Educating Kids in the Age of A.I. | The Ezra Klein Show

Summary

In the recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, host Ezra Klein and Rebecca Winthrop, discussed the dynamics of education in the era of AI. The conversation navigates the decline in reading habits among kids and the challenges AI poses to traditional educational structures. Rebecca explores the idea of rethinking education's core purpose as generative AI becomes a prevalent tool for students. The discussion highlights the need for a new educational model that emphasizes adaptability, creativity, and human interaction to prepare students for an uncertain future.

Highlights

• Generative AI is changing the landscape of education, making some traditional skills less relevant. 🤖
• Schools need to focus on fostering adaptability and engagement rather than just transmitting knowledge. 🔄
• Kids should be encouraged to find their 'spark', which can lead to better engagement and outcomes. 🔥
• AI could potentially support personalized learning, but it raises equity issues. ⚖️
• Parents worry about how to best prepare their kids for a future where AI is prevalent. 🤔

Key Takeaways

• The decline in book reading among kids is alarming and needs immediate attention 📚
• AI offers both challenges and opportunities in education - it's about finding the balance ⚖️
• Motivated and engaged students show better educational outcomes 🎓
• Finding one's 'spark' can significantly enhance learning experiences ✨
• Reimagining education as not just acquisition of knowledge but as development of competencies for an uncertain world 🌐

Overview

In this enlightening episode of The Ezra Klein Show, Ezra Klein delves into the perplexing statistics concerning kids' reading habits over the decades alongside Rebecca Winthrop, director at the Brookings Institution. The duo paints a vivid picture of the educational crisis exacerbated by generative AI—a powerful tool that threatens to make traditional academic skills obsolete, requiring a drastic re-evaluation of educational priorities.

Rebecca Winthrop discusses engaging educational strategies that could rejuvenate a student's learning experience. She shares compelling insights into how personalized learning projects, like designing escape rooms, can ignite a passion for subjects students find mundane. Rebecca emphasizes the value of identifying what truly motivates individual learners, making education not just a monologic transfer of knowledge but an interaction fostering curiosity and critical thinking.

The conversation touches on AI's dual role in creating educational opportunities and challenges. While AI can democratize education by offering personalized tutoring to underserved areas, it also risks widening the gap between privileged and underprivileged students. With concerns about how future educational systems will integrate AI, there’s a unified call for rethinking teaching methods to include skills that foster adaptability and deep learning, ensuring students are prepared for a rapidly evolving world.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:30: Introduction and Reading Habits The introduction discusses the declining trend in reading habits among high school seniors over the decades. In 1976, a significant portion of students engaged in reading for fun, whereas the current statistics show that a large percentage haven't read any book for leisure. This change is often highlighted in various media stories, pointing to a broader shift in how kids engage with reading today.
• 02:30 - 06:30: AI and the Purpose of Education The chapter discusses concerns about the declining reading abilities of students, as observed even by professors at prestigious universities. It highlights a trend over the last decade where fewer children are reading at grade level, a situation exacerbated by the pandemic.
• 06:30 - 13:30: Modes of Engagement in Education The chapter discusses the changing landscape of education, highlighting that traditional educational faculties are not fulfilling their original mission effectively. It introduces the advent of generative AI as a technological advancement that can take over tasks such as reading and summarizing books in an extremely short time, potentially revolutionizing how education is approached.
• 13:30 - 25:00: AI's Impact on Teaching and Learning The chapter titled 'AI's Impact on Teaching and Learning' explores how AI technologies like GPT and Copilot are transforming education. AI tools are capable of writing essays, solving math problems by showing the work, and processing both typed and handwritten questions efficiently. While some consider using AI in this way as cheating, the chapter questions this notion by suggesting that if technology can perform these tasks, it prompts a reevaluation of traditional educational approaches. The chapter hints at the broader implications of AI for individuals and economies.
• 25:00 - 35:30: Concerns About Screen Time and AI The speaker expresses concerns about the future demands of society and the economy on their young children. They are unsure about the skills and education their children will need in 16 to 20 years, leading to anxiety about whether the current education they provide is adequate.
• 35:30 - 49:00: Equity and Accessibility in Education In this chapter, the discussion focuses on the evolving purpose of education in schools, emphasizing the need for equity and accessibility. The guest, Rebecca Winthrop, who is the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute, contributes her insights. She co-authored a book titled 'The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better' with Jenny Anderson, which likely informs her perspective on engaging and supporting students effectively.
• 49:00 - 66:00: Books Recommendations and Conclusion The chapter titled 'Books Recommendations and Conclusion' features a dialogue between Ezra and Rebecca Winthrop. They dive into the complexities of future education amidst uncertain societal demands influenced by AI. Ezra expresses concern over educational directions for his children, aged three and six, amid unpredictable societal values in the foreseeable future. There is a shared skepticism about current educational systems' readiness to equip future generations for impending, unknown challenges.

Educating Kids in the Age of A.I. | The Ezra Klein Show Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Here's a statistic I've been thinking about recently. In 1976, about 40% of high school seniors had read six books or more for fun. In the last year, only about 11% hadn't read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed. About 40% haven't read a single book for fun. If you are looking for this, you see it everywhere right now. There are all these headlines about how kids are not reading the way they once did. There are all these stories
• 00:30 - 01:00 quoting professors even at Ivy League universities about the way in which when they try to assign the reading that they've been assigning their entire careers, their students, they just can't do it anymore. We're losing something. We can see it on test scores that over the last decade we just see the number of kids reading at grade level slipping. Then of course the pandemic accelerated that. So if you were simply asking how are the kids doing on some of these intellectual
• 01:00 - 01:30 faculties that we once thought were the core of what education was trying to promote, they're not doing well. And then as if we summoned it, as if we wrote it into the script, here comes this technology, generative AI, that can do it for them. Imagine you could read any book in less than 30 seconds. no matter how long it is. That'll read the book and summarize it for you. Any style
• 01:30 - 02:00 non-fiction book in 10 minutes that'll write the essay for you. GPT is going to do the bulk of the writing. Copilot is good for factual information and GPT0 helps you not get caught. That'll do the math problem even shown its work for you. And it doesn't matter if the question is typed out or handwritten. It works on both. Yeah, the future is crazy. Of course, using it that way we call cheating. But to them, why wouldn't you? If you have this technology that not only can but will be doing so much of this for you, for us, for the economy, why are we doing any of this at
• 02:00 - 02:30 all? And this intersects with an anxiety I have as a parent of a 3 and a 6-year-old. I don't know what the economy, what society is going to want from them in 16 or 20 years. And if I don't know what it's going to want from them, what it's going to reward in them, how do I know how they should be educated? How do I know if the education I am creating for them is doing a good job? How do I know if I'm failing them?
