What is the Future of Education? Freakonomics’ Steve Levitt & Google Chief Technologist Ben Gomes

- How do I get an AI tutor in every kid's ear?

How is there not a stampede to get kids equipped with those tools?

(dramatic classical music) - So Steven, I've been a huge fan of your books for a long time. - Thank you.

- "Freakonomics" and "SuperFreakonomics," and they showed the power of data to upend conventional wisdom.

And I, you know, now you're interested in education.

And do you think there's a lot of need to upend conventional wisdom in education?

- (laughing) Oh my god.

I mean, I think we've layered, for hundreds of years, we've layered little changes on top of what already existed.

And I feel like we've just so lost sight of the objective, which is to create a new generation of people who are well-adjusted and curious and excited about the world.

It's an incredibly hard problem, and I'm not sure I have any of the answers.

But I think we want something different from our education system.

- So I think in the past, people studied something that was gonna hold them for all their lives.

And now, technology is changing much more rapidly, so there's a need to adapt to technology.

And do you think that that changes also, it seems that that changes sort of fundamentally how education needs to work to create those skills to adapt.

- Yeah, I'm stealing it from one of my podcast guests.

I can't remember which one it was, but he talked about just-in-case learning, which is what we do now.

Like I'm gonna teach you about calculus or about geometry or chemistry or Shakespeare, whatever it is, just in case, some moment in your life 20 years from now, you're gonna say, "Oh my god.

I need to know a right triangle.

I need to make some calculation about it."

Versus just-in-time learning, which is something which actually makes sense.

So you and I have both, at various points in our life, faced problems where we didn't know what the answers were, and we didn't have the right tools.

And what I do and I assume you do is say, "Well, I gotta go learn those tools."

And I was equipped to be able to learn those tools.

So I think you're right.

In a world in which you do not know what you'll be doing five years from now or 20 years from now, building, and a world in which so much knowledge is now at our fingertips, cramming your head full of facts and formulas is not the answer to managing the future.

It's not even, you know?

- Yeah, yeah. - It's self-evident that it's not.

But it's hard for the system to catch up, in part, because the system is built on evaluation, right, of giving grades.

And as an educator teaching at the University of Chicago, look, I'm the worst offender in the world.

I need to somehow give some kids A's and some kids B's.

And the easiest way to do that is to teach them things that don't matter in ways that are somewhat hard and overcomplicated so that I have a way to separate them out. (Ben laughing)

And it's terrible and I'm embarrassed about it.

But it's what I do in my everyday life.

(dramatic classical music) - I think students would be lucky to have you as a professor because you're a very engaging storyteller, but also, the ability to convey complex concepts.

And one of the things I've been thinking about in the context of AI, right, is how do you bring that?

How do you help students get to those fundamental ideas in any of these disciplines through a process of interacting with AI or AI providing other tools that do that?

And you know, we've got this experiment called LearnLM, which is trying to solve the basic problems of tutoring.

Because you know, there's a lot of evidence that, you know, tutoring can actually help improve outcomes dramatically, right?

- Yeah. - But tutoring with a human has certain properties.

The AIs can be very sycophantic.

They can tell you you're right when you're not right and things of that sort.

And so we have been tuning this LLM to actually be better about those characteristics that we know are true of tutors.

(dramatic classical music) So you're starting this school.

So you're thinking about this also from the perspective of kids at K through 12. - Yeah.

- How are you thinking about that?

Are you thinking about toolkits of that sort for the students to learn?

Are you thinking about a conventional curriculum.

- The crux of our whole school is that, by using technology, bespoke, you know, teaching to kids at the level they are and being able to react to what they know and don't know, and so letting them skip the stuff they already know, letting them learn twice, essentially mastery learning. - Yeah, yeah.

- Enabled by technology. - Yeah.

- That is such a better way of teaching kids.

- Yeah. - That our whole model is based on the idea that the stuff that they're gonna test on the SAT or the ACT, like we can teach that to kids in about 1/4 of the time that it currently takes, just because there is a better way of teaching that.

But what I think is much harder thing about, well, now that I've freed up that time in the day, so I've got, say, six hours a day that I'm not warehousing kids and using awful old 1800s technologies, trying to get them to learn things about triangles, what am I gonna do with them?

