For two hundred years, schools have operated according to the industrial model of their time: bringing different people together, imposing the same curriculum on everyone and expecting them to learn at the same pace. The standardized transmission of knowledge, memorization and repetitive exercises have occupied a disproportionate part of education. Artificial intelligence makes it possible to fundamentally challenge this model. A personal AI tutor can adapt every explanation, exercise and repetition to each child’s learning speed, even in real time. A small number of outstanding teachers could create the fundamental lessons that millions of intelligent tutors would use to teach. We no longer need to maintain an expensive face to face system to transmit information that can be delivered individually, at virtually no additional cost. Teachers should no longer be reduced to human repetition machines delivering content that intelligent systems can communicate with greater precision and adaptability.

But schools should not disappear. Their purpose should change. When standardized knowledge becomes accessible to everyone and achieving excellent academic results depends increasingly less on the ability to memorize, the real differences will lie in other abilities: building relationships, collaborating, developing complex projects, entrepreneurship, creativity and, above all, exercising the judgment required to make decisions. Knowing how to answer an exam correctly will lose much of its value when artificial intelligence can provide thousands of correct answers in seconds. What will matter is knowing which problems are worth solving, which solutions to choose and how to bring together a team of people to make them happen. Education must abandon its obsession with producing good exam candidates and start developing people capable of thinking, deciding and taking action. The classroom of the future should no longer be a knowledge factory, but a place to develop precisely those abilities that cannot be automated.