What Are Humans For?
5 ideas for how to parent and teach in an AI world
I am a bit of a nut for coffee. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it is often my very first thought on waking. Solace after the pain of the alarm clock. I shuffle toward the espresso machine, first grinding the beans, watching the little pressure dial as the espresso shot is poured, tuning the squealing sound the milk makes while being steamed, and then finally sitting down to drink, as slowly as humanly possible, one reasonably fine cappuccino.
Coffee has come a very long way in the US, such that coffee nerds now talk of the present day as “third wave” coffee. The first wave was stale pre-ground beans in a drip coffee machine — think a 50s diner. The second wave was when Starbucks brought espresso drinks to all of us in the 90s. Now the third wave is “craft” coffee like pour-overs, home espresso machines, single-origin beans and the like.
I think we’re heading for a third wave of schooling, and with a sufficient amount of caffeine now circulating in my system, I’d like to explain why and to imagine what this might mean for educators and parents.
First Wave
Public schools as we know them came about in the late 1800s, and their goal was in large part to create factory workers. They treated humans like machines — expecting a consistent response to the same inputs, moving students to the next lesson when the bell rings, marching us in lockstep toward basic literacy and compliance. The expectation was that everyone would come out more or less exactly the same. Most of these assumptions are still present in schools today, even though we know this mindset hurts more kids than it helps.
Second Wave
Then came the idea that schools were designed to create knowledge workers. Fueled in the 1950s in the US by competition with the Soviet Union, we doubled down on investments in science and math education, just as modern corporations became the driving force of our economy more than factories. In this era, schools began to treat students, as Sir Ken Robinson memorably put it, as “brains on a stick.” Forget our bodies, our emotions, our cultural pasts — here is a brain into which we can pour a very wide range of content, and the result will be someone “competitive in the global economy.” This person can write a decent essay, present well in a meeting, figure out how to improve a process, and the like.
The Third Wave
The first wave — factory schools — lost relevance when factories were no longer the destination for most working adults. Plus this kind of schooling never worked well for humans, who generally don’t thrive when treated like machines on an assembly line.
The second wave — schools where you win by memorizing — has been losing relevance for a long time but holding on tenaciously. I was educated in a second-wave school, and I memorized a ridiculous amount of content — battles, lines of royal succession, chemical reactions, and more. This knowledge is not harmful, but the question is, at what cost was it gained? Arguably the majority of students are made to feel stupid, or even are actively punished, for not excelling in this kind of learning. And nearly everyone wastes a large part of the best-learning years of their lives on fairly shallow learning.
But a shift is coming. Since the internet became widely used, the idea of memorizing such a large amount of knowledge has been getting harder to justify. Now with the arrival of AI, whether you see it as just the next chapter of the internet revolution or an entirely new thing, is making second-wave schooling seem even more out of touch. AI tools like ChatGPT can write an essay better than 95% of us can. As AI gets better, and more reliably factual, the challenge to traditional schools will be even greater. Why are we wasting our time doing things that computers can do so much better?
Here is the promise of third wave schools: if we were free to re-allocate that time, how much more of our human potential could we tap into?
Let’s accept that, just as factory jobs disappeared and drastically changed our society, many knowledge worker jobs will disappear or be significantly disrupted by AI. Well-researched estimates suggest on the order of 50% of jobs will be disrupted. In this era, being ‘brains on a stick’ is unwise. We can’t compete with AI for memorizing and spitting out content. And thank goodness. We are not machines and we are not only brains. It’s time for an education system that teaches us how to be human.
What are humans for?
If first-wave schools wanted to make people into machines, and second-wave schools try to make us into computers, what if third-wave schools made us into, well, great humans?
What if we developed the abilities to relate well to others, to be original, to reason calmly, to love, to appreciate paradox, to become self-aware, to listen to our bodies, to repair a community, to adapt? There is no list that can capture all of our human potential. But here are some approaches that might help us guide our young people into this third wave:
Teach us to be embodied. Traditional schools teach us to ignore our bodies. Sit still, listen, don’t fidget, only move during these very limited times, ask for permission to use the bathroom, etc. If we’re going to learn to be human, not AI, let’s start by becoming deeply aware of our physicality. This is not just a romantic notion, it speaks to a set of skills and practices that should be part of our education — skills like interoception (being able to sense what’s happening in our bodies), mindfulness, awareness and concentration practices, the ability to use our breathing to shift our mood, or our sensing to move and eat in ways that enhance our health.
If the classroom is not a good place to be in a body, we need better classrooms.(photo credit: Jerry Wang) Treat each other as humans, not machines. Traditional schooling thinks that we should all learn in more or less the same way. When students don’t respond as we expect, the tendency is to be frustrated at the student, as if they’re messing up the assembly line. A school for humans would be unable to see any human as faulty. It would understand that all humans, at all times, are pursuing positive developmental needs, like belonging, connection, and contribution. If there’s a problem, help a fellow human out by understanding their developmental needs and helping them find better ways to meet them.
Use our emotions as the highly evolved functions they are. Emotions can be awfully inconvenient to brains-on-a-stick. Or positively jealousy-inducing to AI. But emotions are not an annoyance — paired with self-awareness and tools to manage their intensity, emotions are often the best compass we have. They integrate many forms of intelligence and information into signals of where our needs and growth may lie. It’s time to restore their reputation.
Embrace one of our species’ specialties: we are tool-makers. Designing schools for humans does not mean ignoring technology. That would be inhuman! We are toolmakers, even when the tools we create often scare us half to death. A school for humans would not avoid AI. We would embrace it as a remarkable tool, one that can augment our intelligence and capability. I recently had to put a presentation together, and with one window in conversation with ChatGPT and another window of brainstorm notes, I was astonished at how quickly I could fly through content and integrate thoughts in new ways. There is no turning back.
Design for originality, purpose, and authenticity. AI is really good at accessing our collective intelligence and producing a high-average result, with increasing consistency. But original, creative work is a human endeavor still. To discover our own originality, particularly in the social storms of adolescence, we need time and space to tinker. We need time to quest for purpose. The skills needed for this adventure are profoundly human: to reflect, to listen deeply to oneself and others, to be open to change, to experiment without being stopped by the fear of failure.
Honestly, even if AI didn’t exist or doesn't cause the degree of change many expect, I think it’s time to make our schooling and parenting more human-oriented. More humane. Something deserving of the complicated, embodied, emotional, original, always-developing beings that we are.
A few other updates…
Finding the Magic in Middle School
Of all the times when we need schools for humans, I would say the area needing the most help is middle school. During this time of transformation, it’s easy to lose the focus on human development. I hope you’ll check out my book, Finding the Magic in Middle School, as a long-form answer to how we could do better with this age. Whether as parents or teachers, we can make this a time of magic, of discovering how to be vibrantly, imperfectly, authentically human.
Advisory Training
We have a last few spots left for our advisory facilitation training this July in San Francisco, a three-day dive into how to facilitate deep, honest conversations for young people. It’s about how to make advisory into a powerful social-emotional learning space. Details here.
In a matter of the past few months, without realizing it yet, most jobs, processes, and educational systems have just been fundamentally and permanently altered. Your idea of a third wave of education is very timely. With computers doing a better job than humans at most tasks, we humans better at least do the job of being humans better than computers.
So eloquently said. We can see AI and other tech as an augmentor and we all need to be educated on it, so we can remove the fear and use them to upgrade our quality of life, especially for our children.