It's so sad. The phone is the ultimate know-it-all, so why learn. It reminds everyone of what to do, so why try to remember anything. Brain cells left to atrophy. I sure hope that people like you and others find a solution. Will teachers even be able to get through the gen-z stare?
What's your view of the role the humanities will play in this landscape? They're obviously central to historical "aristocratic tutoring" but struggling today. Rather than "malaise," it seems like many in the humanities are in denial. D. Graham Burnett's piece in the New Yorker is an exception.
The finding about educators' lack of pedagogical knowledge makes me wonder about a different study: How many academics in history, philosophy, and literature are among the best at practicing the Socratic method? If a decent way was worked out to measure this (a big if), I don't think the number would be low, but I'm not sure it would be high either. Seems like some of the fundamentals have been lost amidst the "malaise."
But aristocratic tutoring might be not the cure all promised, what real values are these aristocrats teaching? If they were 18th century French or English aristocrats, I would be deeply concerned... having a revolution as a result of your aristocratic misrule and theft is not what we need to teach our kids.....
I was educated at a Friends school and I can't imagine a better education. The values imparted on kids from a very early age are quite simple: you are your own person. Everyone else is their own person, too. You have strengths and weaknesses in the classroom, but that doesn't mean you aren't able to approach all subjects with curiosity. Teachers have first names, just like students, and when you skip out on class, you skip out on the community, and everyone suffers because of it. Very little of what I learned would've scored well in the STEM system, but learning how to become a kind, creative, respectful, and curious adults was quite the education. The tragedy, of course, is that Friends School and Montessori-style education is rarely affordable these days. But there will always be rebels who understand that true education is about imparting love and wisdom. In this age of information, what’s important when it comes to knowledge becomes a very different question.
"AI and ed-tech eats education from the bottom up" — yes, for sure. In my years of teaching college, the hardest thing to deal with (among many hard things!) was admin pushing edtech onto us. Now I'm working on an essay that historicizes and critiques the paradigm of "instructional design," which isn't much more than a façade for big tech's siege on higher ed.
The "adaptive curriculum" phenomenon, like "instructional design," is an artifact of "student-centered learning," a concept that crystallized in the 1990s — not coincidentally at the same time that computers started filling classrooms. Individualized attention is great, we need more of it, but it's been so deeply entangled with technologization that I'm afraid we've lost the plot.
The way to promote individualized attention is simple: train teachers more effectively, hire more of them, and pay them enough so that they can have a better quality of life, and thus more bandwidth for working with students.
Yes, it is great. Very crunchy. I was planning on writing a review here of it, and specifically what parts of the science of learning they implement come naturally through 1:1 tutoring (thus, explaining its success). But then Math Academy got what felt like a ton of attention and it seemed unnecessary. Yet, now, there is still no actual good review! So I may still do one in the future.
Yes, it's definitely worth reading The Math Academy Way book, as it brings together in one place pretty much all the thinking and research that's going into Math Academy and similar systems (e.g., PhysicsGraph). If you don't have time to read the whole thing, I wrote a summary of it as part of my overall initial Math Academy review: https://frankhecker.com/2025/02/08/math-academy-part-1/
Does this not work? It's the same as the button above. I know that comments are locked to paying subscribers (as common for the FP), but you should be able to click "continue reading" at the bottom and it takes me through to the piece.
I dunno man, I think the real secret was those raspberries! The most aristocratic of fruits.
More seriously, I’m worried that you’ve overlooked a really important feature of aristocratic tutoring, which is that it is pressure free. Aristocrats don’t care if their kids learn anything, because they’ll inherit the family lands anyway. With the pressure off, kids follow their interests. And for many kids, that meant very mediocre results. The ones we remember are the spectacular geniuses enabled by tutoring. And I do agree that more geniuses would be enabled if we had aristocratic tutoring for all. But look at all those kids homeschooled in American Christian cults. We’re not seeing geniuses pop out of that milieu by the dozen because (a) geniuses are rare to start with; and (b) it’s definitely possible to get tutoring wrong.
We don't really need institutions to educate people.
Life and the world is full of lessons all the time at every age.
The current chaos is a call for community. ditch the tmi and phones and constantness call of capitalism and invest in the unintense and slow and uncompetitive and learn how to communicate nonviolently and learn how to feel, navigate uncomfortable emotions and collaborate.
The three mentions of AI in this write-up suggest you perceive a *hypothetically* beneficial role for the technology to complement a groundswell of human effort, but as of now… I struggle to see it. Even if it is the trendy thing in EdTech, and Lord knows the bandwagon effect is strong. Why yes, AI *is* eating education from the bottom up, but as The Atlantic shows, the effect in the RL trenches is catastrophic (while also demonstrating that there are, in fact, worse things than the pre-2022 paradigm, when the public GenAI homework machine was nowhere to be seen).
