Are schools still needed in the age of AI?

While living in London I have made it one of my aims to just do as much as possible! I'm lucky enough to be living in this amazing city with so much going on around me and I want to experience it all. To facilitate in doing this I have a list on my notes app titled "London Bucket List"which I have complied from a mix of things my friends have, told me about, ads I've seen on the tube, and stuff i've seen on TikTok - which I some what reluctantly admit is my main source of inspiration. One of the latter category was going to a Pints of Knowledge Lecture. Pints of Knowledge is an initiative where academic lecturers and professionals int heir fields give Ted Talk style lectures in various London pubs. If you visit their website there are talks on all sorts of things from The Big Bang to World Cup shirts and held in locations all across the city. I came across a talk titled "Human Intelligence in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: What is the Purpose of Schools in Today's World?" which I thought sounded super interesting and relevant given I have just joined (and plan to continue working in) the eduction sector. I booked tickets (which sell out quick so get to it if you want to go to a talk!), and dragged by boyfriend across London to a bar in the basement of a Pizza restaurant where the talk was taking place.

Some pics I took of the room set up before the lecture started and one we got our 10/10 pizzas!

The evening as a whole was amazing! Not only was the talk very interesting and sparked some great conversations (which I will get into in a minute) but the event was run so well. The chairs were set out lecture style but the atmosphere was very casual. My boyfriend and I got a pint of beer and a pizza each (10/10 pizza btw - if you're in Shoreditch go to Pizza East) and sat on the front row because we (or I??) are maybe a bit too keen. Everyone there was so engaged and chatty, the audience was made up of people of all ages and while there was a heavy skew to those working in the education sector (mostly teachers) not everyone was and it lead to some great discussion. The talk was given by Professor Zachary Walker and Dhanishtha Patel and was pitched at just the right level of factual and engaging so I throughly enjoyed. The main reason I wanted to write this article though was not just to advertise Pints of Knowledge but to talk about what the lecture made me think and my thoughts on this ever evolving subject.

Schools in 2026 are facing a massive change as AI begins to be introduced to the classroom. This change, however, is not as unprecedented as you may think. We have always been in an age of change. In the late 1800s when the typewriter was popularised people said schools were no longer needed - manuscripts could be printed and information spread so what was the point in oral learning. Then we started to move from a physical society to a thinking society, tools were being invented to do the manual labour tasks that humans had been doing previously, this was, after all, the industrial revolution. Schools were no longer needed to teach students how to do physical tasks, they were needed to teach children how to think, to give them information so they could start doing the jobs of a thinking economy that we have had since then. Similarly, in today's world we are starting to see a shift from that thinking economy towards a feeling economy. AI is the mechanisation of the thinking that has previously been done by humans. Now humans need to take over in the jobs that need feelings, feelings that AI doesn't have. AI is not going to take over the caring jobs, the jobs that use human intuition, and there is an argument that this is now the skills we need to be teaching in schools. One member of the audience shared that he was a software engineer, in his role he had seen a shift away from purely writing the code - AI could do that much quicker than he could - and towards knowing what code needs to be written, what would be popular and beneficial to a human market, and in sense checking the code.This trend is likely to be seen across other sectors, with the role humans play in industry starting to look a little different.

It is still pretty obvious to me that there is a lot of point to schools and they are still very much needed. The takeaway here is that we may think AI is going to render education pointless, just as society thought the typewriter might, but this is very much not the case. The discussion got into what actually are the point of schools. It was very interesting to see the differing opinions on this. I think that schools are about sharing knowledge that needs to be passed on, but also on building life and social skills, fostering creativity, gaining resilience, learning to function as part of a society, and still gaining the qualifications needed to succeed in your chosen path of life. Schools are microcosms of life, they teach children how to exist in the real world and allow a space for them to learn, and fail, and grow in a protected environment. Thinking about this sparked an interesting discussion with my boyfriend on the tube ride home about the point of learning things such as non-calculator maths (I'm talking long division, and memorising the values of trig function) as well as having to memorise equations and values which in the real world you could easily ask AI, or even Google, for. I agree with him in the fact that they are no longer skills that are necessary, never in the modern world will I need to pull out the bus stop method for long division unless I am trying to teach it to a student. This being said, the process of learning this helps you build an understanding of what division actually is. The memorisation one I agree is maybe no longer needed. The shear number of equations you have to know for GCSE physics is maybe a bit pointless, and I do feel bad for this year's cohort who are the first (I think) to go back to the pre-COVID lack of an equation sheet, but memorising them helps you understand how they work. This being said, I do think the exams should be adapted slightly to fit a more modern world. And maybe we can ditch non-calculator maths papers.

