What Is the Point of Education in the Age of AI?

As AI grows ever better at memorizing knowledge, answering questions and completing tasks, education faces a challenge it cannot avoid: if machines can do everything, why should people still learn? This question concerns not only how a course should be run and taught, but, more importantly, how education understands its own meaning and mission. If it is not answered well, the very foundations of education will be shaken.

On the surface, Tsinghua's Redbook on AI general education discusses the basic principles of AI general education courses; its larger backdrop is the question of where education itself stands in history. For example: if machines can recite poetry, should students still learn poems by heart? If machines can write their own code, should students still learn to program by hand?

This article argues that these questions have become questions because “knowledge accumulation” has long obscured what education fundamentally is. Now that the storm of AI has arrived, this accumulated dust is bound to be swept into history, and education should return its attention to individual cognitive ability and public awareness.

The revolution in education in the age of AI is, in essence, a return of education to its original simplicity.

1. The Historical Evolution of Education: Two Core Goals and the Drift Toward Knowledge Accumulation

Education existed before humans had writing or schools. Through observation and imitation, children learned how to survive and how to get along with others, and they learned the language, customs and explanations of the world of their group. In this process a person gradually gained the ability to live independently and gradually became a member of the community. Individual growth and the continuity of society thus form the two basic threads for understanding education.

Later, the progress of society and the development of states gave education dedicated norms and institutions. Training in writing, study of the classics, education in ritual and the passing on of crafts were all part of education. Throughout this process, individual growth and social responsibility remained its basic goals. The emphasis that traditional Chinese education placed on self-cultivation and public responsibility, and the concern of ancient Greek education for the formation of the person and for life in the city-state, both show that the goals of education had long gone beyond specific skills. Yet such education was often restricted by status, gender and rank, and both the people it trained and the communities it served had obvious historical limitations.

In modern times, nation-building, industrial development, scientific progress, social mobility and the demand for equal rights together drove the development of mass education. Schools gave more people access to reading, writing, arithmetic and specialized study, and through the learning of a common language, history, culture and public rules they supported social cooperation on a larger scale. The individual and social goals of education thus gained new prominence: individuals have the right to develop themselves through education, and society must provide everyone with a basis for taking part in shared life.

In the actual practice of modern education, however, knowledge accumulation gradually came to occupy a prominent place, drifting away from the main line of individual ability and public responsibility. Access to knowledge, the division of labor, and assessment at scale are three important aspects for understanding this drift.

First, where channels for acquiring knowledge are limited and learning resources are unevenly distributed, schools take on the task of providing systematic knowledge in a concentrated way. To take part in production and social life, individuals often need to master the relevant knowledge in advance, so a store of knowledge has direct practical value. Acquiring knowledge through school helps people escape the constraints of family and region and opens up more opportunities. Education had good practical reasons to emphasize knowledge accumulation and the teaching of skills.

Second, the development of science and industry kept deepening the professional division of labor. Different occupations require specific knowledge and skills, and education became closely tied to professional qualifications, job selection and social mobility. For many families, learning knowledge, passing exams and gaining qualifications became an important path to a better life. Knowledge training in education was therefore driven both by the division of labor and by the aspirations of individuals.

Third, mass education has to organize teaching, allocate opportunities and assess outcomes for very large numbers of students. Compared with long-term cognitive development and public responsibility, the accuracy of answers and fluency in problem-solving are far easier to display through standardized exams. When these indicators are further linked to further schooling and employment, schools and families naturally organize learning around measurable scores. Knowledge accumulation was originally only one part of educational outcomes, yet in the workings of the system it can gradually become the goal that governs educational activity.

Modern education researchers recognized this problem early on. In 1945 Harvard University published General Education in a Free Society; its fundamental motivation was to re-emphasize effective thinking, communication, judgment and the discernment of values under conditions of professional specialization, and to attend to the foundations a person needs, beyond their professional identity, to take part in shared life.