I don't think that it will really eat it from the bottom up, we need to continue our level of support for education. The so-called people at the bottom will expand the educational universe. Automation brings greater productivity so even hard core capitalists will see the logic of expanding the supply of education at basically constant cost. Assuming those pesky AIs are still not back sassing to us....🤣
I was really trying to be optimistic about using AI to supplement teachers not replace them. This is what I would call an increase in supply and because it would be AI driven, it would be much cheaper than hiring more teachers. The other scenario is that AI will "eat education from the bottom up" meaning I think that there will be significant layoffs and reduced hiring in education. I hope not and I tried to provide an economic argument against it.
But right now, I think the author is pretty convincing that many people who are actually training teachers do not know best practices so I get the sense that education should implement what actually works!
"Because we do know what works, at least in broad strokes, from the cognitive science of learning: things like spaced repetition and keeping progression in the zone of proximal development, and all sorts of other techniques that sound fancy but are actually simple and sensible. They just aren’t implemented.
In fact, a new study showed that education faculty (i.e., the people at education colleges who are supposed to train teachers) may have no better understanding of the science of learning than faculty of any other subject. According to the study (Cuevas et al., 2025):
Surprisingly, education faculty scored no better in pedagogical knowledge than faculty of any other college and also showed low metacognitive awareness…. The implications for colleges of education are more dire in that they may be failing to prepare candidates in the most essential aspects of the field.
So I think there will be a revolution in my lifetime. And what I personally can contribute is to constantly harp on how not everything in education is necessarily dismal and opaque and impossible; there have been great educations in the past."
It's so sad. The phone is the ultimate know-it-all, so why learn. It reminds everyone of what to do, so why try to remember anything. Brain cells left to atrophy. I sure hope that people like you and others find a solution. Will teachers even be able to get through the gen-z stare?
mmmm, hopelessness is an expensive habit, perhaps even a luxury that we cannot afford.
All is not lost!
The current challenges are exciting opportunities to regroup and look where we want to goooOOoooooOOOoooooo!
On y va!
WeeEEeeEEeeeeEEEeeeee!
It's a know it all that really knows nothing!
Yea. It knows the good, the bad and the ugly!
What's your view of the role the humanities will play in this landscape? They're obviously central to historical "aristocratic tutoring" but struggling today. Rather than "malaise," it seems like many in the humanities are in denial. D. Graham Burnett's piece in the New Yorker is an exception.
The finding about educators' lack of pedagogical knowledge makes me wonder about a different study: How many academics in history, philosophy, and literature are among the best at practicing the Socratic method? If a decent way was worked out to measure this (a big if), I don't think the number would be low, but I'm not sure it would be high either. Seems like some of the fundamentals have been lost amidst the "malaise."
But aristocratic tutoring might be not the cure all promised, what real values are these aristocrats teaching? If they were 18th century French or English aristocrats, I would be deeply concerned... having a revolution as a result of your aristocratic misrule and theft is not what we need to teach our kids.....
I was educated at a Friends school and I can't imagine a better education. The values imparted on kids from a very early age are quite simple: you are your own person. Everyone else is their own person, too. You have strengths and weaknesses in the classroom, but that doesn't mean you aren't able to approach all subjects with curiosity. Teachers have first names, just like students, and when you skip out on class, you skip out on the community, and everyone suffers because of it. Very little of what I learned would've scored well in the STEM system, but learning how to become a kind, creative, respectful, and curious adults was quite the education. The tragedy, of course, is that Friends School and Montessori-style education is rarely affordable these days. But there will always be rebels who understand that true education is about imparting love and wisdom. In this age of information, what’s important when it comes to knowledge becomes a very different question.
"AI and ed-tech eats education from the bottom up" — yes, for sure. In my years of teaching college, the hardest thing to deal with (among many hard things!) was admin pushing edtech onto us. Now I'm working on an essay that historicizes and critiques the paradigm of "instructional design," which isn't much more than a façade for big tech's siege on higher ed.
The "adaptive curriculum" phenomenon, like "instructional design," is an artifact of "student-centered learning," a concept that crystallized in the 1990s — not coincidentally at the same time that computers started filling classrooms. Individualized attention is great, we need more of it, but it's been so deeply entangled with technologization that I'm afraid we've lost the plot.
The way to promote individualized attention is simple: train teachers more effectively, hire more of them, and pay them enough so that they can have a better quality of life, and thus more bandwidth for working with students.
