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.