AI Tutoring Doesn't Solve the Problem in Education

One of the things that happens with every new technology is that we use it to solve problems from before the technology existed. When the web came along, websites were static because the problem they were solving was to make information available. When smartphones came along, we made little web browsers in them so now you could surf the web on your phone. There’s nothing wrong with these ideas, but in the long run, they don’t matter. The same is true with AI Tutors, 2 hour learning, whatever you want to call the more efficient fact cramming possible with AI.

Step back: there are much bigger ramifications of AI for education, which has the potential to profoundly impact what students need to learn and how they learn those things. In today’s world, where facts are available at your fingertips, traditional content-cramming is pointless. At Flourish, we believe that skills — not content — are the keys to success in the 21st century. We call these skills Superpowers and one Superpower, Learning Machine, includes curiosity, reasoning, and being a superuser of AI (and many more). In our “Problem of the Day” at Flourish, we often give our 6th graders high-school Geometry or Geography problems to solve. That sounds crazy, but without fail, about 80% of kids can solve the problem within the hour. When students are encouraged to use everything available to learn what they need (in this case, going online and figuring it out with Gemini, YouTube, ChatGPT, etc.), it unlocks a world of possibilities for them, saves them a huge amount of time, and reinforces their confidence and agency in accomplishing tough challenges. Plus, it’s just fun.

I hope that given this new possibility in schools, you are starting to question the basic idea of stuffing knowledge into children’s heads as the best way for schools to use their time. It’s true that there are a couple of years of math and reading, in which k-2 students learn, which is useful, and another useful year or two when 5th-6th graders learn to write. Otherwise, most knowledge can be discovered as you need it. Think about it, just-in-time knowledge acquisition is what we do as adults all day long. OK, sometimes we wander into a deep area such as Physics, which doesn’t lend itself to just-in-time learning, but that’s the rare exception. Knowing Physics is best left to physicists or at least to students who want to become physicists, rather than being a required torture for every high schooler. Our job at schools is to expose students to many many things, but it should be students’ choice when they want to go deep.

Back to AI tutoring and the real problem of education. If you reject the objective, ‘we need to get more data into every kid’s head faster,’ then AI tutoring isn’t a good solution. I believe the real objective of education is, ‘What skills does a child need to have by the time they are 18, in order to have a good shot at living a happy and productive life?”

In a world where AI is going to completely change the available jobs both in white collar (now) and blue collar (5 years from now), it’s unlikely that the 18-year-old with the most facts wins. Our bet at Flourish is the 18-year-old who has the strongest Superpowers wins. The four groups we teach are Strong Self (things like self-awareness or executive function), World Changer (working well and leading others), Learning Machine (skills you need to learn whatever you want), and Force For Good (skills to make the right decisions in tough situations). Within these Superpowers are hundreds of skills, thousands of Pursuits (the projects our students do), and Badges students earn by doing Pursuits and going deep on skills they like.

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In that way, we gamify what it takes to build up students’ capabilities during their time at Flourish. We think that’s much more important than the facts they know. We spend all day playing the SuperPower game and working with our students to learn these skills in the context of real-world projects.

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There’s another important aspect to Flourish. In addition to “what” to teach, we care a lot about how to teach it. Traditional classrooms are dull because of the standards-based lecture format required for content-cramming. Moving to experiential learning has been difficult for many schools, because the demands on the teacher to formulate, grade, and assess projects and skills are overwhelming. And class time easily turns into a whirlwind of groups stuck on whatever they are doing, or not really on task, and teachers get stuck in the weeds, which is exhausting.

Here is where AI can reimagine teaching. Just as programmers have moved up a level of abstraction with Cursor and Claude Code, we are moving teachers up a level at Flourish. We plan to use AI to handle everything outside of class time for teachers — such as planning, grading, assessing — leaving teachers fresh to be present with their students, instead of trying to follow the textbook to the letter. And Flourish students use our AI Coach to get un-stuck. Coach helps them brainstorm, suggests alternatives, pushes them to go deeper. Students submit their projects to Coach for grading and Coach has another chance to push their thinking in its follow-up with them. All of this happens without the teacher having to be involved.

About now, if you’re a career teacher, alarm bells are likely going off in your head. ‘Oh my gosh, these guys are trying to get rid of me!’ No way! AI holds the potential for you to return to the very reasons you became a teacher: to foster trusted relationships with all of your students and really know them well. To elevate their thinking from just “finishing the work,” to encouraging them to go deeper. To inspire students to achieve things they didn’t think they could. To help them think about the world in a different way. At least for me, that’s why I became a teacher over twenty years ago. AI means we can finally teach the way we have always longed to teach.

Because we can use AI to supercharge the work of teaching, we can make classrooms more joyful with projects that would have been too hard previously, and free up time for teachers to actually connect with their students. We can focus students on the Superpowers which we believe will matter much more than the facts they have at age 18.

Sound exciting? Then please join Flourish in changing the way classrooms work — for students and for teachers.