How AI Will Transform Education, From PreK To PhD

There has never been a better time to be five years old.

I often get asked this question: “If AI knows everything, why should my kids learn anything at all? Isn’t education obsolete?” My answer is visceral and immediate: No, education will never be obsolete. It’s actually more important than ever. But it does need to adapt. Massively.

A few times per century, some new technological invention drops from the sky and uproots life as we know it. Whether we like it or not, we’re thrust into a “new normal,” one that significantly disrupts the pattern of our daily lives. People once thought the Industrial Revolution was the end of the world. And in some ways, it felt like it. People were scared, uncertain, powerless. Thousands of jobs were lost. But in the long-term, hundreds of thousands of jobs were created. Now, for you and me, everyday tasks are glossed with an ease and convenience that previous generations could have never dreamed of. All we had to do was adapt.

We did it again with the Internet.

And again, with the iPhone.

And we will do it again with AI.

Because beneath newfangled gadgets and innovations and movements, the human spirit throbs like a persistent pulse. We fear, endure, adapt, innovate, create, then marvel at what we’ve done and how far we’ve come. Eventually, we look back and say, “How did we ever manage without this thing?” And the cycle repeats itself.

The first 20 years of a person’s life no longer look anything like the experience of earlier generations. That may sound scary, but I promise you: there has never been a better time to be five years old.

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The five phases of education (as we know it)

Let’s start with a quick look at how education works without AI.

Learning happens in five phases:

1. Pre-K to 3rd Grade
   Kids set the foundation of their education. They learn the basics: letters, numbers, how to read and write. There’s a popular adage: “Until 3rd grade, kids learn to read. After 3rd grade, they read to learn.”

2. 4th Grade to 12th Grade
   These years are all about mastering a standardized curriculum. In the U.S., that’s Common Core and AP courses. The goal is to stuff kids’ heads with as much knowledge as possible.

3. College
   Students begin to learn from seasoned experts. College classes are less about standardized test scores and more about domain expertise. For the first time, students can break away from generalized curriculum and dive deep into niche pockets of education: gothic literature, applied mathematics, biochemistry, the history of ancient Mayan civilization — you name it.

4. Master’s Programs
   Now, students shift to becoming experts themselves. “School subjects” become “career goals.” Students are no longer concerned with pure consumption of knowledge, but the long-term execution and creation of it.

5. PhD Programs
   Finally, the PhD shifts from mastering knowledge to creating it. Students officially break their “student” mold and step into the role of “inventor,” “creator,” and “industry expert.”

As you know, this is an arduous, expensive formula that can span the length of decades. Certain things must happen to elicit certain outcomes. Creation requires mastery. You can’t expand a frontier if you don’t know the existing frontier like the back of your hand.

The human knowledge graph is an intricate web of successes and failures, from caffeine-fueled all-nighters to heated debates with professors to actually being in the field, boots on the ground, testing, trying, experimenting, hypothesizing. Knowledge is the result of generations standing on the shoulders of giants.

Example of a knowledge graph in the realm of philosophy

And now, a new giant (albeit, artificial) has entered the scene. And it will significantly change learning as we know it.

Sacrificing learning in the name of AI isn’t just defeatist, it’s destructive

You and I both know that education isn’t just about learning or thinking; it’s about learning how to learn, thinking about how to think. Throwing up our hands and saying, “Well, there’s no point in learning if AI can do it all!” is a destructive mindset. It’s the path to unlocking “scary AI” — the kind of existential threat that takes over the world because we have allowed technology to use us and not the other way around.

What most of us are not seeing is this: AI can help our kids accomplish things no generation before them has ever been able to do.

It will fill their minds with more knowledge than ever before, faster than ever before. It will enable their minds to be the most interesting places in the world. Can you imagine? If your kids’ own ideas were more exciting than the brain rot of TikTok or the addictive slop of video games?

A few years ago, AI couldn’t beat a third grader in a math test. Now it can beat most Master’s students. AIs today are on track to become experts in every single academic field. What AI cannot do is create new knowledge at the capability level of humans, especially in fields where it doesn’t have gigabytes of training data. And this is where humans can thrive.