Another point that was raised is that maybe the metrics of intelligence have simply changed? Maybe they should no longer be measured in knowledge based exams but instead in application of this knowledge, and with a focus on life skills. There is also a lot of discourse over wether or not GCSEs should go, and if I'm being honest I'm not entirely sure where I sit in this argument. I think GCSEs are beneficial in teaching kids how to sit exams, teaching them discipline, teaching them resilience, and teaching them content - I'm a big advocate that one of the biggest roles of schools is to pass down the knowledge that humanity has discovered over its existence. If the knowledge is not passed down it will be lost, and simply put, an education is one of the most empowering things you can be given in life. They are also good in teaching kids productive failure. Exams are tricky but learning to fail is such an important skill. The will also be vital in checking kids learning in an environment without AI to help them, to ensure a thorough understanding and not simply an ability to prompt AI well enough to do your homework. But then there is an argument that learning to prompt AI well might be a vital skill in the job market of the future.

One argument against this knowledge rich curriculum though is the shear amount of knowledge that needs to be shared. The more humanity discovers, the more there is to teach. We have seen GCSE level content getting more and more advanced as we discover more content to add in at university and A-Level. An audience member who taught primary school said that content keeps being added to the primary curriculum but nothing ever gets taken out. This results in teachers trying to squash so much information into each year and takes away from fundamental areas, namely the creative subjects and time for play and physical activity. Now that we have so much content to share, should kids start specialising earlier? Maybe if they chose to go down a science route at secondary school then they could learn all the science content and not have to worry about english, drama, or PE. But this in itself is detrimental to the full and rounded development of kids. I think making a wide range of subjects mandatory up until 16 is so important. Given the choice, 14 year old Liv would have dropped drama and art in a heart beat, but looking back I am grateful I had to stick them out for as long as I did for the skills that I took away from them that I wouldn't have gained form purely focusing on the science I wanted to do. This does however leave us with the volume of content issue. So maybe we should teach less content because AI knows it all anyway, and just focus on skills?. But this also seems counter productive because in order to be able to utilise AI effectively you need to know and understand what it is talking about. If AI writes your whole essay you will never learn but if AI is used to proof read your essay, or to help generate ideas for your essay then maybe it is okay. There are so many variables and unknowns in this discussion.

AI in the classroom is such a tricky topic. It is inevitable that it will be there. Working in a school I have seen how kids just stick their maths homework into ChatGPT and copy down the answers, and as a uni student myself I have used AI to find sources and write my bibliographies, but there is a difference in this. The main thing I believe teachers need to do with AI in the classroom is model its effective use. AI will be used, that is inevitable, so there is no point saying it is banded. Instead show kids it being used in effective ways, for example recommending sources, helping with grammar, or being used as a revision tool, and discuss the negative impacts of using it to do all your work. If AI does it all you will never understand the content yourself. To quote the talk, "AI needs to be used as a ladder, not as a slide".

Basically, no one really knows the solution to the problems that AI in the classroom pose, and we wont until we have navigated through them and can look back on it. The lecture was so interesting, and sparked such great discussion amongst the audience and so many thoughts in my brain I had to write this whole post. It definitely is a topic I am interested in and am excited to learn more about as I begin my own teacher training in September. I also highly recommend taking yourself to a Pints of Knowledge lecture- there are talk on such a wide array of topics - and hopefully it will be as interesting an evening as mine was.