• 02:30 - 03:00 The purpose of education in schools is profoundly shaken to its core. My guest today is Rebecca Winthrop. She's the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute. Her latest book co-authored with Jenny Anderson is The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. As long as my email esc.com. [Music] [Laughter]
• 03:00 - 03:30 Rebecca Winthrop, welcome to the show. Lovely to be here, Ezra. I'm a three and a six-year-old. I feel like I cannot predict with AI what it is society will want or reward from them in 15 16 years which makes this question in the interim how should they be educated what should they be educated towards feel really uncertain to me my confidence that the schools are set up now for the world
• 03:30 - 04:00 they are going to graduate into is very very low so you study education you've been thinking a lot about education and AI. What advice would you give me? So approximately a third of kids are deeply engaged. Twothirds of the kids are not. So we need to have learning experiences that motivate kids to dig in and engage and be excited to learn. So when friends or relatives ask me the
• 04:00 - 04:30 same question, I usually say, look, we have to think about three parts to the answer. Why do you want your kids to be educated? What is the purpose of education? Because actually now that we have AI that can write essays and pass the bar exam and do AP exams just as good or better than kids, we have to really rethink the purpose of education. The second thing we have to think about
• 04:30 - 05:00 is how kids learn and we know a lot about that. And the third thing is what they should learn like what's the content? What are the skills? People always think of education as sort of a transactional transmission of knowledge, which is one important piece of it, but it is actually so much more than that. Learning to live with other people, learning to know yourself, and developing the flexible competencies to be able to navigate a world of
• 05:00 - 05:30 uncertainty. Those are kind of the the wise for me. But, you know, I might ask you, what what are your hopes and dreams for your kids under the Y before we get to the details of the skills? Well, I have a lot of hopes and dreams for my kids. I would like them to live happy, fulfilling lives, I think I'm not naive. And certainly in my lifetime, the implicit purpose of education, the way we say to
• 05:30 - 06:00 ourselves, did this kid's education work out is do they get a good job, right? That's really what we're, you know, pointing the arrow towards, right? The fact that maybe developed their faculties as a human being, the fact that maybe they learned things that were beautiful or fascinating, that's all great. But if they do all that and they don't get a good job, then we failed them. And if they do none of that, but they do get a good job, then we succeeded. So I think
• 06:00 - 06:30 that's been the reality of education. But I also think that reality relies a little bit on an economy, right, in which we've asked people to act very often as machines of a kind. And now we've created these machines that can act or mimic as people of a kind. And so now the whole transaction is being thrown into some chaos. The skills that I think are going to be most important are how motivated and engaged
• 06:30 - 07:00 kids are to be able to learn new things. That is maybe one of the most important skills in a time of uncertainty that they are go-getters. They're going to be wayfinders. things are going to shift and change and they're going to be able to navigate and constantly learn new things and be excited to learn new things because when kids are motivated um that that's actually a huge uh predictor of how they do. And we're going to want kids absolutely to know enough content so that they can be a
• 07:00 - 07:30 judge of what is real and what is fake. Um, but we're also going to want them to have experiences where they're learning and testing how to come up with creative new solutions to to things, which is not really what traditional public education has been about. I think sometimes about this distinction between education as a a virtue and education is something that is instrumental. Education is training.
• 07:30 - 08:00 Right? studying the classics was important not because it made it likelier that you got into law school, right? But because it deepened your appreciation of beauty. It deepened your capacities as a human being. And I think for reasons that make a lot of sense in many ways, we drifted away from that. And I don't know that you build a society off of people just, you know, enjoying what they're studying. And at the same time, I worry
• 08:00 - 08:30 now we have pulled people into a conveyor belt that when they get to the other side of it, there's not going to be that much there. And I don't even think you need to imagine AI for that. That's already happening to a lot of people. I think one reason you see a lot of anger among young people today is that the the deal often doesn't come through. You do all the extracurriculars, you get your good grades, you show up on time, and then you graduate college and the good jobs and the interesting life
• 08:30 - 09:00 you were promised just aren't there. And so there's something there that feels like it is getting thrown into question if we don't know what the future's going to ask of us. How can we be instrumental in the way we train people for it? We can't be super instrumental. So we have to come up with a new plan. I mean we did not know collectively us the world that we would have generative AI that could basically
• 09:00 - 09:30 write every you know seventh grade essay or college essay to get into university or you know the whole host of exams that are being administered um and are being passed by AI just as well or better than kids. So we have to come up with a new plan. Like that is not the plan for success. And we need to have kids build that muscle of doing hard things because
• 09:30 - 10:00 I worry greatly that AI will basically make a frictionless world for young people. It's great for me. I'm loving generative AI, but I have had several decades of brain development um where I know how to do hard things. So, but kids are developing their brains. They're literally being neurobiologically wired for how to attend, how to focus, how to
• 10:00 - 10:30 try, how to connect ideas, how to relate to other people. And all of those are are not easy things. And I want to push back on something you said. You said, "I don't know if kids just enjoy what they're learning. It's going to help or people are really going to benefit from that." Engagement is very powerful. It's basically how motivated you are to um to really dig in and learn. And it relates
• 10:30 - 11:00 to what you do. Do you show up? Do you participate? Do you do your homework? It relates to how you feel. Do you find school interesting? Um, is it exciting? Do you feel you belong at school? It relates to how you think. Are you cognitively engaged? Are you uh looking at what you learn in one class, applying it to what it might mean in your real in your life outside or other classes? Uh, and it's also how proactive you are about your learning. And all those dimensions really work together in education. And it's a very powerful um
• 11:00 - 11:30 uh construct to predict better achievement, better grades, better mental health, more enrollment in college, better understanding of content um and lots of other benefits to boot. So you have in in your book these four modes of engagement. Do you want to talk through them? Absolutely. So we found after three years of research that kids engage in four different ways. They're passenger mode, kids are coasting.