Four ways AI will transform education

Our idea of education is this: twenty-five students, one teacher, everyone learning the same thing at the same pace at the same time. Some kids are bored and drooling, others are frustrated and struggling, and teachers are oversaturated with responsibility. Bell rings. Class dismissed.

These days will soon be over.

Here are the four integral ways AI will transform education.

1. Personalized Learning for Every Kid

AI tailors education to every child’s passions and interests. Essentially, every kid will have their own personal tutor throughout the entirety of their education. Students will master the same concepts, just in different ways.

Here’s a good visual: imagine you and I are peering up at a stained glass window, one of those beautiful vintage ones you often find in old Southern churches. The sun is beating down and the glass is filtering it into a myriad of different colors: blue, purple, yellow, green. Depending on where you’re looking, or what color catches your eye, you’ll be gazing up at a different version of the sun than I am. But we’re both looking at the same light.

This is what AI will do to education.

Blue. Purple. Yellow. Green. Coding. Music. Fashion. Engineering. The source material is the same, but the lens is unique.

The best part about AI personalized learning is this: when kids love what they’re learning, they pour themselves into it. Personalized education makes learning fun, exciting, compelling, real. And this is just the first way AI will change education.

2. Faster Learning, Faster Mastery

Remember the five phases of traditional education? How long it takes to reach mastery, how cumbersome it feels to pursue? Soon, we’ll wash our hands of that.

With AI, what once took years to learn will take mere months. What took weeks will take hours. AI tools help kids learn foundational skills (reading, math, social studies) at lightning speed, which will make for a total shake down of education as we know it. It will, quite literally, redefine developmental benchmarks.

Kids will be literate by age five. They will graduate high school by eighth grade. They will master subjects faster and more completely than anyone in the history of the world.

It’s time to open our minds to what’s possible for our children.

3. Turn Consumers into Creators

Because students will reach mastery so much quicker, the purpose of high school will shift. Days will no longer be spent cramming for quizzes and tests. Instead, the first two years of high school will take on the role of college: choosing and mastering a chosen field. The final two years will be about creating new knowledge.

Yup — high schoolers doing PhD-level work in their area of choice.

I can already hear the skeptics shouting: “Not everyone wants to do PhD-level work!” But I want to challenge that idea.

PhDs (as we know them so far) are for the niche-obsessed, for those who want to spend a decade buried in quantum physics or poststructuralist literary theory. If you don’t yearn to dissect some microscopic corner of academia, then sure, a PhD probably feels irrelevant.

But what if PhD-level work wasn’t limited to academia?

What if it meant becoming a knowledge creator in the field you actually care about — music, fashion, gaming, architecture, sports analytics, environmental design? What if, instead of just consuming knowledge, high schoolers learned how to generate it? How rewarding of a career, how fulfilling of a life this could elicit.

With AI, high school will be so much more than the end of learning, or the completion of a system. It will mark the transition from regurgitating what others have already figured out to actually pushing the frontier forward.

Which leads us to the fourth and final way AI will change education.

4. Deepening Our Distinctive Humanity

There’s one glaring thing future generations will have to master that past generations have never had to think too much about: being human.

What used to be “soft skills” on our resumes will become defining, irreplaceable characteristics for our children. Leadership. Teamwork. Socialization. Problem-solving. Creativity. Goal-setting. Critical thinking. These are no longer jargon-y words tossed around in job interviews — they are concrete, tangible, much-needed skills. Why? Because AI cannot replace them.

And, with newly compressed academic learning, kids will have more free time. Lots of it. The perfect opportunity to master life skills and develop their distinctive human thumbprint.

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Here’s the TL;DR

With AI, students will no longer be passive vessels for standardized content — they will become active contributors to their field of choice at ridiculously young ages.

The entire education system will shift away from consumption into creation. And if you can’t tell, I (like many others) find this very exciting.

Think about middle schoolers scrolling TikTok or playing video games. When you give them a path to create — coding an app, writing a Broadway musical, designing a new line of sneakers — they come alive, roll up their sleeves, dive in. It’s beautiful. It’s groundbreaking. It’s the future of education.

And the result? A millionfold expansion of the human knowledge graph.

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So no, AI will not make education obsolete. It will redefine how kids learn, turn consumers into creators, and deepen the well of human knowledge.

The unknown feels scary, but I stand by my earlier statement:

There has never been a better time to be five years old.

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