‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most ingenious cheating technology ever devised. But for me, the deeper question is: What should schools be teaching at all? A.I. is going to make the future look very different. How do you prepare kids for a world you can’t predict? And if we can offload more and more tasks to generative A.I., what’s left for the human mind to do? Rebecca Winthrop is the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She is also an author, with Jenny Anderson, of “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.” We discuss how A.I. is transforming what it means to work and be educated, and how our use of A.I. could revive — or undermine — American schools. Mentioned: Brookings Global Task Force on AI Education Winthrop’s World of Education Book Recommendations: Democracy and Education by John Dewey Unwired by Gaia Bernstein Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Alexander Gil Fuentes and Switch and Board Podcast Studio.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Here's a statistic I've been thinking about recently.
0:34.1	So in 1976, if you ask high school seniors, have they read some books in
0:40.0	last year for fun? Around 40% of them had read at least six books for fun in the last year. Only about
0:48.0	11% hadn't read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed. About 40% haven't read a single book for fun.
0:59.2	If you are looking for this, you see it everywhere right now. There are all these headlines about
1:04.3	how kids are not reading the way they once did. There are all these stories quoting professors,
1:09.1	even at Ivy Lee universities, about the way in which,
1:13.3	when they try to assign the reading that they've been assigning their entire careers,
1:17.7	their students, they just can't do it anymore.
1:20.0	And so the professors are adjusting.
1:21.9	They're changing the books, making them shorter, making them simpler, making the reading just less burdensome.
1:30.3	We're losing something. We can see it on test scores that over the last decade,
1:35.6	we just see the number of kids reading at grade level slipping. And then, of course,
1:39.6	the pandemic accelerated that. So if you were simply asking, how are the kids doing on some of these intellectual
1:48.7	faculties that we once thought were the core of what education was trying to promote,
1:54.3	they're not doing well?
1:56.0	And then as if we summoned it, as if we wrote it into the script, here comes its technology, generative AI, that can do it for them.
2:09.4	That'll read the book and summarize it for you. That'll write the essay for you. That'll do the math problem, even shown its work, for you. We know Gen.
2:21.9	I is being used at mass scale by students to cheat. But its challenge is more fundamental
2:29.5	to that. Of course, using it that way, we call it cheating. But to them, why wouldn't you?
2:36.2	If you have this technology, then not only can, but will be doing so much of this for you,
	...

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