Rebecca Winthrop on Rethinking the Purpose of Education

Rebecca Winthrop

What advice would you give me? So approximately a third of kids are deeply engaged. So two-thirds of the kids are not. We need to have learning experiences that motivate kids to dig in and engage and be excited to learn. So when friends or relatives ask me the same question, I usually say, look, we have to think about three parts to the answer. Why do you want your kids to be educated? What is the purpose of education? Because actually, now that we have AI, they can write essays and pass the bar exam and do AP exams just as good or better than kids. We have to really rethink the purpose of education. The second thing we have to think about is how kids learn, and we know a lot about that. And the third thing is what they should learn.

Rebecca Winthrop

Why do you want your kids to be educated? What is the purpose of education? Because actually, now that we have AI, they can write essays and pass the bar exam and do AP exams just as good or better than kids. We have to really rethink the purpose of education. The second thing we have to think about is

Rebecca Winthrop

Why do you want your kids to be educated? What is the purpose of education? Because actually, now that we have AI, they can write essays and pass the bar exam and do AP exams just as good or better than kids. We have to really rethink the purpose of education. The second thing we have to think about is how kids learn, and we know a lot about that. And the third thing is what they should learn. Like, what's the content? What are the skills? People always think of education as

Rebecca Winthrop

The skills that I think are going to be most important are how motivated and engaged kids are to be able to learn new things. That is maybe one of the most important skills in a time of uncertainty. That they are go-getters, they're going to be wayfinders, things are going to shift and change, and they're going to be able to navigate and constantly learn new things and be excited To learn new things. Because when kids are motivated, that's actually a huge predictor of how they do. And we're going to want kids absolutely to know enough content so that they can be a judge of what is real and what is fake. But we're also going to want them to have experiences where they're learning and testing how

Rebecca Winthrop

Because I worry greatly that AI will basically make a frictionless world for young people. It's great for me. I'm loving generative AI, but I have said several decades of brain development where I know how to do hard things. But kids are developing their brains. They're literally being neurobiologically wired for how to attend, how to focus, how to try, how to connect ideas, how to relate to other people. And all of those are not easy things.

Ezra Klein

You have in your book these four modes of engagement. Do you want to talk through them? Absolutely.

Rebecca Winthrop

So we found after three years of research that kids engage in four different ways. They're passenger mode, kids are coasting, achiever mode, they're trying to get perfect outcomes, resistor mode, they're avoiding and disrupting. And explorer mode is when they

Rebecca Winthrop

Passenger mode is difficult to spot often for parents and sometimes teachers because many kids in passenger mode get really good grades, but are just bored to tears. They show up to school, they do the homework, they have dropped out of learning. So passenger mode is when kids are really coasting, doing the bare minimum. Some signs of this are your kid comes home and they do their homework as fast as possible. Another sign is that they say, school's boring. It's just boring. I learned nothing. Kids are in passenger mode because school is actually too easy for them. We talked to so many kids who said, look, I'm in class and the teacher is going over the math homework from yesterday and I got everyone right. And I know the answers and it's 45 minutes of that. And I understand the kids who don't get it, they need the help. But, you know, I'm going to shop online. Or I have kids who say, well, I got the homework home and I know how to do this stuff. So I just put in chat GPT and it did my problem set for me. And then I turn it in. So that's when it's too easy. Another version of why kids get into passenger mode is when it's too hard. School's too hard. You could have a neurodivergent kid. Kids don't feel they belong. And so they're not tuning in. They've missed certain pieces of skill sets that they really need. Knowledge and education is cumulative in many ways. And they get kind of overwhelmed. And they need particular special attention. So that's kind of what's going on in passenger mode.

Rebecca Winthrop

So the first response when Gen AI came in was ban it, block it, get anti-plagiarism checkers in, which are bad, by the way. Like I talked to one kid who showed me he had this essay and the plagiarism checker, it's like 40% of it, and he changed two words and then it went away. So we cannot out technologize ourselves. So what we need to do is shift what we're doing in our teaching and learning experiences.

