Berkeley High School is full of smart people. It has high acceptance rates to competitive colleges, many extracurricular options, and notable status as an East Bay public school. Students in attendance at BHS, or really any American school, all learn in accordance with one philosophy: they are trained to maximize rewards within their system. In this case the “reward” is grades, our currency to govern the entire student economy. A good teacher should be able to align this reward with learning the actual material, which has a dual use to a government. Modern pedagogy educates the citizenry through literacy and skills to perform jobs in a post-industrial society, while also socializing them from a very young age into seeing the parameters they are navigating as natural and inevitable. In school, students are taught what “smart” behavior looks like and how exactly to replicate it: to be smart is to recognize what you start with and achieve your stated goal, given and following whatever parameters have been set. Given a puzzle, school trains students to solve it.
While an interesting case study in systems design, one could also wonder about the sort of cultural attitude that this socializing would produce given scale and time. Especially considering that BHS is far more adept at this socialization than most public schools; BHS doesn’t just create puzzle-solvers. It creates faster, better puzzle solvers than 90 percent of other high schools on a national level (according to U.S. News). It is high-achieving, and that fact is what causes students to reinforce their cultural attitudes towards school in individual quests for their piece of that achievement. In this climate, the grade becomes more important than understanding any sort of material. Our cultural paradigm is one of fetishizing quantifiable results, which in an environment intended for learning is a poor precedent.
We have our givens: school trains students to maximize rewards, and that those rewards are grades. To trust the majority of teachers with this practice has proven disastrous to education in America. When the incentive to earn the label of “success” is so much stronger than that for actual learning, certain assumptions must be internalized, which may not be entirely compatible with education as it currently exists. If there is an easier way, it must be assumed that students will take it. If that easier way involves AI models, so be it. Now, after decades of rot, education must have another reckoning in 2025. Must it still train students to “solve the puzzle,” or perhaps expand its horizons? In a world where menial intellectual labor is increasingly outsourced to technology, the things that school trains us for are becoming more and more outdated. Any old machine can solve a puzzle. The space where they are designed remains fertile ground for any human creative or ambitious enough to till it.