• 11:30 - 12:00 Achiever mode, they're trying to get perfect outcomes. Resistor mode, they're avoiding and disrupting. And explorer mode is when they really love what they're learning and they dig in and they're super proactive. So that's the highlevel framework. What what part do you want to dig in on? Well, why don't you go go through them? I I think passenger mode is particularly interesting here. So why don't we start there? So passenger mode is difficult to spot
• 12:00 - 12:30 often for parents and sometimes teachers because many kids in passenger mode get really good grades but are just bored to tears. They show up to school, they do the homework, they have dropped out of learning. So passenger mode is when kids are really coasting doing the bare minimum. Some signs of this are your kid comes home and they do their homework as fast as possible. Another sign is that they say, "Oh, school's boring. It's
• 12:30 - 13:00 just boring. I learn nothing." Kids are in passenger mode because school is actually too easy for them. We talked to so many kids who said, "Look, I you know, I'm in in class and the teacher is going going over the math homework from yesterday and I got everyone right and I know the answers and it's 45 minutes of that and and I understand the kids who don't get it. they need the help but you know I'm going to shop online or you
• 13:00 - 13:30 know I have kids who say well I got the homework home and I know all I know how to do this stuff so I just put in chat GPT and it did my problem set for me and then I you know turn it in. So that's when it's too too easy. Another version of why kids get into passenger mode is when it's too hard. School is too hard. You could have a neurode divergent kid. kids don't feel um you know they belong and so they're not tuning in. Um they've missed certain pieces of skill sets that
• 13:30 - 14:00 they really need. Knowledge and education is cumulative in many ways um and they get kind of overwhelmed and they need particular special attention. So that's kind of what's going on in passenger mode. Well, one reason I wanted to start in passenger mode is that when I think about ways AI probably is now but can be very harmful, it's the connection with that mode because in passenger mode, what you
• 14:00 - 14:30 want to do and and many of us have done passenger mode at work and many of us have done it at school. In some ways, passenger mode was what I aspired to be at school. I just wasn't able to achieve it. But you're reading something you think is boring. You're reading something you don't want to be reading. But you want to get a good grade. So maybe at an earlier point you would buy the spark notes, right? But now you just have Chad GPT summarize it. And more than that, you can have Chachi PT write
• 14:30 - 15:00 the essay. Kids are getting better at telling Chachi, no, you actually wrote too good of an essay. Like dumb it down a little bit. that you you've basically hired your own like fill-in student who can help you coast and that will help you get if you're able to do it a jointly enough decent grades but also whatever meta skills forget the knowledge whatever meta-kills are being taught how to read
• 15:00 - 15:30 a book how to write an essay you're not actually learning them and that's I think when people think educationally about AI, a bit of the fear and and something that I believe everybody believes is happening now. So So how do you think about that interaction? I think you're 100% right. I've talked to kids all all over the country. I've seen lots of incidents or cases of highly motivated, highly engaged kids who are using AI really well. Um they'll
• 15:30 - 16:00 write the paper themselves. They'll go in and use AI for research and help them copy edit. They're doing the thinking and they've lined up the evidence to create a thesis and they've presented it in logical order on their own. And that is the art of thinking. And that's why we assign seventh graders to write essays or 10th graders to write essays. It's not that they're going to create, you know, incredible works of art. It's to
• 16:00 - 16:30 train them how to think logically and how to think in steps and that is a core component of critical thinking. So as long as kids are mastering that and the AI is helping that's a good use but a lot of kids are using it to do exactly like you said shortcut the assignments. So, an an example, one kid I talked to said, um, well, you know, this a high school kid for my essay, I break the um prompt into three parts. I run it in
• 16:30 - 17:00 through three different generative AI models. I put it together. I run it through three anti- plagiarism checkers and then I turn it in. Another kid said, "Yeah, I do it. I I run it through chat GPT and then I run it through an AI humanizer, which goes in and puts typos in and makes it, you know, your kids are getting good at something. I'm not sure what we want them getting good at, but they're getting good at something. Kids will find a way no matter what. Kids will find a way. We cannot out maneuver them with technology. So, so the first
• 17:00 - 17:30 response when Gen AI came in was ban it, block it, get anti-ag plagiarism checkers in, which are which are bad by the way. Like I talked to one kid who showed me he had this essay um and the plagiarism checker flagged 40% of it and he changed two words and then it went away. It was all he's all good. So, you know, it is worrisome. So, what we need to do is shift what we're doing in our teaching and learning experiences. I have very personally complicated feelings on this on on the question of
• 17:30 - 18:00 AI and education, just question of education generally. I hated school. Hated it. Did terribly in it. Starting in middle school, going through high school, failed classes. It just found the whole thing impenetrable. And not because I wasn't smart, not because I wasn't interested even in things related to it, just somehow the whole construct didn't work for me. And I couldn't make it work for me. It wasn't exactly that I was bored. I I I I think today I probably could have
• 18:00 - 18:30 musled through it, but for whatever reason then I couldn't, but I was voracious outside of school. I spent three or four nights a week at Barnes & Noble. I loved reading deeply into things that that I was interested in. And I've related the story before and one of the the sort of reactions I get is well you should really then recognize the way school fails kids and in a way I do but it's just not obvious to me at all that school should be tuned for me. Like one thing that I
• 18:30 - 19:00 recognize as somebody who studies bureaucracies is that if you just think of US public education to say nothing of also private education to say nothing of global education it's educating a lot of kids and its ability to tune itself to every kid is going to be pretty modest and what kids need is different but somehow you have to be orienting towards something that works for most of them even if you're not sure how to make it
• 19:00 - 19:30 work for all of them. I'm I'm curious how you think about that. I am not sure I agree. I think you I agree with several things. One, you are not alone. There are many many kids who currently today are going through the system and feel like you. two, I agree with you that as sort of a bureaucratic system that is actually quite miraculous if you think about it. Like in every community across our
• 19:30 - 20:00 country, kids as young as 3 to 18 at the same time of day are getting themselves to a place Monday through Friday for a certain amount of days in the year. I mean, that is a that is a organizational feat. And the thing I don't agree with is that once you're there, you just have to design for the mean and the average. I think there's lots of examples AC that are relatively big scale that or at least not just one,
• 20:00 - 20:30 you know, little school in a corner by one fabulous, you know, homespun teacher that do things differently. And I think it actually just gets down to how we orchestrate teaching and learning experiences. Give me one of those examples. One of those examples of a schooling system able to educate in a personalized way at scale that seems to you to be replicable. I'll give you a couple. So
• 20:30 - 21:00 there's an example of schools in North Dakota that have created studios for their adolescence. And what are studios? They are self-created classes that a student can um design and so and they have to tell you or tell the teacher what standards they're meeting. I'll give you an example. We have um a great character in the book I've done with Jenny Anderson, the disengaged teen, uh named um Kia,
