Drive Has Always Been the Difference

 

 

 

 

Last month Google announced “Learn Your Way,” which they state will revolutionize the educational experience by providing you with content in different forms that suit your preferred learning style. Millions of users are already using various artificial intelligence tools to do just that, like an ever-patient and all-knowing sidekick who you can feed question after question about things you want to learn more about. These aids will only get better, faster, and cheaper, and probably at an accelerated rate. 

Many are observing this progress and predicting the demise of the university as we know it. After all, isn’t that what college is for? If I can learn anything I want, effectively and instantaneously and cheaply, why would I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and four years of my life instead? 

Leave aside for a second that the traditional university experience has many other purposes, so these are not perfect substitutes. What I want to probe today is that it’s always been the case that the difference-maker for anyone who wants to accomplish anything in life – get a good job, rise up in the ranks, have real influence in the real world – is the drive to want to learn and the discipline to put in the time to learn. 

I have a friend who is a professor and loves the topic he teaches. But he understands that his students are not like him. He spent years studying his area of expertise and is now spending his entire career teaching it, researching it, and soaking it in to his heart’s content. His students, on the other hand, are not on the same track; they just want the class to get the degree, and the degree to get the job, which will in 100 percent of the cases not be as a university professor. 

And that’s ok, for that’s how education works and that’s how sorting works. But, take this to the extreme and see how it can be problematic. If I told you you could go to school for four years, go through the motions of going to class and writing papers and studying for finals, and then get a good job after, well: my friend would be horrified, because it’s the learning that is inherently pleasurable and useful, but most people would take that proposition. 

But how does the world actually work? Does it function through performance and signaling and credentials? Or does it require that people actually do things, which entails knowing how to do them, which in turn entails taking the time to learn how to do them?

 In every generation, there are the go-getters who welcome tools like “Learn Your Way” from Google. They can’t wait to accelerate their knowledge acquisition and put it to productive use solving real problems in the real world. And, in every generation, there are others for whom education is transactional: if I make a show of the educational process, then I get a degree, and if I have a degree, then I can land a job, and if I have a job, then I get a seat in the room when the real decisions are being made. 

AI tools have merely accelerated both the go-getters’ ability to get ready for their future and the slackers’ ability to mime the educational experience. What will that mean for our future productivity and equity? Time will tell.