Obsolete Schooling and the Courageous Minority: Rethinking Educational Change in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Yong Zhao (赵勇)Purpose
This article argues that schools must change if they are to remain relevant in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), and that the most important agents of such transformational change are the courageous minorities willing to act before the system is ready.
Design/Approach/Method
The article develops a conceptual analysis by bringing together recent evidence on the risks of AI and screen-based technologies with scholarship on the grammar of schooling, educational reform, and panarchy theory.
Findings
The article argues that current concerns about AI—cheating, weakened effort, cognitive dependence, and policy backlash—are symptoms of a deeper problem: Schools still teach and assess what AI can already do. Incremental improvement is therefore insufficient. What is required is transformational change that redefines what is worth learning and how learning should be organized. Yet such change is extraordinarily difficult because schools function as a political and social “peace treaty” that stabilizes competing interests and protects existing assumptions.
Originality/Value
The article advances a new theory of educational change centered on the courageous minority. Rather than waiting for top-down, whole-system reform, it argues that meaningful transformation can begin immediately in protected spaces where small changes may grow into broader paradigm shifts.