OPINION:
Experts warn that artificial intelligence could trigger an employment apocalypse. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said AI could eliminate 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, with unemployment spiking to 10% to 20%.
Meanwhile, surveys by the World Economic Forum find that 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce because of AI in the next five years.
These staggering projections raise an urgent question: If the jobs available today may vanish tomorrow, and if new jobs may exist tomorrow that we can’t imagine today, how should we educate our children? Perhaps surprisingly, the best way to educate in a tech-infused world is through the tried-and-true approach of classical education.
To understand why, it helps to identify the two predominant ideas about technology in education. One treats technology like a shortcut for learning and teaching. Give every student AI tools, calculators and prompt engines, and a student can ace quizzes and produce essays with inhuman efficiency. Additionally, with a personalized AI tutor, students can receive targeted instruction much more efficiently than a human teacher could provide.
Proponents believe that familiarizing students and teachers with tech will give children an edge in the future. If students never develop the underlying skill, then the device becomes a substitute for thinking, not a supplement. Though they become technically proficient, these students become mastered by technology instead of masters of it.
The other approach treats technology as a tool, not the master. Students learn first without it, building skills, habits and their own memories. They use technology only in its proper place once they have become truly capable themselves.
America’s tech-infused, vocationally obsessed standard education system chooses the first approach, often by default. In a vain attempt to prepare students for the future by cramming technology into schools, this system trains students to become technologically dependent.
As was discussed in a recent American Enterprise Institute debate, a powerful argument can be made that AI does more than facilitate or extend our work; it also prevents us from developing skills in the first place. If that is the case, then AI in the classroom should be regarded skeptically, especially if it becomes powerful enough to replace rather than facilitate high-level human thinking. After all, people who are incapable without technology are replaceable as technology advances.
Classical education offers the second, far more reliable path. It anchors students in memory, careful thinking and the rich tradition of Western thought. In a classical classroom, students memorize speeches, poems, history timelines and great works. Their minds become storehouses of meaning, not junk. Decades after their schooling is complete, students still carry with them those texts and ideas.
This storehouse of knowledge becomes fuel for independent thinking. While others use tools to accomplish a task, classically educated students have the rare capability to ask why a task is done or whether it’s being done in the right way. Put simply, those trained classically — who use their reason and build their knowledge to the greatest extent possible — are precisely the workers capable of evaluating whether AI is a useful or a dangerous tool and who can make use of it appropriately.
Meanwhile, those who simply regurgitate AI answers will be the easiest ones to fire.
Case in point: Just a few years ago, mentors urged job seekers to learn coding, convinced that the ubiquity of computers meant coders had guaranteed job security. Of course, AI is quickly colonizing the coding job market. Although demand may always exist for digital engineers to direct the AI and check its work, the future will need vastly fewer coders than previously expected, and coding is far from the only industry affected.
Classical education again has the answer. Instead of teaching children skills that may soon become obsolete, classical education cultivates students who know how to trace themes, patterns and arguments across works and across time. They are grounded in the best of our past, and with that strong foundation, they can be innovative in the present. They have the adaptability and intellectual agility to choose and live well.
Perhaps most important, classical education forms students in virtue: temperance, prudence, courage, justice. Such students will have the fortitude to endure the potential economic turbulence ahead and prudence as they build their adult lives. Classically educated students are ready not only for the uncertainty of the job market but also for the complexities of the human condition.
In a world where AI may replace half of entry-level roles, we should not overload students with soon-to-be-outdated tech instruction or train them for jobs that may not exist. We must reclaim education as a formation of memory, reason and virtue. If we do, then we will produce not automatons who rely on technology but rather sturdy people who can rely on themselves.
• Kathleen O’Toole is the associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College and a high school teacher at Hillsdale Academy.
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