Two years, five years, fifteen years from now?

 

No one knows when artificial intelligence will surpass human beings at every cognitive task that schools have traditionally been built around. But schools cannot afford to wait until it happens.

 

For two hundred years, education has had a clear purpose: prepare children for productive life. Schools were factories for the future workforce, organized around knowledge transfer, measurable skills, and the credentials that opened doors to employment. That model shaped the classroom, the timetable, the textbook, the test, and the professional identity of the teacher.

 

If artificial intelligence can teach, tutor, assess, and personalize learning better than any classroom can, and if the economy no longer needs what schools were designed to produce, then education faces the most important question in its modern history: What is school for?

 

School After Superintelligence explores five possible futures for education: some hopeful, some alarming, and one that asks what learning means when usefulness is no longer the answer. It is a book about the end of knowledge scarcity, the danger of reducing schools to efficient delivery systems, and the urgent need to protect school as a human institution in the age of machine intelligence.