But education, as we have organized it, was already drifting away from the cultivation of judgment, taste, historical sense, and imagination. AI didn't cause that drift, but made it impossible to ignore. And real learning has rarely been a mass phenomenon. It has always required a component of cognitive friction.

For the first time, machines outperform humans in domains that education has long treated as proxies for intelligence, like recall, synthesis, linguistic fluency, and pattern recognition. That shift does not eliminate learning, but it does destabilize a system that equated those outputs with understanding.