Meet a former VC who has a plan to prepare American students for an AI-disrupted future |
Meet a former VC who has a plan to prepare American students for an AI-disrupted future
American schools are at a crossroads. Artificial intelligence companies say their technology will completely reshape the workforce, and no one knows how, as the definition of career readiness is being rewritten. Education advocate Ted Dintersmith believes the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“It’s a world where all of these jobs are going to just vanish. We don’t have time to mold this for 10 years,” Dintersmith told Fortune. “Would you rather spend thousands of hours on math you’ll never use in school, or get really good at something that can help you pursue a career you find fulfilling and can support yourself. What do you care about: the future of a kid or data for the state rankings?”
Dintersmith, in his new book, Aftermath: The Life-Changing Math That Schools Won’t Teach You, argues that the education system is designed to fail students. It’s still teaching kids to learn things a machine can easily do, and it isn’t offering real world knowledge. He argues that math taught in schools has little relevance to real work or life, and it’s undermining American society. Kids should be learning real-world probability and statistics instead of algebra and calculus equations.
The book is the culmination of 15 years studying the American education system strengths and weaknesses. He sees a system that defines academic success on “high-stakes” standard exams that ask questions that a computer could easily answer, while failing to give students skills that would prepare them for their lives and careers. If the American education system doesn’t change, millions will enter adulthood unprepared, sowing “the........