• 21:00 - 21:30 and she was totally disengaged, doom scrolling, and in middle school, and then these studios showed up. She got super into it because she was learning um history and science, and she decided to design an escape room. and she had to list out for herself, these are the standards I'm meeting for whatever grade she was in, 10th grade, I think, uh, history and science. And she did an escape room around the assassination of
• 21:30 - 22:00 Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. But she had to design this escape room that turned her on like nobody else. Um, and that she she got super excited and she did several of those and then and then she actually said she was so motivated she went back to sort of normal classes. They're doing that across the district. That's one small example. There's other examples of schools that um you know do really we're talking about AI do sort of techbased
• 22:00 - 22:30 uh education on core subjects for a couple hours a day, math, science, reading, social studies, and then for the rest of the day they are doing projects together on whatever it may be that they so decide. And there's a curriculum, there's things you know the teachers want them to learn. It's not a every kid do whatever you want. Um, but that's super motivating. There's no reason that we couldn't do that with the existing staff and people and school buildings and infrastructure. We just
• 22:30 - 23:00 have to have the willpower to to decide to do things differently. I want to zoom in on something in that story, which is that when the the student you brought up found the thing that lit her up, she was then able to to to do better in in all the other classes that maybe didn't. This was a little bit of my own experience of life. For me, it was political blogging of all things, which I found as a freshman in college. And once I I
• 23:00 - 23:30 activated, then I became much better at doing things that I didn't want to do or didn't exactly see the point of in even unrelated fields. I love that. So you started political blogging and then what happened? I think the way you what would have been the the conventional line on me from the adults who knew me was smart kid can't get it together, right? Just can't seem to get the homework in, right? can't seem to do things he's not that interested in doing and can't even seem to do the things he is interested in doing in a way that fits what we want
• 23:30 - 24:00 from him. I read every book in English class and I enjoyed doing the essays and I'm a good writer. I think I'm willing to say that at this point in my life. I think you're allowed. And I still did badly on the essays um because it wasn't what they wanted for me in some way or another. Right. And over time, I just don't have that ex I mean, that was the broad experience of my life that I couldn't fit what I did to what the world wanted for me, right?
• 24:00 - 24:30 And now I'm just much better at doing that in a in in ways that are not related to my my core set of interests. I'm not trying to overextrapulate my experience. It's actually important to me not to overextrapulate my experience. But something I've seen you talk about is this this quality of when students find the teacher, find the subject, find the approach that activates them that all of a sudden the things that are not that activating to them become become easier that there is a a
• 24:30 - 25:00 sort of lock in a key dynamic. There is and this is something we talk about around finding your spark. Kids need to find their spark and it they may have many sparks and their sparks may change but when kids find their spark for Kia it was this idea of doing an escape room around historical residential assassinations. She got excited. Other students they find sparks
• 25:00 - 25:30 in other places. Uh, one of the characters in our book, Samir, absolutely loved local politics and dove in getting himself on the school board ultimately in high school. Another student, Matteo, um, was super excited and turned on by robotics and that's what really turned him around. And when you're motivated, this internal drive, it makes you engage more, you lean in more, you enjoy it more. There's a virtuous upward cycle. And there's lots
• 25:30 - 26:00 of evidence to show that it often spills over. So Kia talks about um doing these studios for a couple years which really helped her re-engage and care about school. Uh and then she went back and did some um high school college credit courses which were very um sort of you know traditional structure. and she said she didn't love the structure, but she had enough motivation to figure out how to bend the class to her interests. So,
• 26:00 - 26:30 that's the best case scenario. It doesn't always spill over automatically. What you talked about when you said you enjoyed it, you loved it, you loved English, but you didn't give the teachers what they want. It's probably because you were a total explorer. And we do not reward engaging in school uh in a in a way that supports explorers in general. uh and that is what we have to change. So, so then this gets to the AI optimist case and I take the AI
• 26:30 - 27:00 optimist case as something like this. It's pretty hard to do personalized learning even if you have uh examples that that you've seen work because you have one teacher, it's a classroom of 20 30 kids oftent times. But AI makes this completely different. AI gives you more tutors than there are children. It allows you to have tutors who adapt to that kid's individual learning style in any way you wanted to, in any way they wanted to. If
• 27:00 - 27:30 this kid is a visual learner, it can do visual learning. If pop quizzes are helpful for them, they can do pop quizzes. It can turn it into a podcast they listen to. If you, you know, are are more audio focused, everything can be turned into a poem if you absorb information better through the sonnet form. That as we get better at this and as we build these systems and tune them better, although they're already pretty capable here, that our ability to personalize education using artificial intelligence
• 27:30 - 28:00 as tutors, will be like nothing ever seen before in human history. It's a complete quantum leap in educational possibility. And as such, it allows you to bring every child into their educational utopia, whatever that is, to spark them, to turn them on, to make them into an explorer. How do you feel about that more utopic vision? I think we're on the same page. We schools exist. They're important. They're important for many reasons. We
• 28:00 - 28:30 need to change what we do inside of them, particularly because of Gen AI, and we need to do it quickly. um in addition to I would say you know regulating Genai so it isn't so massively in in students and young people's hands without being designed for that purpose. I would say those are the two big things we need to do. But I don't think our goal inside schools when we're educating young people is to have a 100% personalized learning journey for every kid. What I think you're talking about is actually the ability for Genai
• 28:30 - 29:00 to help teachers, which I think is very real. I think there's a big difference and we need to make a big distinction between AI supporting educators in doing what they do versus going direct to young people. Well, well, let me push you on this for a second before you go here because if I'm taking the position of the AI optimist, what I'd say is no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the AI will be better than the teachers. Better
• 29:00 - 29:30 at what? If we are saying that AI is going to be better than the median for many people at many kinds of work, why would we not assume that this system we will be able to build in six years given how fast these things are developing won't per kid be better than the teacher? I am not saying I believe this, but I want to make you argue. No, you're pushing on it. I get the AI optimist. But the question is better at what? So teachers do many many things. kids learn
• 29:30 - 30:00 in relationships with other humans. We've evolved to do that. I do not think that we will go away from that or we may go away and then we'll be like, "Oh my god, that was a huge mistake." And 10 years later go back. So there's a question around skill development and knowledge transmission. That is one thing a teacher does and I think that's what you're talking about. That is an area where I think technology can be good. Can be really good. So, and and actually we see it even without generative AI. There's
• 30:00 - 30:30 adaptive learning software, you know, that helps kids really, you know, learn to read. Um, which is incredibly helpful, especially if you have access gaps, you don't have good teachers, you have large classes, you have substitute teachers that aren't trained on on how to teach kids to read. So that complemented with things that motivate kids, get them excited and see the relevance of what they're doing, which is often in person could be a great could be a great thing to do inside the
