Gerald Zhang-Schmidt

Microexplorer, Educator, Runner

Author: Gerald Zhang-Schmidt

  • Education in an Age of AI: Why Learn Anything Anymore?

    The Question We’re All Asking Because of AI Is Wrong

    With the rise of generative AI, it’s not just my pupils anymore who ask, “What good will it ever be for me to know that?”

    I recently heard a thoughtful podcast host wonder aloud how to educate his own children for this new world. What should they learn to be prepared for the future?

    It’s a question that has always been at the heart of education, but AI has given it a terrifying new urgency.

    Looking at it through the lens of a teacher, however, I’d argue it’s a misguided question in multiple ways. It misunderstands both the purpose of school and the fundamental nature of learning itself.

    The Panic Button: Our Usual, Wrong Answers

    When faced with rapid change, we tend to hit one of two panic buttons.

    Panic Button #1: “Why can’t school keep up?”

    This is a common and valid thought. School can feel like a superheavy tanker plowing the seas; course corrections take an immense amount of time. In a world changing this fast, is the institution agile enough to respond?

    To some extent, it tries. Schools have brought in digital skills education and are now looking toward AI literacy. But on the other hand, we should appreciate the stability. School’s role is to transmit foundational knowledge, not to chase every new trend. Its slowness can be a feature, not just a bug, anchoring us to essential basics.

    Panic Button #2: “We need skills, not content!”

    This has been a popular refrain for decades. “Learning to learn” is the goal. Don’t make pupils memorize things they’ll never need! Teach them how to adapt, because the jobs of the future haven’t even been invented yet!

    Now, with AI, this has gone into hyperdrive. Why struggle to write an essay when a machine can do it for you? Why learn anything by heart when you can just ask your phone?

    This is the point where we must take a step back and think again. These reactions are superficial fixes for a problem we haven’t properly diagnosed.

    The Real Issue: Learning Is Not Abstract

    The whole debate about what pupils need to learn gets absurd because it starts from a false premise. You cannot “learn to learn” in a vacuum. Learning requires content.

    I can certainly understand students’ frustration. If I had had the chance to study Japanese or Chinese instead of Latin in high school, I would have loved it. I still don’t fully accept the argument that Latin is a unique gateway to logical thinking or understanding Europe’s roots.

    But even if you don’t use the specific thing you learn later in life, you still needed it to learn how to learn. There’s another side to “useless content”: you never know what you will eventually need. More importantly, you will probably never even notice the foundational role it played in helping you understand something else down the road.

    This is the bedrock of education: any new piece of information can only stick if you can connect it to other knowledge you already possess. Without a scaffold of existing knowledge, new facts, ideas, and skills have nothing to cling to.

    When Forgetting the Basics Becomes Dangerous

    This isn’t just an abstract theory. I see pupils from backgrounds without a lot of educational support argue they won’t need basic maths because they have calculators. They are missing the point. You need basic maths to progress to advanced maths, and more fundamentally, to develop the numerical and logical intuition to know if the calculator’s answer even makes sense.

    Worse, I see society as a whole argue that biology and ecology are useless. When was the last time you heard a serious public discussion about how our bodies work, or how our life satisfaction is tied to nature? Instead, we get empty talk of “environmental protection” as a luxury, while “economic growth” is seen as a necessity, no matter its effect.

    That last phrasing alone, common as it is, betrays a profound lack of knowledge. It ignores the fact that the economy—and indeed, human life itself—is entirely dependent on ecological functioning. A society without this foundational knowledge cannot make wise decisions. It cannot even understand the problems it faces.

    The Take-Away: The Real Skill for the Age of AI

    So, what is school for? It is not merely to create productive workers. The stakeholders—be they the state, religious institutions, or parents—have always had varied aims. But the foundational goal must be to provide a basic, coherent understanding of the world and one’s place in it.

    We are forgetting basic skills of movement, navigation, reading, and solitude. School can only do so much, but it must be the place where a foundation of knowledge is built.

    When we panic about teaching AI and entrepreneurship, we forget that without this foundation, those skills are useless. You won’t get anywhere, whether in a future of climate disruption or one where AI solves all our problems. A machine can give you an answer, but it can’t give you the deep satisfaction that comes from having a genuine grasp of things.

