School’s Out Forever

A 2nd-degree connection of mine announced on LinkedIn that he is on day 47 of learning Rust “the right way.” He built a custom AI skill, a Socratic tutor that refuses to just give him the answer. Instead, it asks him guiding questions. It checks his understanding. It celebrates his small wins. He says it’s the best teacher he’s ever had.

Let me make sure I have this right. He has access to a machine that already knows Rust. It can write the Rust. It can fix the Rust. It can explain the Rust to the Rust. And he went out of his way to make it withhold the answer, so he can spend 47 days extracting it one leading question at a time.

He’s paying twenty dollars a month to be the teacher’s pet in a class of one.

The Answer Is Right There

And it’s not just him. Claude has a Learning mode. ChatGPT has Study Mode. Both are designed to resist giving you the answer, and one head-to-head review praised Claude for holding the Socratic line the most stubbornly. Imagine praising a calculator for making you show your work. Imagine hiring a plumber who hands you a wrench and asks, “Well, what do you think is wrong with the pipe?”

We built the most knowledgeable entity in the history of the species, and the first thing we did was teach it to play dumb so we could feel smart.

The Children Already Know

The kids figured this out first. They always do.

In August, economists Philip Oreopoulos and Nina Low published a two-year randomized trial of Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI tutor, across 18 Tennessee middle schools. Ninety-six percent of students tried it. Then the median student ignored it on two-thirds of the days they practiced, and when they got a problem wrong, they asked it for help just 17 percent of the time. The paper is titled One Click Away. The researchers concluded that “the binding constraint appears to be engagement.”

The binding constraint is that thirteen-year-olds are not stupid.

In 2023, Sal Khan stood on the TED stage and called AI tutoring “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” He was going to solve Benjamin Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem — the famous 1984 finding that one-on-one tutoring lifts a student two full standard deviations. Three years later, the measured effect was about 0.07 standard deviations a year.

Two sigma. Point-oh-seven.

Experts call this disappointing. I call it the first test these kids have ever aced. They were handed a patient, tireless, infinitely knowledgeable tutor, and they looked at it and said: no thanks, I’ll wait until you can just do it for me. They aren’t behind. They’re early. (Khan Academy is now redesigning the tutor so that children will want to be tutored, a problem no one has cracked since Socrates, who was executed for corrupting the youth.)

Two Hours Too Many

The market agrees. Alpha School, the AI-powered private school chain co-founded by MacKenzie Price, replaced teachers with “guides” and squeezed the entire academic day into two hours of apps. Tuition at most campuses runs $40,000 to $65,000 a year. The pitch: kids “learn 2X in 2 hours.”

Follow the trend line. Six hours of school, normal learning. Two hours of school, double the learning. Extrapolate. At zero hours, children will learn infinitely fast.

I’m offering this for free. I call it Zero Hour Learning. Tuition is also zero. Your kid stays home and Claude does the homework, of which there is none, because there’s no school.

And spare me the romance of the current system. We spent twelve years and a fortune teaching every American the quadratic formula, and the adult population can’t split a dinner check without an app. School was already a machine for forgetting things. AI just skips the part where you learn them first.

Blown to Pieces

None of this is new. In 1971, Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society, arguing that schools teach children to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, and a diploma with competence. He wanted to replace schools with “learning webs,” where people could pursue knowledge freely.

He was right about the first part and hopelessly sentimental about the second. Why replace school with learning when you can replace it with nothing?

One year later, Alice Cooper released the follow-up, “School’s Out.” Only one of them hit the Top 10.

So here is my modest proposal. Abolish school. All of it. Kindergarten, high school, college, grad school, the coding bootcamps, the MasterClass subscription, the Duolingo owl. Turn the buildings into data centers. They’ll need air conditioning, but frankly, so did the kids.

And the teachers? Liberated. For decades they’ve told us they don’t do it for the money. Wonderful news: there is no longer any money. If they truly did it for the kids, they’ll understand that the kids no longer need them, and they’ll leave quietly, out of love.

Someone will ask where the AI learns new things once no human knows anything. From other AIs, obviously. The models will train the models, knowledge passed from machine to machine like a family recipe, and nobody in the kitchen will need to know how to cook. Humanity has carried the burden of knowing things for 300,000 years.

We can put it down now.

Day 52

As for my connection: he’s on day 52 now. Last week his Socratic tutor asked him what he thought the borrow checker was for, and he sat there and thought about it — really thought about it, for almost a full minute — and came up with the right answer on his own.

He said it was the best feeling he’s had in years.

Disgusting.