09/14/2026
Two Hours of Academics. A Whole Day of Learning.
A stranger asked me about AI schooling, and I realized the conversation has already left the education conferences.
I was at an event recently, making the kind of small talk you make with someone you've just met. We traded the usual — what do you do, what's yhadour work, how did you end up in it. Then, without much of a preamble, he asked me:
"What do you think about the AI school?"
I'll admit my first reaction was surprise. Not at the question itself — I think about it constantly — but at who was asking it. This wasn't a principal, a curriculum director, or someone selling me a platform. This was a person with no professional stake in education at all, and he already had opinions. That told me something: the conversation about AI and schooling is no longer happening only among educators. It's happening in living rooms, in break rooms, and at parties, among the parents and neighbors who will ultimately decide whether any of it is acceptable.
So I answered him honestly. I'm in favor.
I have never been a follow-the-rules educator
I should say up front where I'm coming from, because it explains a lot about why I answer the way I do.
I have never been what most people would call a by-the-book teacher. When I was in the classroom, my best lessons were rarely the ones that happened in the classroom. They happened in the yard. We went looking for an insect and ended up talking about habitat, adaptation, and why this one lived under that rock and not the other. We checked the sky and argued about what the clouds were going to do. We counted our steps across the courtyard and discovered we had walked into a math lesson without being told we were having one.
Those students learned more in twenty minutes outside than they did from any worksheet I ever handed them. I knew it at the time, and I know it more clearly now, years later, when I run into former students and find out what they actually remember.
The problem was never that I didn't believe in academics. The problem was the arithmetic of the school day. Six or seven hours, most of it spent delivering content to thirty students at one pace — a pace that was too slow for some, too fast for others, and exactly right for almost no one.
What AI schooling makes possible
This is where AI changes the math, and it's why my answer to that stranger was yes.
Picture a day with two hours of focused academics. Not two hours of a teacher talking at the front of a room, but two hours in which each student works at the level they're actually at, on the thing they actually need next — because the system knows where they are and adjusts to them. Not one lesson plan for thirty kids. Thirty pathways, continuously adapted.
And then the rest of the day is free for everything school never has time for:
• Public speaking. Learning to stand in front of people and hold a room.
• Inquiry. Learning to question themselves, sit with not knowing, and go find out.
• Service. Helping others, and understanding what it costs and what it gives back.
• Nature, in real contact. Not a photograph of an ecosystem. The ecosystem.
These aren't enrichment. They're the skills that determine what kind of adult a child becomes, and we've been treating them as what you do if there's time left over. There is never time left over.
The teacher doesn't disappear. The teacher finally gets to teach.
The fear I hear most often is that AI replaces teachers. I'd argue the opposite: it gives us back the teachers we were supposed to have.
If a system handles differentiation and content delivery, the adult in the room stops being — and I mean this plainly — a body standing in front of a group. They become what I'd call a real teacher: someone who notices that a student has gone quiet this week, who knows the difference between a child who can't and a child who won't, who understands how a twelve-year-old's brain and social world actually work.
That expertise doesn't become less important when the role shifts to a guiding one. It becomes the whole job. Cognitive and social development are not things a model can observe from a screen. They're things a trained adult notices in a hallway.
One non-negotiable
None of this works without a discipline we all have to build, students and teachers alike: check the output.
AI is not perfect. It is confidently wrong regularly, and it will hand a student an error in the same clean, authoritative sentence it uses for the truth. If we build a school model on these tools without teaching verification as a core skill — how to question a source, cross-check a claim, recognize when something doesn't add up — we haven't modernized education. We've just automated the transmission of mistakes.
Which, come to think of it, is the same skill I was teaching in the yard. Go look. Check for yourself. Don't take my word for it either.