Ezra Klein

I'm not trying to over extrapolate my experience. It's actually important in me not to over extrapolate my experience. But something I've seen you talk about is this quality of when students find the teacher, find the subject, find the approach that activates them, that all of a sudden the things that Are not that activating to them become easier, that there is a sort of lock and a key dynamic to learning.

Rebecca Winthrop

And this is something we talk about around finding your spark. Kids need to find their spark. And they may have many sparks, and their sparks may change. But when kids find their spark, for Kia, it was this idea of doing an escape room around historical residential assassinations. For other students, they find

Ezra Klein

It's pretty hard to do personalized learning, even if you have examples that you've seen work. Because you have one teacher, it's a classroom of 20, 30 kids oftentimes. But AI makes this completely different. AI gives you more tutors than there are children. It allows you to have tutors who adapt to that kid's individual learning style in any way you wanted to, in any way they wanted to. If this kid is a visual learner, it can do visual learning. If pop quizzes are helpful for them, they can do pop quizzes. It can turn it into a podcast they listen to. If you are more audio focused, everything can be be turned into a poem if you absorb information better through the sonnet form. That as we get better at this, and as we build these systems and tune them better, although they're already pretty capable here, that our ability to personalize education using artificial Intelligence as tutors will be like nothing ever seen before in human history. It's a complete quantum leap in educational possibility. And as such, it allows you to bring every child into their educational utopia, whatever that is, to spark them, to turn them on, to make them into an explorer.

Ezra Klein

And what scares me, putting aside what world my kids graduate into, is them moving into schools at the exact time that they don't know what the hell to do with this technology. And they're about to try a lot of things that don't work and probably try it badly. And I wonder, as somebody who's tracked this, what you think the lessons of what I consider, at least, the screens and phones debacle of the 2010s or the 2000s have been.

Rebecca Winthrop

This is a really tricky question, and you point on something that is a real issue, which is around the deep equity issues that have already emerged. So think about the schools that ban AI for a kid who has no access to AI at home versus a kid who goes home and has full access to all the AI tools. That right there is a huge cleavage in our country. It also, there's a huge equity gap in terms of language. Large language models work off of language that is written down. There's a lot of languages that aren't written down that much. They have very little written down. And so there you're seeing a global gap across the globe between sort of African and indigenous languages and communities versus English speaking or other large languages. So equity is a huge one. Your question about sort of public versus private, I would say to

Rebecca Winthrop

This is a really tricky question, and you point on something that is a real issue, which is around the deep equity issues that have already emerged. So think about the schools that ban AI for a kid who has no access to AI at home versus a kid who goes home and has full access to all the AI tools. That right there is a huge cleavage in our country. It also, there's a huge equity gap in terms of language. Large language models work off of language that is written down. There's a lot of languages that aren't written down that much. They have very little written down. And so there you're seeing a global gap across the globe between sort of African and indigenous languages and communities versus English speaking or other large languages. So equity is a huge one. Your question about sort of public versus private, I would say to public education systems, do not have FOMO. Because that is what the gut instinct is when a new technology comes. I'm missing out. I have a fear of missing out, and I need to adopt it, and I see this. So don't have FOMO. Don't use it unless it's a real problem you want to solve. Do give it to the adults in the school building. Give it to teachers. Have them use it and figure out how it will help them today. Then give it to sort of really novel school leaders to think about how they could maybe restructure the teaching and learning experiences. What are the things that AI can do? There's so much that AI could actually do to help make public schools work better. Bus schedules, calendaring, school meals, cafeteria. I mean, assessment input. There's so much time that could be really freed up.

Rebecca Winthrop

So I think that AI has real potential for very specific use cases, particularly around access gaps. And in Nigeria, what was done was after school, twice a week, an AI tutor helped kids learn English. And it was for six weeks, which is not long. It was June, July, I think. And it was a randomized controlled trial. We're still waiting for all the evidence to come through, but 0.3 standard deviations, which is pretty good, equivalent to maybe two years of average sort of English learning. And we see that difference with other technologies too. It doesn't have to be Gen AI. It can be rule-based AI. It could be predictive AI. We've seen sort of similar benefits, for example, in Malawi, teaching literacy and numeracy to kids with offline tablets where teachers have maybe 80 to 100 kids in a class and each Kid is having sort of a personalized adaptive learning experience. That is hugely beneficial as well.

