E Pluribus…AI?
Our chance at improving schools—and democracy—might be slipping away.
I have a confession: I spent some version of my last ten years in education working on a flavor of “personalized learning,” and I think it had a pretty damning blindspot. We never agreed on the purpose of school.
I’ve been dwelling on this for the last few days, trying to make sense of the swirl of emotions I felt in anticipation of Tuesday’s Ezra Klein Show1 episode featuring Rebecca Winthrop from Brookings. There was anxiety, disappointment, anger, frustration, even arrogance. Because the episode wasn’t just about education—it was about its purpose2.
“What’s the purpose of education?” isn’t a new question. Here it is on a syllabus from my grad school in 2010. And that course3,4 existed long before then.
One of my biggest takeaways from that class: I could’ve been a graphic designer with more practice.
The other? That we, as a nation, have never truly agreed on why we have schools. In 1984, Patricia Albjerg Graham (former Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education) wrote “Cacophony about Practice, Silence about Purpose5.” Nearly 40 years later, not much has changed. We argue endlessly about practices—high-impact tutoring, project-based learning, personalized learning, Common Core, charter schools, SEL, extended learning time, teacher unions—without ever answering the question: but why?
Below is a non-exhaustive list of what schools might be for. We might want schools to:
Help kids from different backgrounds assimilate6 into a common culture (as in the early 20th century),
Equip kids with skills to get jobs and support themselves and their families,
Produce taxpayers and national security contributors,
Pour knowledge into kids so they can become scientists (and again, contribute to national security),
Teach kids to live and collaborate with people who are different from them,
Offer shared experiences that create cultural common ground,
Foster adaptability and lifelong learning,
Support kids in becoming who they want to be and living individually fulfilling lives.
At any given time, we expect schools to do 80% of that list—and more. But we don’t equip teachers for any of it. We rarely say these goals out loud. And, perhaps most egregiously, we rarely involve teachers—or students—in the conversation.
It shouldn’t be radical to ask students what they want from school.
Even amid all this disagreement, there’s one thing we can’t ignore: students will have to live in, and help shape, a multiracial democracy. That, arguably, should be the foundation. If we started there, how would school look different? What would we emphasize?
This is what I think is missing from most current AI and edtech conversations. Founders, technologists, and VCs are quick to deploy products in schools to acquire users, often operating with an impoverished model of learning: one that assumes learning is a code to be debugged in each child’s brain.
The hope is that the child, now properly “rewired,” can go on to achieve personal growth or contribute to the economy. But is that really enough?
Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques this vision in a recent op-ed, reminding us how easily we’ve traded collective wellbeing for personal optimization. We got stuck on the hedonic treadmill. Not to be corny—but Ubuntu7, you know?
This dominant model leaves out peers. It leaves out caring adults. It treats learning as isolation, not interaction. It’s rooted in the success of tech companies that individualized people into ad-targetable units8. And in doing so, they helped dismantle institutions, like media, movie theaters, and even OG Reverse Chronological Twitter™️, that created shared experiences. Instead they gave the people what they wanted.
Ezra echoed an argument on the show that goes something like:
Every kid has a learning style9.
If we can diagnose what knowledge or skill a kid lacks...
...then we should present it in a way that aligns with their style.
Computers are good at matching styles and content.
Therefore: personalized learning = better, more efficient learning.
But here’s the problem: preferences aren’t always what’s good for us. Kids (and Jared) might prefer Cheez-Its to broccoli. That doesn’t make Cheez-Its dinner.
If we only teach kids in their preferred modality, they won’t develop the skills to learn in others. Worse, we deprive them of the reinforcement that comes from encountering knowledge across modalities.
And if we isolate them, we deprive them of something else: dialogue. Disagreement. Synthesis.
The habits of democracy.
So what does any of this have to do with JOINERS?
In her conversation with Ezra, Rebecca Winthrop points to a missing ingredient in school: exploration. This is a core tenet of adolescent development. The adolescent brain is in its second-most sensitive period. Second only to infancy. It craves novelty, discovery, stimulation. And because schools aren’t offering that, young people find it elsewhere.
JOINERS can help. Not by lecturing about “democracy and civic purpose.” That’s a great way to lose a young person. But by giving youth tangible ways to explore those ideas. Messily. Playfully. With autonomy.
I’m inspired by the work of GripTape, The National Contribution Project, and The Lazarus Leadership Fellows Program (which I did as a teen). These programs show that when young people have agency, some money, and an adult who models purpose (without imposing it), they do amazing things towards cultivating their purpose10.
JOINERS might take a slightly more structured path and offer microgrants to youth to start their own civic clubs. It bends the autonomy principle a little, but if done right, it could still nurture purpose, belonging, peer relationships, and civic efficacy11 (which, by the way, has plummeted).
These clubs could meet in a brick-and-mortar JOINERS location, side by side with adults who are also pursuing purpose through their own civic commitments.
Yes, I came in hot on AI. And yes, AI may enable remediation that lets more students participate in grade-level content. That’s great. But most current use cases are limited to “intervention” and “pull-out.” That’s not transformation—it’s triage.
So I’ll ask again, especially to the technologists:
What’s the point of integrating technology into the school day?
What do you want kids to be able to do, and why?
What are we preparing them for?
Or to put it more simply:
What is the purpose of school?
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I refused to stop making the very bad joke that Ezra Klein is our household’s patron podcast saint.
Tbh I might not have listened if it was about Linda McMahon or some other well-worn education conversation.
Kay Merseth’s A-326: School Reform
Kay’s course also introduced me to education + technology historian Larry Cuban. I like to use quotes from his (1986) Teachers and Machines on panels in front of AI optimists to trick them into thinking they’re the first to claim they’re revolutionizing education.
Nobody ever does when I share it and I won’t expect you to read it. But maybe you’ll drop the PDF into your favorite LLM to get a TL;DR?
I think this is a step shy of what Stephen Miller and Donald Trump would like to do in schools, which is more like indoctrination.
And gave me a job one day with the profits.
To be clear it breaks down here because “learning styles” are a neuromyth based on a perversion of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.