I just don’t get it.
Over the past few days, I have made the mistake of spending far too much time reading LinkedIn posts from our assorted educational gurus, visionaries, thought leaders, consultants, professors, administrators, futurists and other people who have apparently been entrusted with discovering the future of education between conference presentations.
And what a future it is.
We need more gaming. More personalization. Higher-order thinking. AI literacy. Digital citizenship. Fewer digital devices. More handwriting. Bring back cursive. Teach empathy. Revive Multiple Intelligences. Improve online assessment. Expand community engagement. Build makerspaces. Embrace formative assessment. Teach children how to prompt ChatGPT. Teach teachers how to teach children how to prompt ChatGPT. Presumably, someone will soon offer a certificate in teaching teachers how to teach children how to prompt ChatGPT.
There will be a webinar.
Possibly a badge.
And almost certainly a consultant.
The remarkable thing is that, apart from generative AI, virtually none of this is new. We have been discussing student-centred learning, critical thinking, authentic assessment, differentiated instruction, collaboration, creativity and community-based learning for decades. We rename them, repackage them, put them into PowerPoint decks, create acronyms for them and then congratulate ourselves on innovation.
Education may be the only industry capable of recycling a 30-year-old idea and calling it transformational.
I do not entirely blame the people involved. Academics need publications. Consultants need contracts. Bureaucracies need initiatives. Conference organizers need conferences. School systems need strategic plans containing colourful arrows pointing toward words such as innovation, excellence and transformation.
Everybody is busy.
My question is whether anybody has noticed what is happening outside the building.
The World Is Not Tinkering
Artificial intelligence is not simply another educational technology to be placed alongside the interactive whiteboard and whatever became of the overhead projector.
The OECD is now explicitly arguing that rapidly advancing AI requires education systems to reconsider fundamental questions: What is schooling for? What knowledge remains important? What should humans learn when machines can increasingly perform intellectual tasks previously reserved for humans? The OECD's language is particularly revealing: policymakers need to look beyond incremental changes and reconsider the curriculum itself.
That is rather different from scheduling a professional-development afternoon entitled Ten Exciting Ways to Use ChatGPT in Grade 7 Social Studies.
UNESCO has reached a similar conclusion. Its AI competency framework does not define AI literacy as learning a collection of clever prompts. It identifies human-centred thinking, ethics, critical judgement, understanding AI systems and the capacity to create with them as essential competencies. UNESCO also notes that relatively few countries have established comprehensive national AI competency programs for teachers.
Meanwhile, the labour market is not politely waiting for education to finish its committee meeting.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on more than 1,000 employers, estimates that 39% of workers' core skills will change by 2030. AI and big data are among the fastest-growing skill areas, but so are analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning. Employers are not merely asking for people who know how to operate machines. They increasingly need people capable of doing what machines cannot reliably do: judge, question, adapt, create, collaborate and think.
In other words, Human Intelligence may become more important precisely because Artificial Intelligence is becoming more powerful.
That ought to get our attention.
Meanwhile, Back at School…
And yet much of public education remains astonishingly recognizable.
Walk into many classrooms and the basic architecture would not bewilder a visitor from 1956. There is a teacher. There are students grouped largely by age. There is a timetable divided into subjects. There is prescribed curriculum content. There are assignments. There are tests. There are grades. There are bells.
We have added Wi-Fi.
Progress.
This is where my frustration with the endless parade of educational initiatives becomes something closer to anger.
The problem is not that formative assessment is bad. It is excellent.
The problem is not that makerspaces are pointless. They can be wonderful.
Gaming can motivate students. Personalization can improve learning. Empathy matters. Handwriting may have cognitive benefits. AI literacy is unquestionably important.
But these are pieces.
We are rearranging furniture while wondering whether the house still serves the people living in it.
The OECD's latest work goes considerably further. Its 2026 AI literacy framework with the European Commission argues that young people need to understand AI, critically evaluate its outputs and use it ethically and creatively because AI is increasingly embedded in civic, professional and social life. Another OECD analysis asks an even more uncomfortable question: as AI becomes capable of performing tasks we once considered distinctly human, which capabilities should remain central to human education, and does that require us to rethink the very function of schooling?
That is the conversation we should be having.
Not whether Grade 8 students need another app.
Stop Asking How to Improve the System
Perhaps we are asking the wrong question.
We keep asking:
How can we improve education?
Maybe the question should be:
If public education did not exist and we had to invent it today, knowing what we know about AI, neuroscience, climate change, automation, misinformation, globalization and the emerging labour market, would we build anything remotely resembling the system we currently have?
I suspect the answer would make quite a few people uncomfortable.
Good.
Discomfort might finally be useful.
We need to put curriculum, assessment, graduation requirements, teacher preparation, age-based grouping, schedules, subjects, homework, examinations and even the traditional definition of academic success on the table.
No sacred cows.
We should ask what knowledge children genuinely need when information is effectively infinite. What thinking abilities become more important when machines can produce competent answers in seconds. How children learn to distinguish truth from extraordinarily convincing nonsense. How they develop judgement, curiosity, intellectual independence, ethical reasoning, adaptability and the courage to tell an algorithm—or an authority figure—that it may be wrong.
Most importantly, we need to decide what we believe an educated human being should be in the middle of the twenty-first century.
Because the world our children will inherit is not waiting for us to complete another pilot project.
Employers surveyed by the World Economic Forum expect 86% of businesses to be transformed by AI and information-processing technologies by 2030. That is less than four years away.
Children entering Grade 9 today will barely have graduated.
And we are still debating whether they should use their phones in class.
We Have Seen This Movie Before
There is an uncomfortable historical parallel.
For decades, scientists warned governments and citizens about climate change. The evidence accumulated. Reports were issued. Conferences were held. Targets were announced.
And humanity demonstrated its remarkable capacity to acknowledge an enormous problem while continuing with Tuesday afternoon pretty much as scheduled.
Education appears determined to conduct a similar experiment.
We see the transformation coming. We acknowledge its magnitude. We hold conferences about it. We publish policies about it. We form committees to examine it.
Then Monday morning arrives and the bell rings at 8:30.
The students sit down.
The teacher opens the prescribed curriculum.
And everybody continues.
Perhaps AI will prove less revolutionary than some predict. Perhaps some of today's forecasts will look ridiculous in ten years. Anyone claiming to know precisely where artificial intelligence is taking civilization is selling certainty that simply does not exist.
But uncertainty is not an argument for preserving the status quo.
It is the strongest argument for developing human beings capable of dealing with uncertainty.
That means people who can think rather than merely remember; question rather than merely comply; evaluate rather than merely consume; create rather than merely reproduce; adapt rather than wait for instructions.
That should be the mission.
Not another initiative.
Not another glossy strategic plan.
Not another consultant explaining transformation to us from slide 47 of a PowerPoint presentation.
We need educators, parents, students, governments, universities, employers, technologists and communities around the same table asking one brutally simple question:
What kind of human being will flourish in the world that is coming, and what must education become to produce that person?
Then we rebuild accordingly.
Because if the world really is changing as profoundly as the evidence suggests, history will not be particularly interested in how many AI-literacy workshops we offered in 2026.
It will ask whether we recognized what was happening.
Whether we had the courage to change.
And whether, when the future arrived at the schoolhouse door, we were preparing our children for it—
or teaching them cursive while the world rebooted.