The Classroom Changed

The Classroom Changed

By Alexis Kinney

I think we're living through one of the biggest changes in education since the internet became widely accessible.

And I'm not sure we're talking about it enough.

For most of human history, access to knowledge was controlled by access to something else.

• A teacher.
• A university.
• A library.
• Money.
• Geography.
• A particular social circle.
• An employer willing to train you.
• Someone who already knew what you wanted to know and was willing to teach you.

The internet changed much of that.

Artificial intelligence is changing it again.

Not because AI suddenly makes everyone an expert.

It doesn't.

But because, for the first time, an enormous number of people have access to something that can function as a teacher, tutor, research assistant, brainstorming partner, editor, translator, technical guide, and intellectual sparring partner—all from the same screen.

I think we're still trying to understand what that means.

I know I am.

I Used to Think Education Was Somewhere You Went

I attended college briefly when I was younger, but I didn't finish.

For years, I carried that fact around with an invisible "but" attached to it.

I went to college, but I didn't graduate.

As if the education portion of my life had begun, stopped prematurely, and then been replaced by work.

Except that's not what happened.

I kept learning.

• I learned through jobs.
• Through people.
• Through books.
• Through mistakes.
• Through responsibility.
• Through watching organizations succeed and fail.
• Through being handed problems I didn't immediately know how to solve.

And eventually, I realized something.

My education hadn't ended.

The classroom changed.

Then the Classroom Changed Again

When I first entered the workforce, if I didn't know how to do something, I had a fairly predictable set of options.

• Ask someone.
• Look it up.
• Read a book.
• Search Google.
• Watch a tutorial.
• Take a course.
• Hire someone who knew more than I did.

All of those options still exist, and all of them still have value.

But AI introduced something fundamentally different.

Now I can begin with a question.

Then ask another question.

Then challenge the answer.

Then ask for an explanation in language I understand.

Then ask what I'm missing.

Then approach the same problem from another angle.

Then connect that idea to something completely different.

That matters to someone like me because I don't naturally learn in straight lines.

I follow patterns.

One question creates three more.

I want to know not only what something is, but why it works, what connects to it, what contradicts it, where the weakness is, and what happens if you change one variable.

Traditional search is extraordinarily powerful, but it generally requires me to find the information and assemble the connections myself.

AI can participate in the exploration.

That changes the experience of learning.

Access to Answers Isn't the Same as Being Educated

This is where I think we need to be careful.

AI can make you feel very smart very quickly.

You can ask a complicated question and receive a beautifully organized answer in seconds.

That can create an illusion.

Understanding something you've just read is not the same as mastering it.

Generating something is not the same as knowing how to build it yourself.

And receiving a confident answer certainly doesn't mean the answer is correct.

AI can be wrong.

Sources can be wrong.

People can be wrong.

I can be wrong.

The technology doesn't eliminate the need to think.

It increases it.

Because when information becomes easier to produce, our ability to evaluate information becomes more valuable.

• What is the source?
• Does this make sense?
• What assumptions are being made?
• What perspective is missing?
• What would someone who disagrees say?
• Is this fact or interpretation?
• Can I verify it?
• Do I actually understand this, or do I simply understand the explanation I was given?

Those questions matter.

AI should not replace critical thinking.

It should provoke more of it.

Curiosity May Become a Competitive Advantage

I've been thinking a lot about what separates people when everyone has access to increasingly powerful technology.

For a while, I assumed the advantage would belong to the people who were best at using AI.

Now I think that's only part of it.

The larger advantage may belong to people who are curious enough to know what to ask.

Because the quality of what you discover is often connected to the quality of the question you begin with.

A person who doesn't wonder very much can have access to every piece of information in the world and do very little with it.

A curious person can encounter one idea and spend three hours pulling on the thread.

That's how I've always learned.

AI simply gives me more thread to pull.

There Is Still No Shortcut to Expertise

I don't want this mistaken for an argument that anyone can open an AI tool and suddenly become a doctor, attorney, engineer, accountant, horticulturist, electrician, historian, programmer, or scientist.

Expertise matters.

Experience matters.

Credentials matter in professions where competency must be independently established.

There are things you cannot learn safely through experimentation.

And there is knowledge that only comes from doing something hundreds or thousands of times.

