What is education? What is learning? These are surprisingly tricky to define because they are broad. My wife and I started a microschool (in Mumbai) because we

What is education? What is learning? These are surprisingly tricky to define because they are broad. My wife and I started a microschool (in Mumbai) because we couldn’t find any for our kids that were both good and did not require a multi-hour trek to get to daily. Taking up the responsibility of educating others’ kids meant we needed to articulate and clarify very foundational concepts. What exactly is a good school? What makes it so? As parents, we began our search with the “how”. We knew that traditional standardized age-segmented, test-driven schooling isn’t great. There is tons of literature on that. I also happen to have a PhD in neuroscience and have written a book about the mind, so I also know how little we know about how we learn. From whatever little we do, though, we know this current industrialized form of schooling is bad. And yet it’s been bureaucratized and dispensed with dogmatic confidence. It speaks to our resilience that we turn out okay despite its inanity. There are alternative methods that have been around for quite some time (Waldorf/Steiner schools celebrated their centenary recently). We’ve adopted one of the alternative methods. However, the practice of actually engaging with twenty kids for hours everyday quickly made us realize that it is not enough to change or ask the how. A set of telescoping questions quickly reveal themselves: How? What? Why? To ask how we must educate, we must ask what is education, and why is it required? Education is learning to play the game of life well. We must learn it because the game changes and we are not born with the tools and wisdom it takes to play it. We acquire them over our lifetime, learning about the game, about ourselves. We are learning even into our middle and late ages. It’s not just numeracy, literacy, or computational skills. It is mental wellbeing. It is understanding how we fit into the fabric of society and how we can navigate it successfully and profitably, and hopefully sustainably. Do you need school or college for that? No, but it helps to have a place where you can share notes and have experienced guides who are not merely transmitting information, but actively learning and exploring. That isn’t happening in most schools or colleges though. We are stuck with the unconscious definition of learning as information transmission and education as the institutional process within which this transmission happens in a measurable, testable, certifiable manner. Systems have been built around this idea and like all systems, these are tough to dismantle. I think Generative AI’s greatest potential lies in making the transmission of information so effortlessly easy and effective (by personalizing this transmission to suit each individual’s needs) that we’ll come to realize there is more to education, learning, and the game of life than devoting over twenty years of our lives to getting graded and branded within these transmission of information tests and systems that empower them.