not all parents will, and man, it’s just so much better not to start.
I hope this article has become obsolete, in a “cool radical innovations in schooling way” not a “we are all paperclips now” way, by the time my fiance and I need to make any big decisions.