An electrician doesn't simply know electrical terminology.

An experienced electrician can walk into a situation, notice something unusual, understand the implications, and draw from years of accumulated experience.

A surgeon doesn't simply know anatomy.

A great operator doesn't simply know business terminology.

A great writer doesn't simply know grammar.

Knowledge becomes judgment through experience.

AI can accelerate access to information.

It cannot manufacture lived experience.

That distinction matters.

The Most Interesting Future May Be Human + Machine

The conversation about AI is often framed as a competition.

What will AI replace?

Which jobs disappear?

What can a machine do better than a person?

Those are legitimate questions.

But I'm becoming increasingly interested in another one:

What becomes possible when a capable human being becomes significantly more capable because of the tools available to them?

• Give an experienced tradesperson better diagnostic technology.
• Give a small-business owner analytical capabilities once available only to larger companies.
• Give a teacher tools that help personalize instruction.
• Give a writer a research assistant.
• Give an operations professional the ability to analyze a complicated process in minutes instead of days.
• Give someone who never learned to code the ability to begin understanding what code can do.
• Give a curious person a place to ask the question they might have been embarrassed to ask another human being.

That's interesting to me.

Not artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence.

Human intelligence extending its reach.

Maybe We Need to Stop Asking When Someone Finished Their Education

We've historically treated education as a stage of life.

• Childhood.
• School.
• College.
• Career.

But that model doesn't make much sense anymore.

The world changes too quickly.

A person can graduate with a degree and become professionally outdated if they stop learning.

Someone without a degree can become extraordinarily knowledgeable if they spend twenty years deliberately learning.

• A tradesperson can become a business owner.
• An accountant can learn automation.
• A nurse can become an entrepreneur.
• A writer can learn publishing.
• An executive can learn AI.
• Someone can begin an entirely different career at 45.

The credential still matters.

But increasingly, so does what happened after the credential.

• What have you learned lately?
• What are you trying to understand?
• What have you changed your mind about?
• What can you do today that you couldn't do five years ago?

Those questions tell me something too.

I Don't Want AI to Think for Me

This may be the most important distinction I've discovered in my own use of it.

I don't want artificial intelligence to tell me what to think.

I want it to help me think further.

There's a difference.

I want to bring the instinct.

The curiosity.

The lived experience.

The judgment.

The skepticism.

The values.

The question.

Then I want to use every tool available to me to explore where that question leads.

Sometimes the answer confirms what I thought.

Sometimes it completely dismantles it.

Sometimes I discover I was asking the wrong question in the first place.

That's learning.

And that is why I don't view AI primarily as a shortcut.

I view it as access.

• Access to information.
• Access to explanation.
• Access to experimentation.
• Access to ideas I might not otherwise encounter.
• Access to the ability to begin.

But what I do with that access is still my responsibility.

The Classroom Changed

I used to think the important question was whether I should have finished college.

It's not a question I can answer by rewriting the past.

And I don't need to.

Because the more interesting question is what I'm going to learn next.

I'm 36 years old, and there are subjects I understand today that I knew almost nothing about five years ago.

There are tools I'm using that didn't exist when I was in college.

There are careers being created that didn't exist when today's professionals chose their majors.

There are questions my children may someday have to answer about work and education that I cannot possibly anticipate for them yet.

So perhaps the best thing I can teach them isn't exactly what to learn.

It's how to remain a learner.

• How to ask questions.
• How to recognize when they don't know something.
• How to find people who know more.
• How to use technology without surrendering their judgment to it.
• How to change their minds when the evidence changes.
• How to become excellent at something.
• How to remain curious even after someone hands them a diploma.

Because I'm increasingly convinced that the future won't simply belong to the people with the most information.

Information is becoming abundant.

It may belong to the people who know what to do with it.

• The people who can connect ideas.
• Question assumptions.
• Recognize patterns.
• Build things.
• Repair things.
• Create things.
• Work with people.
• Exercise judgment.
• And keep learning when the world changes again.

I didn't finish my education when I left school.

I didn't finish it when I became a leader.

I didn't finish it when I became an author.

And I won't finish it because I learned how to use artificial intelligence.

That's the point.

The classroom changed.

I'm still in it.