For someone who has read all your previous AT essays (and also the ACX review of Alpha School), is it worth reading the Math Academy PDF?
Yes, it is great. Very crunchy. I was planning on writing a review here of it, and specifically what parts of the science of learning they implement come naturally through 1:1 tutoring (thus, explaining its success). But then Math Academy got what felt like a ton of attention and it seemed unnecessary. Yet, now, there is still no actual good review! So I may still do one in the future.
Yes, it's definitely worth reading The Math Academy Way book, as it brings together in one place pretty much all the thinking and research that's going into Math Academy and similar systems (e.g., PhysicsGraph). If you don't have time to read the whole thing, I wrote a summary of it as part of my overall initial Math Academy review: https://frankhecker.com/2025/02/08/math-academy-part-1/
> That most likely means that AI and ed-tech eats education from the bottom up.
Hmm, education has a lot of bottoms. Which one do you think it will start with?
Hi Erik, for those of us paying subscribers to your channel, can we get access to this piece you wrote for The Free Press?
Hmm, I thought it was accessible for everyone.
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-taught-my-three-year-old-to-read-tutoring-education-culture
Does this not work? It's the same as the button above. I know that comments are locked to paying subscribers (as common for the FP), but you should be able to click "continue reading" at the bottom and it takes me through to the piece.
This link works, thanks
The original "link to article" button in your post brings us to The Free Press's substack piece, which is for paying subscribers only.
I dunno man, I think the real secret was those raspberries! The most aristocratic of fruits.
More seriously, I’m worried that you’ve overlooked a really important feature of aristocratic tutoring, which is that it is pressure free. Aristocrats don’t care if their kids learn anything, because they’ll inherit the family lands anyway. With the pressure off, kids follow their interests. And for many kids, that meant very mediocre results. The ones we remember are the spectacular geniuses enabled by tutoring. And I do agree that more geniuses would be enabled if we had aristocratic tutoring for all. But look at all those kids homeschooled in American Christian cults. We’re not seeing geniuses pop out of that milieu by the dozen because (a) geniuses are rare to start with; and (b) it’s definitely possible to get tutoring wrong.
Homeschooling in a solid community is fab.
We don't really need institutions to educate people.
Life and the world is full of lessons all the time at every age.
The current chaos is a call for community. ditch the tmi and phones and constantness call of capitalism and invest in the unintense and slow and uncompetitive and learn how to communicate nonviolently and learn how to feel, navigate uncomfortable emotions and collaborate.
In warm solidarity,
ajm
The three mentions of AI in this write-up suggest you perceive a *hypothetically* beneficial role for the technology to complement a groundswell of human effort, but as of now… I struggle to see it. Even if it is the trendy thing in EdTech, and Lord knows the bandwagon effect is strong. Why yes, AI *is* eating education from the bottom up, but as The Atlantic shows, the effect in the RL trenches is catastrophic (while also demonstrating that there are, in fact, worse things than the pre-2022 paradigm, when the public GenAI homework machine was nowhere to be seen).
Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/high-school-student-ai-education/
I don't think that it will really eat it from the bottom up, we need to continue our level of support for education. The so-called people at the bottom will expand the educational universe. Automation brings greater productivity so even hard core capitalists will see the logic of expanding the supply of education at basically constant cost. Assuming those pesky AIs are still not back sassing to us....🤣
Could you say more concretely what education policy you propose?
I was really trying to be optimistic about using AI to supplement teachers not replace them. This is what I would call an increase in supply and because it would be AI driven, it would be much cheaper than hiring more teachers. The other scenario is that AI will "eat education from the bottom up" meaning I think that there will be significant layoffs and reduced hiring in education. I hope not and I tried to provide an economic argument against it.
But right now, I think the author is pretty convincing that many people who are actually training teachers do not know best practices so I get the sense that education should implement what actually works!
"Because we do know what works, at least in broad strokes, from the cognitive science of learning: things like spaced repetition and keeping progression in the zone of proximal development, and all sorts of other techniques that sound fancy but are actually simple and sensible. They just aren’t implemented.
In fact, a new study showed that education faculty (i.e., the people at education colleges who are supposed to train teachers) may have no better understanding of the science of learning than faculty of any other subject. According to the study (Cuevas et al., 2025):
Surprisingly, education faculty scored no better in pedagogical knowledge than faculty of any other college and also showed low metacognitive awareness…. The implications for colleges of education are more dire in that they may be failing to prepare candidates in the most essential aspects of the field.
So I think there will be a revolution in my lifetime. And what I personally can contribute is to constantly harp on how not everything in education is necessarily dismal and opaque and impossible; there have been great educations in the past."