> When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
On the one hand, this guy is not wrong, from a personal perspective. On the other hand, guys like this are a total waste of time and space in the classroom.
Schools have always faced a fundamental internal conflict, i.e., dueling purposes, and recent developments such as the rise of ChatGPT and the rise of student loan debt may have finally brought the entire educational system to a crisis.
We like to think of education as the primary purpose of the educational system, hence the name. And education is indeed essential, not just for job training but also for the enrichment of human life, as well as the preservation of democracy and freedom. Arguably, the latter are more important. Yet we also rely on the educational system for social and economic sorting. It's a ranking system that has a monumental effect on the future prospects of students. And as the above quotation notes, it's a club, an exclusive club, where the lucky few get to meet the right people and enter into important social circles.
At the university level, things become even more muddled, because professors and scientists are performing important research that may have little or nothing to do with the education of undergraduate students. A lot of this research is important for society, and for industry, but it still comes into conflict with the other purposes of the university.
So how do we resolve the inherent conflict? Is there a way to split the educational system into separate entities that are truer to their individual purposes? Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from cheating? It should also be noted that not everyone is ready to learn. Our current educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on age and social promotion. Everyone of the same age is expected to follow the same track. I personally wasn't ready to study and learn when I was a teenager; it took several more years for me to mature emotionally, develop ambition and discipline. It's difficult to force-feed students: “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” Perhaps, though, there might be more motivation to learn if learning was not tied to future economic and social prospects. If students view school as merely a tool to achieve certain benefits, then of course they'll view anything else in school as a waste of time.
In a sense, our educational system finds failure to educate to be acceptable, even desirable, because failure fulfills the alternative purpose of social ranking.