Ezra Klein

There's all kinds of times when you are confused by what you are reading, what you are learning. You're in a big class and it's embarrassing to ask 55 questions or there's even time to ask 55 questions and you don't want to seem stupid. But if you could contain the system somehow, and that seems more plausible here where there's a fundamental prompt at the core of them, then, you know, if we got that right, you know, In a lot of these use cases, it could be really powerful. Absolutely.

Rebecca Winthrop

And the key is what you said, contain the system. We can't sort of just bring commercial tech into our schools and hope it will solve these problems.

Rebecca Winthrop

I think that's right. If I had to choose for my own kids, and I do, we would have a school that has no phones for all the reasons we know. And Jonathan Haidt has done a great job on sort of catalyzing that movement here in the U.S. And bringing it from across the globe to our schools. We should have cell phone bands in school, bell to bell. Don't have it at recess because that's where you start interacting and playing with kids. And I think we should make school a place where kids can actually interact with each other, develop human-to socialization capacities because there is massive commercial tech the Minute they leave school that is vying for their attention. And make sure to do some high-quality AI literacy. AI literacy is way, way different than using AI to learn. AI literacy is, what is this? How is it made? What are the risks? What are the benefits? And let's talk about how our ethics around this new tool and how to incorporate it into our lives with an adult instructor, talking about how it works and what it is.

Rebecca Winthrop

You can't create an AI that'll be great for kids and teachers and teaching and learning without having teachers and kids and education experts and child development experts in the Development process with you. And so few are. So I think about what the Dutch government is doing. They're doing a partnership with sort of the teacher unions and the academics and the tech companies, and they're having a little lab to figure out, you know, what would AI look like In schools. But any of that sort of bottom-up experimentation is the way to go before you roll it out. Because most AI developers, although they might be good people, they're not child development specialists.

Ezra Klein

They're going to be going into school in the age of Gen AI. How should you think about their schooling? So we can't really predict the shape of society in 15 or 20 years. I don't think that's a question we could answer on the show. If we could, we should probably be investing, not podcasting. But what we have in education now is constant markers that are supposed to tell us as parents how well our kids' education is going. And that's basically grades and maybe to some degree counselor reports. And the idea is if they get good grades and they seem happy and well-adjusted, then at the end of that process, they'll go to a good college or go to a trade school and get a good job. And it's going to be a pretty straight line. All A's equal good job. The future is foggier. What they will need to know is maybe a little foggier. What then should a parent be trying to watch in the meantime? How do you think about whether or not your kid's education is going well if you're a little suspicious that the grades designed for, and maybe even not that well designed for, the society We have had are not going to correlate all that well to the society we will have.

Rebecca Winthrop

And I think as a parent, you, yourself, but also other parents out there, are right to be suspicious because I think that linear line is going to be much more complicated as the years go On with AI in our world. So what I would think about is a couple of things. One, getting back to the research I've done with my co-author and colleague Jenny Anderson, grades don't show you how much kids are engaged. I mean, schools are not designed to give kids agency. Schools are designed to help kids comply. And it's actually not really the fault of the teacher. Teachers are squished from above with all sorts of standards and squished from below with parents, you know, putting a lot of pressure on teachers about their kids' performance and Outcome. And what you really want is some feedback loops that are beyond just grades and behavior to know, is my kid developing agency over their learning? And what I mean by that is, are they able to reflect and think about things they're learning in a way that they can identify what's interesting and they can have the skills to pursue new Information? That right there is, I think, going to be the core skill. It is the core skill for learning new things in an uncertain world, which is, I think, one of the number one things we think about. In addition to that, I would say make sure kids are learning to interact with other human beings. Any school that has them working with peers, but even connecting with community members, our social networks are getting smaller. There's going to be a premium on human-to interaction as more and more skills get automated and done by AI, which are the more knowledge cognitive tasks. The sort of interpersonal caregiving, teaching skills are going to continue to be important for some time. I'm not sure for how long, but for some time. And then the last thing, which may seem silly to you, but I increasingly keep thinking about, is think about speaking, listening and speaking as the missing piece of literacy alongside Reading and writing.