• 30:30 - 31:00 classroom. We we see private schools doing that. There's a a group of schools that I have not visited and I don't know um up close, but alpha schools are doing this. They do and they've been doing it for 10 years actually pre- Genai. They do a couple couple hours of sort of adaptive learning on key academic subjects and then the rest of the time um kids are working together to build bridges or learn about financial literacy or play sports or identify a passion that they want to go learn about
• 31:00 - 31:30 in their community. It's together. It's alone. What we don't want to do is bring AI in and have every kid sitting in front of a AI tutor alone at their desk for eight hours a day. that that's not the future that is gonna help our kids. I guess another way you might think about it is that this changes the job of the teacher quite substantially. Absolutely. So, and I will say I think I don't believe what I'm about to say. So, I don't want to get yelled at by everybody for for every take I'm not talking to
• 31:30 - 32:00 you. I'm talking to my beloved audience. Um my beloved audience. Fair enough. Uh but one thing I've observed is that it seems to me that where AI is going to push is towards the skills of the manager, the editor, the supervisor, the fact checker in a way and often away from the skills which are right now more numerous and needed in more numerous quantities of the worker,
• 32:00 - 32:30 of the writer, of in this case maybe the teacher. So, if you think about that that world that you were just describing as the one we don't want a second ago where you have 25 kids in a class, they're all staring at a screen. They're all working with an individualized AI tutor, right? You could imagine a world if you think about every one of those screens as a junior teacher, as an individual tutor, that there's some master teacher in the room who the kids
• 32:30 - 33:00 can go talk to, who can like be pulled in to sort of oversee the learning to reshape what's happening. There is testing there. There there are things that are trying to help us evaluate how the kids are doing. But the teacher who's already managing a classroom of students is now also in a way managing a classroom of helpers of tutors. I think that would be the kind of vision you would hear from the more AI pill among us.
• 33:00 - 33:30 Right? The role of the teacher in traditional public schools is damn near impossible. Honestly, they have to master a certain subject. They have to get kids to grade level. So, if you have and usually we have a wide difference of grade levels in school between three and four different grade levels. So, they've got to differentiate and figure out who needs what. The bored kid who's the passenger, the struggling kid who's also
• 33:30 - 34:00 the passenger, both of them silent and quiet and you don't even know. Um, and they've got to manage classroom dynamics. Like kids have to not, you know, hit each other or disrupt each other or ruin the furniture. Um, and they have to increasingly be social workers. Kids are not doing well. Lots of mental health problems. They've got to spot that. They've got to help it. They also have to be relationship managers. They've got to work with parents, etc. So, it's very hard for one teacher to do this all. Absolutely. I
• 34:00 - 34:30 think the wave of the future is a different model where you have multiple people and one of those could be an AI tutor helping support our kids growth and development. The interaction with AI can help with skill development, knowledge acquisition, but that is one slice of what happens in a classroom and it is one slice of what it really means for kids to be educated. Kids are
• 34:30 - 35:00 learning all sorts of things in a classroom. They're learning how to self-regulate emotions in a group. They're learning how to understand different perspectives from kids who are different from themselves. They're they're learning, you know, how to ask for help when they need it. There's a whole bunch of things that kids are kids are learning that is much more personto person that we want to maintain, I would argue. Here's where I actually am.
• 35:00 - 35:30 I think we've just been going through a catastrophic experiment with screens and children and right now I think we are starting to figure out that this was a bad idea and schools are banning phones. My sense is that they are not relying very much on laptops and iPads. There's a big vogue for a while of every kid gets their own uh uh laptop or tablet. I think that's beginning to go away if I'm reading the the tea leaves of this, right? And so I feel a bit
• 35:30 - 36:00 better about that as a parent of young kids. I really feel badly for the parents whose kids have been navigating this over the past 10 or 15 10 years, let's call it. And right now I see AI coming and I don't think we understand it at all. I don't think we understand how to teach with it. I don't think the studies we're doing right now are good studies yet. There are too many other effects we're not going to be measuring. I think there's the the sort of narrow thing that a program does and then what it
• 36:00 - 36:30 does for a kid to be staring at a screen all the time in a a deeper way. I believe human beings are embodied. And if you made me choose between sending my kids to a school that has no screens at all and one that is trying the latest in AI technology, I would send them to school with no screens at all in a second. But we're going to be working through this somehow. And what scares me, putting aside what world my kids graduate into, is them moving into schools at the exact time that they
• 36:30 - 37:00 don't know what the hell to do with this technology. And they're about to try a lot of things that don't work and probably try it badly. And I wonder as somebody who's tracked this, what you think the lessons of what I consider at least the screens and phones debacle of the 2010s or the 2000s have been. I agree with you 100%. It was a massive uncontrolled experiment and our kids were the guinea pigs. We just had a wait andsee approach. We
• 37:00 - 37:30 cannot take a wait and see approach again. And I think that there's lots of lessons. I would say first off, do not use generative AI unless you really know what you're using it for. there is a a a real sense of FOMO among educators, parents, young people even that there's this thing happening out there and I I should use it because it's the newest thing. I saw that with uh groups who were working on
• 37:30 - 38:00 student well-being and they um had done teacher training around um well-being curriculum for teachers and they said, "Oh, we need to train parents how to do it." So, their idea was let's use Genai. It'll be great because parents also, you know, do need to reinforce well-being messages that teachers are giving in school, which is true. And what we'll do is we'll create an app. And so this is what they had suggested. Ezra, imagine you sitting down around the dinner table. You pull up your phone and you have an app and your kids have
• 38:00 - 38:30 their phone and you say, "Okay, how are you feeling today?" And um you know, you're looking at your phone and they're telling you how they feel. And then you click through and ask, you know, why why are you feeling that way? Like mediated through a phone. It's crazy. It's crazy. Like we've lost our mind like that. We need AI to talk to our kids. So, you know, if you don't need if there's not a real problem you're trying to solve, don't use it is number one. Number two, any I really do believe this, any
• 38:30 - 39:00 company that wants to work with kids in schools should be a benefit corporation because legally you have a lot of companies who are creating perhaps really good stuff if used well that they have to maximize profits. They can't maximize social benefit and well-being. Well, one thing that worries me is the way in which this might maybe already has been widen the inequality between parents who can pay
• 39:00 - 39:30 for private schools and parents who can't. And what I mean by that is that private schools can just adapt more quickly. They are not dealing with they don't have to go through legislatures and have the boards and they they're they're just a little bit more independent. they can take the screens out, they can put them in, they can limit what comes in. Whereas the public school systems tend to be somewhat more slowmoving. Um, I just knew living out in the Bay Area, a lot of tech people
• 39:30 - 40:00 who were paying money to send their kids to private schools that had banned the products they made starting many years ago and the rest of everybody were sending them to public schools that had not done that. And when things are very very fast moving, being able to be fast moving is really important. So somebody who cares a lot about public education, what should the orientation of the public schools be? How do they sort of not seem to parents who think there's something that their kids should be getting out of this? Don't their kids
