Educating After Knowledge |
Knowledge is dead.
Not in the sense that truth has vanished or that learning no longer matters, but in the deeper, structural sense that knowledge as a stable possession—think dusty books and road maps—has lost its central role in human cognition. In a world where information is instant and increasingly available "on demand," the old idea of “knowing” seems to feel like an artifact of another era. What once required years of study can now be summoned in seconds, often with a fluency that resembles understanding. However, this acquisition can bypass the cognitive struggle that once gave that understanding its depth.
This perspective comes into tight focus when you're the parent of teenagers. Watching kids today move through the almost Pavlovian rituals of education, I find myself more focused on what kind of minds are being formed than what is simply being memorized. For my family, it's essential to learn to think in a world where the boundary between understanding and its AI-conjured simulation is precariously narrow.
Artificial intelligence hasn't just accelerated access to information, it has altered the structure of cognition itself. Understanding now unfolds as an iterative process rather than a final state. The process is extraordinary as we iterate facts and ideas that "collapse the information function" into a construct that, in some instances, has never existed. Insight emerges through cycles, not conclusions, as knowledge changes from static maps to........