Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic.—Wikipedia1
We’re embedded in a series of LOTRW posts on how meteorologists might respond to the current season of political and funding adversity. Options considered so far include direct political pushback, expanding science’s circle of friends, making connections to the sciences and technologies of current national enthusiasm (and concern), and, in the latest post, contributing by whatever means possible to K-12 public school education. High-quality, constantly improving education is critical to the long-term future of science, of innovation, and even of freedom itself, not just in the United States but around the world.
Since the early 1800s, the three R’s have been American education’s iconic focus. For more than two centuries, schools and colleges have been producing successive cohorts of graduating seniors at (generally) increasing levels of literacy, composition, and numeracy. In the early twenty-first century, however, American educators are finding that three additional R’s also matter: ‘rtificial intelligence, recruitment, and self-renewal.
Let’s dig a bit deeper.
‘rtificial intelligence. Education’s approach to artificial intelligence in schools is in disarray. It’s easy to see that AI use by students carries potential risks. Students can use it to complete all forms of their homework without mastering the original three R’s. Relying on AI can impair the development of students’ critical thinking, their socialization, and more. But AI is pervasive; outright bans are unworkable. More importantly, to the extent such bans are successful, they would leave children unprepared to enter the workforce of the future. AI bans can therefore be applied, if at all, only to the very earliest years of education.
Bans’ opposite extreme—namely, hands-off—doesn’t seem appealing either. Any success would be at best hit-or-miss. And any lost benefits would be consequential. At its full potential, AI won’t simply help students with the three R’s and help teachers do their classroom and administrative chores more efficiently. Instead, it’s going to enable wholly new approaches to the classroom. One possibility of many might be a blend or hybrid of traditional ideas and the so-called flipped classroom, in which students are exposed to new ideas at home and do their “homework” at school.2
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart. Here in the United States, K-12 public education is under local control. On the one hand, education is in chaos in the face of this transition and contemporary efforts to introduce specific cultural norms into the schoolroom (or not). But on the other hand, this means that the United States is in effect conducting hundreds of simultaneous evaluations of the competing policy ideas and frameworks. (This link gives a flavor of the resources for generating policy ideas that are out there.) If matched by a corresponding emphasis on early detection and sharing of information on success and failure, we could see profound advances in education as soon as midcentury.
Any such reworking won’t be confined to K-12 schooling. It will also transform higher education. Superficially, higher education looks to be one of the least sustainable institutions on the planet. One source notes that the average college tuition, fees, and room and board in 2019 was more than $24K more expensive than in 2000, an increase of 59%; meanwhile, median weekly earnings for people with a bachelor’s degree rose only 5%.
A recent Brookings study provides a longer-term look: between 1980 and recent years, typical college sticker prices rose by 170% while the median wages for young workers grew by just 20%. Digging deeper, the Brookings study noted that this gap had been ameliorated somewhat as colleges have discounted their sticker price for many students. And digging deeper still, such discounts have mostly benefited only the very poorest.
That brings us to the fifth R—recruitment. By this we’re talking about the U.S. university recruitment of international students. In 1986, 40 years ago, about a third of a million foreign students were registered in U.S. universities, some 2% of the total. Today that figure has tripled, comprising 6% of students, much of that growth coming from India and China. Most of these students had been paying the full sticker price, going a long way to balance university books in the face of discounting to domestic students. But international applications for the 2026-27 year dropped by some 100,000 from the prior year—the result of a combination of factors including visa and travel restrictions, uncertainties about opportunities for work in the United States after graduation, and competition from universities in other countries. If American universities are to survive, they must develop new business models, including vigorous recruitment of foreign-born students to replace the numbers lost over recent years.
The last reality facing twenty-first-century American education? Renewal. Throughout prior generations, people died in pretty much the same world into which they had been born. This stasis, this slow pace of change, meant that their early schooling as well as their wisdom carried into their old age.
Today’s rapidly evolving world means young people leaving high school or college no longer have the learning they will need to carry them through any more than the first decade or two of their adult lives. They’ll be continually reinventing themselves. The current educational model will necessarily find itself augmented by forms of continuing education far more rigorous than those of today. If the United States is to be as relevant at the close of this century as it was at the beginning, it must foster and maintain a culture of lifelong education for constant, sustained personal reworking.
Want to remain relevant throughout your life? Self-renewal must become pretty much like breathing—uninterruptible.
Mens sana in corpore sano has never mattered more.
- The three R’s as a cultural idea go back to at least the early 1800s. Wikipedia has entries for another dozen 3R’s, given on a disambiguation page. ↩︎
- Any effort to dig deeper here reveals a rabbit warren of literature and ideas, much of it coming from the commercial sector, which sees opportunity for vast profits in any future reworking of education. ↩︎