• 40:00 - 40:30 need to know how to use AI? Um, so they're going to need to attract parents on on that level, but also how do they not end up flatfooted if this is turning out to be a disaster? This is a really tricky question and you you point on something that is a real issue which is around the deep equity issues that have already emerged. So think about the schools that ban AI for a kid who has no access to AI at
• 40:30 - 41:00 home versus a kid who goes home and has full access to all the AI tools. That right there is a huge cleavage in our country. It also um there's a huge equity gap in terms of language. Large language models work off of language that is written down. There's a lot of languages that aren't
• 41:00 - 41:30 written down that much. They have very little written down. And so there you're seeing a global gap across the globe um between sort of African and indigenous languages or um and communities versus English speakaking or other large languages. So there is a equity is a is a huge one. Your question about sort of public versus private. I would say to public education systems do do not have FOMO because that is what the gut
• 41:30 - 42:00 instinct is when a new technology comes. I'm missing out. I have a fear of missing out and I need to adopt it and I I see this. So don't have FOMO. Don't use it unless it's a real problem you want to solve. Do give it to the adults in the school building. Give it to teachers. Have them use it and figure out how it will help them today. Then give it to sort of really in, you know, novel school leaders to think about how they could maybe restructure the teaching and learning experiences. What
• 42:00 - 42:30 are the things that um AI can do? There's a so much that um AI could actually do to help make public schools work better. Bus schedules, calendaring, school meals, cafeteria. I mean, you know, assessment input. There's so much time that could be really freed up. Let me try to sharpen the FOMO argument or the argument that will be used to give people FOMO. The argument goes something like this. If AI is a very potent technology that's going to be integrated
• 42:30 - 43:00 into virtually everything in the future, not literally everything, but but quite a lot, then not just your literacy, but your competency in it becomes paramount. You're not going to be replaced by an AI. You're going to be replaced by a person who knows how to use AI. And so what you need to learn is to use the AI. You need to learn how to manage it, how to prompt it, a sense of what it can and can't do. And there's no way to do that other than relentless familiarity and experimentation and
• 43:00 - 43:30 exposure. And so a kid who goes to some lite school or when they're young the toys are made out of wood and when they're older the books are all printed on paper and there's not a geni in sight is going to lose out and it will be like having not taught them mathematics right or having not taught them how to drive or something of that or how to type right how do you take that argument I think it is 50% % right and I think
• 43:30 - 44:00 the 50% depends on the age of the child. I absolutely 100% think you should send your kids to the Waldorf school with a wood blocks and um when they're young. You know, we know that kids um early childhood the more screen time they have the less language acquisition they have. We know that, you know, babies when you're um when infants are learning uh
• 44:00 - 44:30 language, they learn a lot of language from human to human contact. And when if you put the same sentences on a on a screen, they don't learn it. Our neurobiology is not going to change in, you know, five years. So we have to work with that's the only confines I think we really have to work within everything else I think we can reimagine but it's true that when kids get older you do want to teach AI literacy
• 44:30 - 45:00 when kids understand this is true for social media too when kids sort of learn about oh these big companies are um you know trying to addict me they're I I'm doing it for free but I get um you know with my attention and uh staying on it longer is how they make money. You get you tell that to teenagers actually there's been great research on this and they get pissed off. I think we need to do the same with AI literacy like this is how it works. It's not some magical
• 45:00 - 45:30 thing. It's not another human being. So when kids get older, we need to teach them about that and then they need when they get older they need to start playing with it. Playing with it, using it. But my huge caveat is with AI that is designed for kids. Right now there is a spring fling race by the large AI labs to get students to sign up. You've got chat GPT giving two months free of of GPT
• 45:30 - 46:00 plus. Then you got XAI come in two months free for Super Grock and then Google. um not to be outdone is like well you can get a month you can get a year free and I'll give you two terabytes of storage and these are largely um for college students and Google just made Gemini available um for for kids through parents with family plan and they are racing to get allegiance of young kids. This is terrible because those products
• 46:00 - 46:30 are not designed for children and for learning. I guess then there to go back to your equity point, there's the argument from the opposite direction in equity, which is that it is the kids with the least access to all kinds of enrichment materials to to tutors. I mean, we we know what rich kids in urban centers get and then what you're getting
• 46:30 - 47:00 I mean, you know, in parts of America that are rural and don't yet have broadband or don't have wide access to broadband to say nothing of, you know, a kid in Nigeria um in rural Nigeria. That that is where at least a well ststructured Genai tutor might be able to make a difference really fast. You've talked a bit about a study uh in Nigeria that I never quite know how to
• 47:00 - 47:30 how seriously to take these studies yet. Um but but why don't you say what it what it did and what it found? So I think that AI has real potential for very specific use cases particularly around access gaps and in Nigeria what was done was after school twice a week um an AI tutor helped kids learn English and it was for 6 weeks which is not long it was June July I think it was
• 47:30 - 48:00 a randomized control trial we're still waiting for all the evidence to come through but three standard deviations which is pretty good equivalent to maybe two years of average sort of English learning. And you know, we see that difference with other technologies too. It doesn't have to be Gen AI. It can be rule-based AI. It could be predictive AI. We've seen sort of similar benefits for example in Malawi teaching literacy and numeracy to kids with offline tablets um where teachers have maybe 80
• 48:00 - 48:30 to 100 kids in a class and each kid is having sort of a personalized adaptive learning experience that is hugely beneficial as well. So that's one use case. Another use case that I think is really great is um neurode divergent kids. Super helpful. Um there's all sorts of kids um that have different learning differences that struggle in school, don't have access to the
• 48:30 - 49:00 specialists that they need that would benefit greatly from, you know, being in a classroom where they could have a little assistant to help them navigate. Um we I see my my youngest son has dyslexia and they the sort of read and write text to speech speech to text has been gamechanging for him. There's also use cases here in the US. Do you see AI being used and experimented around supporting wellness advisors who kind of
• 49:00 - 49:30 fill the gap for school counselors in rural school districts for example where they don't have school counselors which is actually a an actual person but AI is boosting that person's ability um to have a helpful conversation with a kid and it's bringing through tech a mental health resource into a community that didn't have one. So there's lots of use cases actually if done well contained well designed well and we have adult you
• 49:30 - 50:00 know we humans have our hand on the steering wheel. Ethan Mollik who's a an AI expert he's got this idea that has been influential for me about the best available human is AI better for you in a certain purpose not than the best human but the best human available to you at a given moment. Exactly. So yes, having a professional excellent editor like my editor at the New York Times would be better, but most people don't have that available. So AI is a better than the best available editor to them.
