“Do your students use ChatGPT?”
A school’s question, one Tuesday morning. It wasn’t really about AI. It was about what will still be valuable in education tomorrow.
Abraham Anaba · 3 min read
Tuesday morning. I was sitting in a school’s lobby a few minutes before our meeting, rereading our notes and trying to anticipate the questions: the business model, the certifications, the partnership terms. The usual.
The first question was about none of these.
“Do your students use ChatGPT?”
I found the question fascinating. Because in reality, it wasn’t about ChatGPT. It was about a much deeper concern.
The real question has changed
Schools no longer wonder whether AI will transform education. They know it will. The question has become: how do you keep adding value when a student can get an answer in seconds?
For years, information was scarce. Today it is everywhere. What is becoming scarce is something else:
- the ability to reason;
- to tell a good answer from a merely convincing one;
- to connect ideas;
- to defend a decision;
- to solve a real problem.
Learning to think, with it
I left that meeting with an even stronger conviction: the future of education probably won’t be played out against AI. It will be played out in our ability to learn to think… with it.
It is also what I see in learning data: the journeys that succeed are not the ones that consume the most content, but the ones where learners are put in a position to decide and to produce.
What about you? If you had to pick one skill that will still be essential in ten years, which would it be?