…is that it's forcing us to grapple with answers to basic questions. Questions like:
- What is school for?
- What does it take to get there?
- How does technology help or hinder those efforts?
High-quality, comprehensive, and evidence-supported answers are the only ones that work here. If we assume we're all in agreement on what an education is for and then proceed to work at answering what it takes to get there, we'll end up with all the varieties for frustration and triviality and disagreement and overwhelm that we're used to.
Prior to the advent of generative AI, failure to answer the first question was one of our profession's core problems. Unfortunately, it continues to be so. As Greg McKeown argues so well in Essentialism, when clarity of purpose is absent, groups and individuals will work poorly, distractedly, and to little effect.

What I offer is that education is now and has always been for the following:

Notice how much more intelligible this goal is than the fuzzy, guesswork-laden goal of “preparing students for the future.”
In 2020, did you predict that in 2024 there would be robots that could produce a human-sounding deep-dive podcast after perusing a blog article for a couple minutes? I did not. Nor do I think it likely that I can accurately predict what technologies we'll be wrestling with in 2028.
But if my belief is that helping young people master history or English and that the development of such mastery is the best thing I can do to make them strong and capable for long-term flourishing…then now, all of a sudden, questions two and three get much easier to answer.
What does it take to move students toward mastery? Motivation, knowledge-building, thinking argumentatively, reading, writing, speaking/listening — those are the six things in These 6 Things. In the book, I took pains to demonstrate that these basic areas of practice, rightly considered, have powerful applications in all the content areas.
If and where generative AI can help me move my students toward their own mastery in these areas…then I'm open to giving it a shot. If and where generative AI can't do it — if, for example, instead of moving toward mastery, it helps my students avoid the desirable difficulty that learning is made of — then I'm not.
Clarity of purpose, colleagues — don't sleep on it, ever. I'm about twenty years into my career, and I continue to derive strength, purpose, and power from thinking on these kinds of things.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
PS I've got a new course out today called the Value Belief Mini-Course. Check it out.
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