• 50:00 - 50:30 There's a lot more demand for therapy than there are therapists. So often times AI is, you know, practically where it's going. Even for me, sometimes it's a better therapist than the best available therapist I have uh available at a given moment. It certainly seems plausibly true in education, too. Uh there's all kinds of times when you are confused by what you are reading, what you are learning. Yep. And you're in a big class and it's embarrassing to ask 55 questions or there's even time to ask
• 50:30 - 51:00 55 questions and you don't want to seem stupid. But if you could contain the system somehow and that seems more plausible here where there's a fundamental prompt at the core of them, right? Then you know if we got that right uh it it you know in a lot of these use cases it could be really absolutely and the key is what you said contain the system. We can't sort of just bring commercial tech into our schools and hope it will solve
• 51:00 - 51:30 these problems. It has to have guard rails. We have to make sure that the data that's it's being trained on is legit and not going to create harmful prompts for kids. We've seen terrible things with commercial um AI companions with young young people, you know, developing relationships and being, you know, really manipulated emotionally. But you can put guard rails. It's totally possible. Um it's just where who what the frankly it gets back to the the incentives. It gets back to the business
• 51:30 - 52:00 model. Um and which is where you you know regulation and government could and should step in. Um, so yes, if contained is the question. So then let me ask you about the other impulse somebody might have, which is not that you're going to be replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI, but that in a world where we have AIs, the most important thing for human beings to be is as human as possible. And that what we need to do is
• 52:00 - 52:30 return to more classical education. that what we need to do is be reading the great books, developing the attentional faculties that a lot of data and anecdata suggest that even very elite students are losing. To read a long book and think about it, to write a long essay, to be educated in the way that was considered high civilization
• 52:30 - 53:00 education 70 years ago and you might get at a St. John's or a U of Chicago or certain private schools today. But actually what we should do is retreat somewhat. School should be a place not where we learn how to partner with machines because the rest of societyy's going to tell you how to do that. School should be a place where we develop specifically human faculties such that we are capable and flexible and
• 53:00 - 53:30 attentive in moving through a world that we just cannot predict. We 100% want kids to have the capacity for deep attention. And you're thinking about your own kiddos who are young. And I'm thinking about my own teenagers who are 13 and 16. And I see the undermining of attentive faculties from when my 16-year-old got his phone. For a long time, he didn't
• 53:30 - 54:00 want a phone because I'd been droning on and on for years cuz he has me as a mother about addiction and opportunity costs and just that, you know, it's okay to enjoy it a little bit, but you know, can't sacrifice sleep and physical exercise and inperson, you know, communication. And then he did get his phone and he struggles with it and he says, "Mom, this is really hard." Like it's eroding his ability to do his homework or to follow follow something he wants to do. The only thing that it
• 54:00 - 54:30 doesn't seem to distract him from doing is playing the piano because he loves playing the piano. So anything that we can do to actually ensure young people are developing the muscle and it's not just attention and tension is the entry point. That's the doorway that gets you through. It's actually reflection and meaning making which is what you get from deep reading and reading full books which a lot of young people struggle to
• 54:30 - 55:00 do today. You also can get it from other means. You could get it from long socratic dialogues in community with diverse people over time. But it has to be an experience where you reflect, you think about meaning, you think about different perspectives and it changes how you see the world. But but what do you think about this idea that school should be a rare screen-free
• 55:00 - 55:30 oasis in a child's life? I've sometimes imagined a school that you know I could send my kids to. I'm not saying it exists just in my head. Yes. where what they do is they go in and you know somebody is watching them and helping them read books and think through math and there's long periods and and they have a certain amount of exploratory capacity in that right you can choose between different books you can but that the idea that maybe one space in their
• 55:30 - 56:00 life would just be a place that is trying to encourage in them that capacity for meaning for deep attention, for deep contemplation. It seems to me to be more valuable than it seems to be to other people. To just have a teacher sit there and watch kids read for an hour and a half at a time and then there's a discussion than to do a lot of what we do in school. And so this idea of schools as as explicitly counter to the
• 56:00 - 56:30 trends of the moment because they need to develop things that the moment will not naturally develop. How do you think about that? I think that's right. I actually think if I had to choose for my own kids, um, and I do, we would have, you know, a school that has no no phones for all the reasons we know. And Jonathan Height has done a great job on on, you know, sort of catalyzing that movement here in the US and bringing it from across the globe to our schools. I
• 56:30 - 57:00 think today we should have cell phone bands in school, bell to bell. don't don't have it at recess because that's where you start interacting and playing with kids. And uh I think we should um make school a place where kids can actually interact with each other, have develop humanto human socialization capacities because there is massive
• 57:00 - 57:30 commercial tech the minute they leave school that is vying for their attention and coming for them. And make sure make sure to do some highquality AI literacy. AI literacy is way way different than using AI to learn. AI literacy is what is this? How was it made? What are the risks? What are the benefits? And let's talk about what how our ethics around this new tool and and
• 57:30 - 58:00 how to incorporate it into our lives. you know, with an in with an adult instructor talking about how it works and what it is. I think that would that's AI literacy and that's important. I hope you're right. I I've been in general very skeptical of of how much literacy will do. But I guess this goes back to I mean there is a question how much we will do, but your your question is will it make a difference? I'm as I'm as phone literate as I think you can almost be. I've been writing about this
• 58:00 - 58:30 for years. Y I'm functionally extremist on this issue and still the only way for me to modulate my own use to the point I would like to is to use a device that hobbles my phone the brick every time I touch it to the RFID chip and if I don't do that all the literacy in the world I've known John height for many many years he's been on this show I've read the anxious generation um it doesn't do me that much good because uh that's just not how the the the brain
• 58:30 - 59:00 any more than knowing that I shouldn't eat so many Oreos keeps you from eating them if they're on the table in front of me. And I think you bring something up that's really important, which is, you know, these things need to be regulated. It's ridiculous that they're out there being used by kids. Like, and it's ridiculous to say, Ezra, it's your willpower that should be the deciding factor. It's ridiculous for adults. It's ridiculous for kids. These are incredibly seductive technologies. So what I you know I this is this is a
