In the Age of AI, What Should Schools Teach?

Sometimes, the purposes of schooling align with individual and social needs of the time; other times, they don't. Reflecting the best management thinking of 1918, when local communities rapidly expanded and institutionalized schooling, today's public schools take a minimalist, utilitarian approach to knowledge, aiming to teach only the knowledge that graduates seem likely to use in their jobs and their homes. That approach never made much sense, and even less so now, at a time when artificial intelligence might render much of our "practical" knowledge obsolete, with household tasks and jobs from clerk to investment manager increasingly likely to be done without humans. If schools are to continue, what might history tell us about what schooling should do next?

The first U.S. public schools, taxpayer-funded and with mandatory attendance, were authorized by Massachusetts's 1647 "Old Deluder Satan Act" — so named since schools taught literacy for young people to read the Bible, spreading its individual and shared meaning to interpret the world and one's place in it. Religion remained the dominant goal of schools until the American Revolution, when at the urging of leaders like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush, schools began teaching "politics and war," promoting love of country in addition to love of God.