{ "archive_path": "archive/1792534000.896299", "base_url": "stevekrouse.com/ends", "basename": "ends", "bookmarked_date": "2026-10-20 22:06", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/stevekrouse.com/ends", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=stevekrouse.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "stevekrouse.com/ends.html" }, "domain": "stevekrouse.com", "extension": "", "hash": "DPZ1PHFZ8W97MVQTNQEG", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=stevekrouse.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:05.815244+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1792534000.896299", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:05.286695+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://stevekrouse.com/ends" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:06.282442+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1792534000.896299", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:05.826031+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://stevekrouse.com/ends" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:13.253253+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1792534000.896299", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:09.464547+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpnyqmm3vp", "https://stevekrouse.com/ends" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:09.451558+00:00", "index_texts": [ "What is the purpose of education in the age of AGI?\nOctober 19, 2026\nYesterday, the title The End of Education by Neil Postman called to me from my bookshelf, whispering that it might be the right book at the right time. It was. Published in 1995, it was surprisingly appropriate balm for the soul of a confused programmer and soon-to-be father.\nMy wife and I are expecting our first child. My economically valuable skillset \u2013 programming \u2013 suddenly feels less valuable. What shall I teach my son? And to what end?\n\nMr. Edison says\nThat the radio will supplant the teacher.\nAlready one may learn languages by means\nOf Victrola records.\nThe moving picture will visualize\nWhat the radio fails to get across.\nTeachers will be relegated to the backwoods.\nWith fire-horses,\nAnd long-haired women;\nOr, perhaps shown in museums.\nEducation will become a matter\nOf pressing the button.\nPerhaps I can get a position at the switchboard.\n\u2013 Quoted in The End of Education by Neil Postman, quoting Teachers and Machines: The Use of Technology Since 1920 by Larry Cuban\n\nIn Edison\u2019s own words:\n\nBooks will soon be obsolete in the public schools\u2026 Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.\n\n\u2013 Thomas Edison, The New York Dramatic Mirror, 1913\nBack in 2013, I boldly predicted that MOOCs would upend education. Ah, my past self, you sweet summer child.\nNassim Nicholas Taleb has helped me appreciate the staying power of staying power, sometimes called The Lindy Effect. Merely staying alive implies some anti-fragility to adapt and survive. Consider that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded to educate the clergy. From The End of Education:\n\nIn the Western world, beginning in the thirteenth century and for five hundred years afterward, that God was sufficient justification for the founding of institutions of learning, from grammar schools, where children were taught to read the Bible, to great universities, where men were trained to be ministers of God.\n\nSchools survived what happened to religion. It should be no surprise that they\u2019ve survived the radio, motion pictures, and the internet.\nWe typically confuse why something claims it exists, ie to glorify God, vs the forces that actually perpetuate it, which are subtler, we\u2019d prefer not spoken aloud, and more prosaic, ie endowments, prestige, and needing someone to watch one\u2019s kids.\nIt has been a surprisingly good bet that schools will continue to exist in roughly their current form for many years to come. Ironically, there also seems to be some staying power to technologists boldly (and so far incorrectly) doubting the staying power of schools! I myself have contributed to this grand tradition multiple times, and find myself at risk of doing it yet again.\nSurely this time must finally be different, right? We have captured intelligence in a bottle, and you\u2019re telling me that \u201cOk class, turn to page 17\u201d and \u201cDoes anyone know how to solve for x\u201d are still going to be around in the 2030s?\nThere are many shifting purposes to education, which underpin how it has survived this long. As the times change, so do its purposes shift and adapt, such as:\n\n\nbecome a good person\n\n\nbecome a good citizen\n\n\nearn a living\n\n\nmake the world better\n\n\nlearn basic facts\n\n\nI once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word \u201cresourceful\u201d, because I reasoned that if you \u201cwere able to use arbitrary resources to uncover and solve problems\u201d, you had no more need for schooling. In the age of Google, email, and the internet, a person was educated when they could wield them. But now I see my vision of resourcefulness perfected in the AI agent and its tool loop. Maybe resourcefulness will go the way of the Dewey Decimal System which in turn supplanted memorization and an oral tradition.\nImagine education as a table held up by its many purposes. I didn\u2019t realize how centrally important \u201cthe ability to earn a living\u201d was for me until it started to wobble. A big reason is because I\u2019m looking for a more objective arbiter of \u201cgood\u201d in education. Education\u2019s own tests and measures can feel stifling. The market offered a counterpoint. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were college dropouts, but the market deemed them good. Now that I think of it, apparently Einstein was a mediocre student, but his contributions to science were his way out. With recent advances in AI mathematics, both of these paths to glory are under fire. Clara Collier makes similar points in her exceptional essay \u201cAfter Work, We\u2019ll Have Each Other.\u201d\nIf AI takes our ability to contribute, what\u2019s left for our children?\nNeil Postman offers a few suggestions for positive purposes for education that I found heartening, not mainly for their content, but for the fact that it\u2019s possible to make up new purposes for education and advocate for them. My favorite suggestions of Postman\u2019s are:\n\n\nSpaceship Earth \u2013 we\u2019re all in this together; let\u2019s take care of each other and our planet\n\n\nThe American Experiment \u2013 let\u2019s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be\n\n\nThe World Makers \u2013 as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn\u2019t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us\n\n\nAt the risk of going too meta, I do strongly believe in Postman\u2019s point (in his other education book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity) that \u201cthe medium is the message.\u201d That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what. And likewise, I believe in Dr. Alfie Kohn\u2019s notion that we should relate to our educational charges as humans, not objects \u2013 \u201cdoing with\u201d vs \u201cdoing to\u201d. Thus, I believe it may be most honest and effective to invite our children to help us craft the purpose for their education as we figure it out together.\nWish me luck." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1792534000.896299", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:07.539109+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://stevekrouse.com/ends" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:07.529414+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "What Shall I Teach My Son?", "pwd": "/data/archive/1792534000.896299", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:07.516033+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--reject=js,mjs,woff,woff2,ttf,otf,eot,mp4,m4v,mov,webm,ogv,mkv,avi,flv", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "--timestamping", "https://stevekrouse.com/ends" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:07.504547+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "stevekrouse.com/ends.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1792534000.896299", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-20T22:07:06.292765+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "What Shall I Teach My Son?", "warc": null, "wget": "stevekrouse.com/ends.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1792534000.896299", "newest_archive_date": "2026-10-20T22:07:09.464547+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-10-20T22:07:05.286695+00:00", "path": "/ends", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "79de9ef4-1e4d-4d0a-b05c-485504e301da", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1792534000-import.txt" ], "tags": null, "tags_str": "", "timestamp": "1792534000.896299", "title": "What Shall I Teach My Son?", "updated": "2026-10-20T22:07:05.285057+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-10-20 22:07", "url": "https://stevekrouse.com/ends" }