    The ultimate skill for the age of AI is not prompt engineering. It is possessing a rich and broad enough knowledge base to ask the right questions, to critically evaluate the answers the machine provides, and to connect them in a meaningful way. The purpose of education is not to help humans compete with machines, but to cultivate the humanity, wisdom, and understanding that machines will never have.

  • Why I Logged Off, and Why I’m Arguing We Should All Log On as Teacher-Creators

    It was a strange feeling when a pupil came up to me and said, “My mum and I watched all your YouTube videos.”

    He paused. “They’re boring.”

    He wasn’t wrong, but as I replied back, “I’m not sure a review of 250-dollar running shoes is made for kids!”

    For a long time, I’ve had too little energy for online content, caught between my life as a teacher and my life as a father of two small children.

    My recent hesitation ran deeper than just time pressure. I looked at what was happening online with teachers, and frankly, I found myself appalled.

    This is the story of why I deleted my social media accounts—and why I’ve come to believe that being a thoughtful content creator might be one of the most important things a modern teacher can do.

    The Minefield: A Case Study in “Bad Teacher” Headlines

    It’s easy to find examples that make you want to log off for good, especially as a teacher.

    There was the elementary school teacher advertising her side hustle as an “orgasm pope.” While I found the public reaction exaggerated, it highlighted a weird, uncomfortable mixing of a teacher’s public and private personas.

    Then there were the young teachers who had to fight for their jobs in court, arguably because school boards were wary of their status as online influencers. That didn’t sit right with me; it felt like a punishment for being modern.

    But it didn’t help when German TV interviewed teachers who filmed videos in their classrooms, failed to protect their pupils’ privacy, and even advertised products in educational settings. That’s not a grey area; that’s just wrong.

    Faced with all this, my dabbling on TikTok—a platform my pupils love—started to feel stupid. It didn’t help when I logged on the app after a long time away and found the “For you” all very strange, the videos all starting with the content equivalent of jump scares.

    I ended up deleting almost all of my social media accounts. The risk seemed to far outweigh the reward. Things being shared online had all been getting anti-science; social media algorithms felt increasingly anti-social.

    The Core Tension: Are You a Person or a Professional?

    The real issue goes deeper than just bad examples. It touches the very core of what it means to be a teacher today.

    We’re told to maintain a healthy work/life balance, to get a hobby, and to be unreachable when we’re off the clock.

    That’s great advice, but it’s a difficult topic for teachers who grade papers at home and whose minds are still on classroom social dynamics long after the bell rings.

    We chose our subjects because we have a personal interest in them. If you are professional about your work, you don’t just work as a teacher; in many ways, you are a teacher.

    In addition, codes of conduct come in, stipulating standards we must adhere to even in our private lives.

    The work wants to determine how you live and how you are allowed to present yourself. The statement, “Teaching is a calling, not a profession,” is horrible, in my opinion. It justifies low pay and long hours while ignoring that teachers are professionals who deserve respect—and a private life.

    The Turning Point: Asking a Better Question

    During my time offline, as I taught digital literacy and watched the rise of AI in education, I came away with a different perspective. I realized we were all stuck in a loop of fear and criticism.

    What if this whole debate is framed by an outdated view of both teaching and the internet? What if, instead of being a risk to be managed, content creation is one of the most powerful professional development tools available to a modern educator?

    It’s time we reframe the discussion: teachers shouldn’t just be allowed to be content creators; they should be encouraged.

    The Case for the Teacher-Creator

    When we look past the scary headlines, the benefits for our students and our profession become clear.

    1. It’s Authentic Digital Literacy in Practice

    Many teachers are now expected to teach digital literacy. I’d rather have a teacher who is an online creator—who knows the ins and outs of video creation, virality, and online communication—teaching my kids than someone hiding behind a fake Facebook profile with little idea of what the online world truly threatens and offers. When you create, you learn about digital footprints, copyright, and community management from experience, not a textbook.

    2. It Models Passion and a Balanced Life

    When teachers create content about their subject, they show its relevance outside the classroom and model what it means to be a lifelong learner. And when a teacher creates content about a healthy hobby, they show students that a fulfilling adult life isn’t just a professional role. It’s a powerful, positive example.

