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The Confession That Should Worry Every Parent
When AI outperforms humans at traditional schoolwork, what should children actually learn?
Jared Kaplan said something that should worry every parent. His six-year-old son will never write essays better than AI. Never solve math problems faster than a machine. Not "probably won't." Never.
This isn't some fearful prediction. Jared Kaplan is Anthropic's chief scientist. He's building these AI systems himself. He knows what's coming, and he says most white-collar work will be automated within two to three years. His son will still be in elementary school, practicing skills that are already outdated.
We're teaching kids to win a race that's already finished.
The Essay Problem Nobody Wants to Address
Consider the classic school essay. Teachers assign them to develop critical thinking, research skills, and clear communication. But here's what actually happens now: a student can describe their thesis to ChatGPT or Claude, get a well-structured draft in seconds, then edit it slightly to sound more personal.
The AI version is often better. Better structure, clearer arguments, fewer grammatical errors. It cites sources, builds logical progressions, and maintains consistent tone. The student who spends three hours researching and writing gets a worse result than the one who spends ten minutes with AI.
We can install detection software and create honor codes, but we're fighting the ocean with a bucket. The real question isn't how to stop students from using AI. It's why we're still measuring intelligence through tasks that machines do better.
The uncomfortable reality: AI often produces better essays than students spending hours researching and writing.
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What Actually Matters When Knowledge Is Free
If AI handles the mechanics of writing and calculation, what's left for humans? The answer separates into two categories: skills AI struggles with and skills that make us distinctly human.
Skills AI Can't Replicate Yet
Asking the right questions matters more than finding answers. AI gives you what you ask for, nothing more. Knowing what problem to solve, what question exposes the real issue, what angle reveals new insight requires judgment that comes from experience and context.
Physical presence and emotional intelligence remain human domains. Reading a room, sensing when someone needs support versus space, building trust through consistent action over time. These things happen in three dimensions with real stakes.
Skills That Define Human Value
Teaching kids to work alongside AI rather than compete against it becomes the new literacy. This means understanding what AI does well, where it fails, and how to use it as a tool rather than a replacement for thinking.
Creativity shifts from execution to direction. Instead of spending hours perfecting a design, kids need to learn how to envision what should exist and guide AI to create it. The value sits in taste, vision, and the ability to recognize what's actually good versus what's technically correct.
The Education System We Actually Need
Schools weren't designed for this world. They were built to create factory workers and office administrators who could follow processes, remember facts, and complete standardized tasks. That model is dying in real time.
What replaces it? Project-based learning where kids solve actual problems using whatever tools work best, including AI. Evaluation based on the questions they ask, the solutions they propose, and their ability to collaborate with both humans and machines.
We need classes on prompt engineering before calculus. Ethics and philosophy before physics. How to evaluate information sources before memorizing historical dates. These aren't soft skills anymore. They're survival skills.
The shift isn't subtle: we need to completely reimagine how students spend their learning time.
Preparing Kids for a World We Can't Predict
The hardest part of parenting in the AI era is accepting uncertainty. We can't tell kids which careers will exist in fifteen years or which skills will command premium pay. What we can do is teach them to learn constantly, adapt quickly, and find meaning beyond their productivity.
Kaplan's son will grow up in a world where being smart means something completely different than it did for previous generations. The parents and educators who recognize this early, who stop clinging to outdated measures of intelligence, will give their kids the actual preparation they need.
The education crisis isn't coming. It's already here. And every day we spend teaching to yesterday's standards is a day we fail the next generation.
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