The Biggest Value of Math Isn't Math

I’m not an expert in education. I was CEO of an education company for a year because it was in our portfolio, and I’m not an expert in spite of that. But here’s how I think about it.

Your brain just wants to learn. One way your brain is similar to AI is that it just learns. Even someone who says they hate learning, hate studying, hate reading: they’re still learning. They’re just not learning the traditional things. If you spend all day looking at TikTok, what are you going to learn? The names of the influencers and what brand of clothing they wear. You’re going to learn it. You can’t help it. You see people you’d consider very non-intellectual who know everything about some celebrity. They’ve learned something.

So in your developmental years, you’re going to learn stuff. There’s no question about it. The question is where. As you learn, your brain is physically changing. Pathways are being formed, synapses are being formed. You’re wiring your brain. And is there an approach to wiring your brain that gives you a better life after? That may have to do with your ability to get a job. But it may also have to do with your ability to just be happy. There are personality characteristics that tend to lead people to happier lives than others: addiction versus conscientiousness. The way you wire your brain is going to have an impact on how you live the rest of your life.

If you wire your brain for very short attention spans, if everything you do is swiping on some app as fast as possible, you can’t pay attention to anything. I’m not a psychologist, but the median adult will tell you it’s probably bad for kids to have shorter attention spans, and that it’s good to be able to get absorbed in something, to have long-term interests. A lot of things that are healthy for you, like a long-term relationship or exercising, require a level of commitment: not easily giving up, not getting bored. How do you develop that kind of personality? You wire your brain for it in childhood.

You go to the gym, you build muscles. The biggest value of learning math may not be doing math. It may be that math is naturally hard. It requires a certain level of focus, and it just takes a while until you actually get it. And then you finally get it, and you feel that you got it. If you skip that process because you’re using AI, we may end up with a bunch of very short-term-oriented people. Easy-to-depress people. People who give up as soon as something goes wrong for them. A lot of characteristics that are broadly understood to be bad for one’s life.

That’s why I think AI is bad for education. It’s not that we’d be better off if AI didn’t exist. But you have to build your brain somehow, and right now I think people aren’t. And this comes on top of everything else: schools have become easier, grade inflation, policies to never fail kids, curricula oriented toward the kids who are struggling instead of the kids getting ahead.

So: all of elementary school without AI or phones. That wouldn’t cost you anything. Introduce it later, because it is a tool and you want people to be good at using the tool. Proctored exams. Oral exams. You can’t trust that anyone would even write an essay by hand anymore. Schools should change dramatically, and people should choose programs that are more like that.