That's actually the part that- - Yeah. - I'm really nervous about.

- Yeah. - I'm really nervous about.

'Cause am I actually gonna be able to deliver them a curriculum that is exciting and engaging?

- Are there particular things that you see there that have been very effective?

- I mean, already I think, AI tutors are, you know, as good as a run-of-the-mill human tutor.

Probably, you know, it won't be long.

But to me, if I ran, you know, the California Department of Education, my thought would be, "How do I get an AI tutor in every kid's ear?"

Because if you told me suddenly I had a grant for, you know, $17 billion that would put, you know, a tutor, a full-time tutor for every kid, I would take it in a second.

How is there not a stampede to get kids equipped with those tools?

But I don't think there is.

- AI can act as a tutor, but there is, I also believe there is the role of the human in motivating.

And how people interact with the technology, the teacher, the student, and so on, is being evolved.

I feel like we're currently in an era of evolution.

A new technology has come, and then that technology itself is evolving rapidly.

And there are long-established institutions that are trying to figure out how to use that technology best.

And we are trying to work with teachers and so on, right? - Yeah.

- In school systems to help them and for them to inform us to what's working and what's not. - Yeah.

- Humans are still pretty fundamental.

Like humans learn because of humans.

How you think of the humans in the loop- - Yeah. - In your school?

- Yeah. - In your school?

- So in our school, what we're trying to do is take teachers and turn them into cheerleaders and guides, people who are helping the kids understand who they are and who they become, and trying to get rid of obstacles that are keeping kids from doing that, which is, you know, which I think many people go into teaching imagining- - Yeah, yeah.

- That's what they do. - That's what they do.

- But then the reality takes it away.

(dramatic classical music) - I remember I had a history teacher in school, very inspirational, you know, was a Jesuit priest.

And he would set up history as like, "Here's a situation.

Here are the parties.

What do you think is gonna happen?"

- Yeah. - Now, there's no way for us to actually know that, but the discussion kept us engaged in a way that I'd never been engaged with history before.

'Cause otherwise it was years and dimensions of temples and numbers and dates and stuff like that, and like, one king after another, right?

And so this suddenly turned into something about like human beings and how they interact and so on, right?

So I think it leaves you that space, but you also needed something of like what actually happened in history. - Yeah.

in history. - Yeah.

- So the balance seems to be something that seems important, no?

- Yes.

And so I do think, yeah, we would benefit a lot from a system in which teachers felt free to be more themselves and didn't feel this pressure, where like, "I've got to bomb through these four topics today because the state standards have 472 topics.

And so I have to click off these 472 boxes.

And if I don't, someone's gonna be mad at me."

Like I think, I totally understand why people respond to those incentives.

I think those are the wrong incentives.

Honestly, I think what we're asking teachers to do at our school is to connect with kids.

I mean, part of what that history professor you're talking about did, who changed the way you thought about history, was gave you the freedom to actually start to be creative and to think- - Yeah.

- In a history context instead of feeling like your only job is to memorize and regurgitate.

- Yeah, and I think about like, you know, one of the reasons I'm working on learning at Google is things like YouTube and Search and Gemini, even like Google Arts & Culture, people come to those tools because they want to, not because they have to, right?

So the creators on YouTube, I find like really inspire, and there's so much I've learned from them.

And you know, they don't succeed unless people want to come to their education.

And they learn in a somewhat different way in that want to- - Yeah. - Rather than have to.

- Yeah. - Rather than have to.

But there are these, feels like there are these two components of education, and hopefully, the want to can become larger in this process using some of these tools of AI.

And the have to can become more efficient.

- Yeah. - And effective, right?

So those, it seems like that's part of what you're trying to achieve in this school.

(dramatic classical music) - In my own classroom, I'm not excited at all.

You know, I feel like I'm part of the past in my own classroom.

But here, trying to create this, it really feels like being part of the future.

So it's, I hope we have a conversation- - Yeah.

- Two, five, 10 years from now. - Yes.

from now. - Yes.

- In which we can both say that we, you know, that we spent our time well and it was fun, and we created amazing things for the world.

- Yeah, that'll be wonderful.

(dramatic classical music)