AI will be everywhere, I agree. Yet it will not destroy all things. It will transform them. It will break the current system, I assume. And it might force us back into another paradigm, one in which education serves those who seek it, while skill-based education applies to those who need training for specific jobs.

AI critics often misunderstand how AI will transform education. Do not misunderstand me. I believe some universities are producing students who have not learned but have finished a degree using AI shortcuts.

As Ronald Purser puts it: “Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes.” I have no rose-coloured glasses when it comes to this question. AI in education will make degrees as we know them less meaningful (not quite meaningless).

But is this any real change? In 2020, did we think university education was on the up and up? Were students improving, growing in the humane arts, and becoming the kind of people that traditional universities aimed to produce?

Not in most cases. Five years ago, we assumed that universities pressed students into programs for the greatest utility. When we asked the student, “What are you going to university for?”, the only answer was to get this or that job.

And I want people to get the skills to survive the marketplace, even to thrive in it. But this utilitarian end is not the full purpose of education. As C. S. Lewis explains in his Abolition of Man, education aims to form in the heart an ordered love for what is good, true, and beautiful; and a just dislike for what is evil.

At its heart, education is for leisure—not watching Netflix, but pursuing the questions and ends of life: how should we live? How should a country order its public life? What is true? Read Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture to see what I mean.

If it is not obvious at this point, my argument is that AI will not make education fail; it already has. Not because universities have churned out degrees (although we might ask what the point of this is) and not because they equipped students with skills for the workforce (this is good), but because we misunderstood the nature of education.

Let a trade school be a trade school. Close the degree mills. Restore education to its ancient purposes. Granted, schools may remain one legal organization; I am not ignorant of modern structures. But we can at least be honest about what is happening in education.

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