    3. It Builds Modern Communication Skills

    To create engaging content, you have to learn to explain complex ideas clearly, to script a compelling narrative, and to use multimedia tools effectively. These are not distractions from teaching; they are the core skills of master teaching, upgraded for the 21st century.

    A Responsible Creator’s Checklist

    Of course, this doesn’t mean a free-for-all. Being a teacher-creator comes with non-negotiable responsibilities.

    These are the questions every one of us must constantly ask:

    • Time & Energy: Is this taking away from my core duties to my students?
    • Conflicts of Interest: Is my content monetized in a way that could ever pressure my students? Am I using it in the classroom appropriately?
    • Equity: Does my content create an advantage for students with better access to technology?
    • Privacy: Am I rigorously protecting the privacy of my students, my colleagues, and my school?
    • Longevity: Will this content still reflect well on me and my profession in five or ten years?
    • Professionalism: Does this content align with my role as an educator and set a positive example?

    The Take-Away: From Consumers to Creators

    Personally, I haven’t met these hordes of kids so often talked about, who all want to be influencers and YouTube stars.

    I wish I did.

    They would be motivated to use the internet for more than banal entertainment. They’d quickly learn that creating meaningful content takes hard work, skill, and dedication—more than just a click here or a dance there.

    And that applies all the more to us.

    By becoming thoughtful creators ourselves, we don’t just improve our own teaching. We put ourselves in the best possible position to guide the next generation, helping them navigate the digital world not as passive consumers, but as responsible, skilled, and passionate creators in their own right.

  • Where did the blog go – and where to, blogs?

    If you’ve come here looking for the blog I’ve long been writing, my apologies!

    The good news: After a long time writing, and thanks to the writing as a process of thinking, my topic got into focus, my niche became clear.

    It’s the topic and perspective of “microexploration” I also mention regularly here. And as I decided to get more professional about it, I switched it to its dedicated site:

    www.microexplore.me

    There, I’m revising my older writing and getting into new explorations – and the topic of life as exploration.

    Here, on the site that has my last name as URL, I want to present myself as my personal brand, and allow myself to blog in an older fashion, more personally.

    Are blogs still a thing?

    It’s a weird thing.

    Much of the web now runs (well, gets published) on content systems, oftentimes WordPress, which were originally made to be blogging systems.

    They are not blogs anymore, however, as they all got professionalized and monetized into content machines, all designed to draw attention and, through the views, make money from ads.

    Since everything is just about getting the eyeballs, it’s becoming more and more common to just let AI do its generative thing and spit out content.

    Now, Google says that they still care about the quality of the content, and I’ve done a horrible thing from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint in just deleting the old blog here and publishing revised content bit by bit, without linking from the old to the new.

    Probably, it’s even a bad thing for appearing in AI-produced output and being visible that way.

    I still write, at least partly, in an old-fashioned way, however: I write online to share thoughts. To at least some extent, I could just as well journal for myself and not make the writing visible to anyone else.

    Considering how much commenting is being done only because people misunderstand the writing, take offence with something nobody else notices and the writer never intended – to not even start talking about the problem with personal information versus privacy – I often wonder what good this public writing even is.

    And then again, a lot of such writing doesn’t even get seen, let alone commented on, anyways.

    Blogs as personal logbooks (How did we ever get to “blog” rather than “plog” from there again?) seem to be gone, subsumed by social media posting.

    I don’t care.

    I don’t want to be on social media anymore. Their algorithms are even more antisocial than the worst of the heuristics we have in our own brains (which I worry a lot about).

    I want to be visible online, however.

    Blogging, publishing onilne, I have regularly declared to have been therapy for me.

    I wrote, and I write, to think. And I do so online to share ideas, to have the feeling that they would, at least potentially, be out there for others to share in the thinking, see similarities and differences.

    Microexploration and other topics of mine will be professional topics, and therefore I want them on their own sites and with less of me and my views in them.

    “Just the facts, ma’m!”

    Even AI can play its part in that, and help.

    All the better in times of so much AI-generated (and hallucinated) content, however, to be visible as an actual human being as well – and here, I have now given myself the space for that.

    If you happen to come across this and care, I appreciate it!

    And if no one sees or cares about this… it’s still good for me.

    (Since this feels like a necessary addendum: If you see this and feel inclined to post something negative, just go away. This is my house.)