• 59:00 - 59:30 really tough one for me around because you do want kids to be fluent in the new technology of the time and you do want them to have an ethics and awareness about it. You don't want them to be seduced by it. The large AI labs are perfectly capable, perfectly capable, if they wanted to, of creating a Gen AI product that is designed for kids that will not be as seductive. It's interesting. I was just thinking
• 59:30 - 60:00 about that and I wonder I I think they are, but I also wouldn't overstate how well they even understand what it is they are doing. They don't fully understand the systems they're making. Now the kids are more I mean relentlessly the kids are more capable and ingenious than you know the eight or 40 or 100 developers on any given when you're building something that has a small number of hundreds of people
• 60:00 - 60:30 building it and then it's used by 40,000 kids. I think our um experience is that they are clever in ways typically that that you are not. Um I I do think that over time we can create things that are that that are curbed. It's just that I'm not sure we even know exactly what we are targeting. What we are creating. Well, I would say they're the they have to change how they're developing the products. You can't create um an AI that'll be great for kids and teachers
• 60:30 - 61:00 and teaching and learning without having teachers and kids and education experts and child development experts in the development process with you. and so few are. So I think about what um the Dutch government is doing. They're doing a partnership with sort of the teacher unions and the academics and the tech companies and they're having a little lab to figure out how to you know what would AI look like in in schools. But any of that sort of bottomup experimentation is a is a way to go
• 61:00 - 61:30 before you roll it out because most AI developers, although they might be good people, they're not child development specialists. But if they change the way they develop their products, they could. So then I want to go back to to where we began, which is, you know, you've got young kids now. They're going to be going into school in the age of Genai. How should you think about their schooling? So, we can't really predict the shape of society in 15 or 20 years. I don't think that's a question we could answer on the show. If we could, we
• 61:30 - 62:00 should probably be investing, not podcasting. But what we have in education now is constant markers that are supposed to tell us as parents how well our kids education is going. And that's basically grades and maybe to some degree counselor reports. And the idea is if they get good grades and they seem happy and well adjusted, then at the end of that process, they'll go to a good college or, you know, go to a trade school and get a good job. And
• 62:00 - 62:30 and it's going to be a pretty straight line. All A's equal good job. The future is foggier. What they will need to know is maybe a little foggier. What then should a parent be trying to watch in the meantime? How do you think about whether or not your kid's education is going well if you're a little suspicious that the grades designed for and maybe even not that well designed for the society we have had are
• 62:30 - 63:00 not going to correlate all that well to the society we will have. And I think as a parent, you yourself, but also other parents out there are right to be suspicious because I think that linear line is going to be much more complicated as the years go on with AI in our world. So what I would think about is a couple of things. One, getting back to the research I've done with my co-author and colleague Jenny
• 63:00 - 63:30 Anderson, grades don't show you how much kids are engaged. Schools are not designed to give kids agency. Schools are designed to help kids comply. And it's actually not really the fault of the teacher. teachers are squished from above with all sorts of standards and squished from below with parents, you know, putting a lot of pressure on, you know, teachers about their kids' performance and outcome. And what you
• 63:30 - 64:00 really want is some feedback loops that are beyond just grades and behavior like to know is my kid developing agency over their learning. And what I mean by that is are they able to reflect and think about things they're learning in a way that they can identify what's interesting and they can p have the skills to pursue new information. That right there is I think going to be the core skill. It is the core skill for
• 64:00 - 64:30 learning new things in an uncertain world which is I think one of the number one things we think about. In addition to that, I would say make sure kids are learning to interact with other human beings. Any school that has them working with peers, but even connecting with community members. our um social networks are getting smaller. There's going to be a premium on humanto human interaction as more and more um skills get automated and done by by I by AI
• 64:30 - 65:00 which are the more knowledge sort of cognitive tasks the sort of interpersonal caregiving teaching you know skills are going to continue to be important for some for some time. I'm not sure for how long but for some time. And then the last thing which may seem silly to you but I increasingly keep thinking about is think about uh speaking listening and speaking as the missing piece of literacy alongside reading and writing. We are going to
• 65:00 - 65:30 need to show our merit and our sort of credentials more and more through what the British call oracy skills. You know, I I think we've lost the art of listening and speaking. I think that's a good place to end. Thank you for speaking and listening with me. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So the first one is democracy and education by
• 65:30 - 66:00 John Dwey which is over 100 years old and we are now seeing through lots of great neuroscience that his observations around the teaching and learning experience and what makes for a good teaching and learning experience were right. He has some great discussions around the importance of reflection. not just ingesting knowledge but reflecting on it, making meaning, figuring out how to do things with it. And I I love it because, you know, we didn't talk about
• 66:00 - 66:30 this Ezra much, but the role of schools in our society are more than just your and my kids education and getting a job, even though that's what we care about most as a parent. They are about creating a democratic society or not. So, that that's an oldie but goodie. I love it. John Dwey. Um the second book is by Gia Bernstein. It's called Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies. She's a law professor at Satan Hall University. and she I I
• 66:30 - 67:00 really enjoy this book because it gives a really good sort of overview particularly around kids and young people of the incentives that commercial tech has and how we need to sort of what are some strategies for resisting that and getting to a a better place. And the last one it's called blueprint for revolution. How to use rice pudding, Lego men, and other nonviolent techniques to galvanize communities,
• 67:00 - 67:30 overthrow dictators, or simply change the world by Sergio Papovich, who is uh the was the student sort of leader, Serbian student leader that started a movement to overthrow Sloan Malloich and now is doing quite a bit of work on um nonviolent protest against authoritarianism. And to me, this book is sort of like the updated version of non-violent activism. He really
• 67:30 - 68:00 gets media. He really gets social media. And I just think it's incredibly relevant today. Rebecca Winthrop, thank you very much. Thank you. [Music]