In my lifetime, I’ve had over a hundred teachers. Out of those hundred, only a few were great. Some were well-meaning, but most were trapped in a system that rewards memorization, conformity, and yesterday’s thinking. Only one taught me skills that actually prepared me for the future.
I remember a math teacher in 2005 telling us to memorize formulas because “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.” Three years later, we all started carrying supercomputers in our pockets. That moment sums up my entire education. Outdated. Reactive. A wasted opportunity.
We were taught how to memorize, not how to think. No questioning. No critical thought. No sense of how any of it would apply to our future. Take notes, memorize, take the test. Next. Then it was gone. Zero connection to the material. Zero reason to care.
The problem isn’t that teachers don’t care. Most are thrown into impossible circumstances. One person is asked to teach twenty or thirty unique minds, each with different strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles. It can be done, but it’s rare. The truth is our education model was designed for an industrial age that no longer exists.
The Cost of Stagnation
The results speak for themselves. Studies show that more than half of American adults read below a sixth grade level. That means millions of people struggle to engage with complex information, weigh nuance, or think critically about the world around them. If education is supposed to prepare us for life, we have to ask: life when? The world of the past, or the one we’re walking into?
Education should prepare us for the future. Yet academia often prepares students perfectly for yesterday. When I earned my Personal Trainer certification earlier this year (2025), I saw how outdated the material was. Nutrition guidelines, exercise science, even how to measure blood pressure were all a decade behind the curve. The same thing happened in college, where we were trained on outdated tape cameras and editing methods that had already been replaced by new technology. My first job out of school didn’t even exist when I chose my major. How can students plan their futures when the system can’t even see six months ahead? What students really need are timeless skills: critical thinking, adaptability, creativity, and problem-solving. Skills that prepare them for any future, not just the past.
That’s why AI matters. Personalized, adaptive, and infinitely scalable, it can do what a single teacher in a crowded classroom never could. The truth is most traditional teaching jobs may not exist in the future. AI will be the one curating lessons, adapting to each student, and tracking progress in real time. The role of the human teacher will shift to what machines can’t replicate: guiding, mentoring, and inspiring. And learning doesn’t have to end at graduation. Real education should encompass a lifetime.
One model is ending, but a better one is waiting to be built.
Read the full article:
https://www.erinemalone.com/post/the-education-system-is-broken-the-future-of-learning-is-ai
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