The report thus became a historic document of general education. It was a deep reflection by educators in the course of modernization, a return to the “original purpose” of education: concern for the whole development of the person and for social responsibility. Nevertheless, educational practice aimed at utilitarian knowledge accumulation remains the mainstream approach in many countries and regions.

2. Education's Disorientation in the Age of AI: Where Does Education Go After the “Knowledge Plug-in”?

The rapid development of AI has dealt a fatal blow to forms of education aimed at knowledge accumulation. AI can remember vast amounts of knowledge and generate answers to questions quickly, and in the future it may help us solve the great majority of problems. It is as though people have gained a “knowledge plug-in” they can call on at any time, and with it they can complete more and more tasks that once required mastering the relevant knowledge themselves. This blurs the purpose of an education once defined by “knowledge accumulation”, especially for tasks of memorization or mechanical operation, such as reciting classical poems or doing complex calculations.

This means that if we keep defining the fundamental goal of education as the transmission of knowledge and the training of skills, then with every step forward in machine capability, human learning becomes a little less necessary.

If that is so, the very necessity of education will be severely undermined.

3. Returning to the Basic Goals of Education: Individual Cognitive Ability and a Shared Public Cognitive Foundation

The confusion discussed in the previous section arises, at root, from taking “accumulating useful knowledge” as the goal of education. To resolve it, we should return to the “original purpose” of education: cultivating individuals' basic cognitive abilities and society's public awareness. These goals were always the “legal foundation” of education; they were merely diluted by secondary goals brought about by technological progress. Today AI has once again changed the learning environment that education faces, and as the secondary goals centered on knowledge accumulation lose their force, a return to these basic goals of education is inevitable.

Unlike the traditional educational environment, the educational environment of the intelligent age is more complex, and the educational goals at both the individual and the social level are more challenging.

At the individual level, education must cultivate cognitive ability, so that a person becomes a subject who can keep learning, judge independently and take responsibility for their own actions. This includes understanding concepts, organizing knowledge and analyzing evidence, as well as being aware that one may be wrong, recognizing the limits of one's judgment, and adjusting one's trust in other people and in technology. People need the ability to use all kinds of tools, AI included, to understand a complex world, while keeping the ability to examine that dependence and revise their own understanding.

At the social level, education must build a shared public cognitive foundation, so that different people can take part in shared life. This foundation includes both common knowledge and common ways of handling disagreement. Basic knowledge of history and culture, scientific literacy and public rules let people understand the world one another inhabit; respecting evidence, giving reasons, distinguishing judgments of fact from choices of value, and allowing questioning and revision let people with different positions hold a discussion. The common foundation should accommodate disagreement, and it should also allow members of society to take part in criticizing, supplementing and renewing it.

These two goals support each other. Individuals' independent judgment helps uncover errors in collective understanding; shared knowledge, language and methods of testing in turn allow individual judgments to be questioned and corrected by others. Education must maintain both people's independent cognition and society's common foundation. The former determines whether individuals can be autonomous; the latter determines whether disagreements can be understood and cooperation sustained; and together they underpin society's capacity to correct its errors.

It is worth stressing that, under these two goals, learning knowledge still holds a foundational place. Cognitive ability cannot form out of nothing: understanding a historical debate requires knowing the background of events and the sources of the material; judging a scientific claim requires mastering the relevant concepts and rules of evidence; evaluating an AI-generated answer also requires enough knowledge to spot problems, ask for grounds and recognize limits. Information can be retrieved at any time, but what to retrieve, how to understand it and whether to believe it still depend on what a person already knows.

Knowledge accumulation is therefore no longer fit to be the primary goal of education, but learning knowledge remains important: it is the means of exercising cognitive ability and building a shared cognitive foundation. After cars became common, running still helped the body develop, and its value does not need to be proved by racing a car. After calculators became common, children still needed to learn numbers and arithmetic, because understanding quantitative relations, mastering symbolic rules and going through the process of derivation form the intellectual groundwork for life in society. Likewise, when AI can write essays, learning to write still serves to organize thoughts, clarify concepts, understand readers and take responsibility for what one expresses.

