What Shall I Teach My Son?
Short summary
Steve Krouse, a programmer about to become a father, uses Neil Postman's The End of Education to ask what schooling is for once AI can do much of what he's trained to do. He concludes that education's purposes have shifted many times, and that parents might work out new ones together with their kids.
- Schools have outlasted every technology predicted to replace them, from radio and film to MOOCs, because their staying power comes from endowments, prestige, and childcare rather than their stated purpose.
- Krouse's own answer, "resourceful," looks obsolete now that AI agents use tools in a loop, and earning a living, a purpose he had leaned on, is wobbling too.
- Postman proposed new purposes such as Spaceship Earth, the American Experiment, and The World Makers, and Krouse argues the medium of teaching matters as much as its content.
Full summary
Steve Krouse, a programmer about to become a father, wonders what to teach his son now that AI threatens to make his own skills less valuable. The prompt comes via Neil Postman's 1995 book The End of Education, which Krouse rereads and finds unexpectedly relevant. He opens with a string of confident predictions that schooling was about to be transformed: Thomas Edison said in 1913 that books would soon be obsolete and the school system would change within ten years, and radio and film were each supposed to replace teachers. Krouse admits he made a similar bet about MOOCs in 2013 and was wrong.
His main argument is that schools have a strong track record of survival, which he traces through Taleb's Lindy Effect. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded to train clergy, and schools outlived the decline of religion as their stated justification. Krouse separates the reasons institutions claim to exist from the forces that actually keep them running, which he lists as endowments, prestige, and childcare. He concedes that AI feels like a different kind of break, since it can now do the kind of resourcefulness he once picked as education's single purpose. He also notes that the market has long been an alternative measure of worth, citing Jobs, Gates, and Einstein, a path now threatened by AI advances in mathematics. He points to Clara Collier's essay "After Work, We'll Have Each Other" as a related take.
Krouse's answer is less a conclusion than a method. From Postman he takes the idea that education's purposes can be invented and argued for, and he picks three: Spaceship Earth (caring for each other and the planet), the American Experiment (renewing curiosity and responsibility about the country), and the World Makers (students making the tools and stories that shape people). He also leans on Postman's line that "the medium is the message" and Alfie Kohn's distinction between doing with children and doing to them. So he plans to bring his son into deciding what his education is for, working it out together rather than handing it down.