So in the intelligent society knowledge remains important and must not be discarded. What should be discarded is the role knowledge has played in education: memorizing and retrieving knowledge is no longer the core; the valuable outcome is the individual cognitive ability exercised through learning knowledge.

In short, the educational revolution of the intelligent age is not about abandoning the learning of knowledge; it is about reorganizing how knowledge is learned, so that it becomes material for training individual cognitive ability and building social consensus.

4. The Future Shape of Education: General Education as the Foundation, Professional Education Flexible and Open

Once the two basic goals of education are clear again, the shape of future education has a direction that can be reasoned out. Whatever occupation a person chooses, they need to understand the world, keep learning and judge independently, and they all live in a society of mutual dependence with others. Taking people's basic abilities and the foundations of public life as the goal, and achieving it through learning in different fields of knowledge, is exactly the core meaning of general education.

In particular, a person's time to grow and their attention, like society's educational resources, are always limited, so public education must give priority to the forms of education that bear on individual cognition and shared life. General education should therefore become the principal form of public education in the future. “Principal” here refers to fundamental goals, organizing principles and basic structure: education should select content, arrange learning and assess outcomes around human development and the shared public cognitive foundation. It should run through basic education, vocational education, higher education and adult continuing education, with content and depth suited to each stage.

On this common foundation, professional education can take a more flexible and open form. Universities, vocational colleges, workplaces, professional communities, online courses, and individuals learning together with AI can each take on different parts of professional learning. Learners can enter new fields, add specialized knowledge at different stages as their development requires, and deepen their abilities through practice. The abilities to learn and to judge that general education cultivates provide the conditions for such continuing professional development.

Of course, this does not mean that professional education should be left outside public education. Public education remains responsible for guaranteeing the opportunity for and quality of professional learning, so that a solid general foundation can support more people in entering in-depth professional training, which also serves the interests of society as a whole. UNESCO's report on the futures of education, which discusses education as a public endeavor and a common good, reflects this vision of education beyond individual returns.

Thus “general education as the foundation, professional education flexible and open” has a clear internal logic: the abilities and public foundations that everyone needs are continuously guaranteed by education; specialized learning oriented toward different occupations and paths of development then forms diverse routes on top of that foundation. We judge that this will become the basic model of future education.

5. Back to the Redbook: The Mission of AI General Education

Within these educational goals and this future shape, the position of Tsinghua's Redbook Artificial Intelligence General Education can be understood more fully. Cognitive autonomy is, first of all, an educational demand that the intelligent society places on human development and public life. AI general education responds to this demand: with knowledge of AI as its main body, and through learning its basic concepts, technical logic, ways of thinking and social impact, it cultivates the capacity for cognitive autonomy that the intelligent society requires. The mission of AI general education can therefore be stated clearly: to serve all learners, with knowledge of AI as its main body, providing the learning conditions for individuals to develop the capacity for cognitive autonomy, and building the corresponding shared public cognitive foundation for the intelligent society.

Correspondingly, professional AI education can be organized flexibly according to different developmental needs. Learners who wish to go on to algorithm research, system development or industry applications can gradually build specialized abilities through university programs, vocational education, research training, online learning, and learning together with machines. The depth and requirements of each route should match its tasks and responsibilities.

The more capable AI becomes, the more clearly education needs to understand human growth and society's public responsibility. AI can do many things for us, but human understanding and judgment must still be formed through learning, and society's common foundation must still be continuously built by education. What AI general education has to shoulder is precisely the responsibility of foundational education under these conditions of our time: enabling everyone to understand, use and scrutinize intelligent systems, and enabling society to keep its capacity for shared understanding, shared error correction and the shared creation of the future.