In this special episode, we pause our usual conversations with educators and leaders to reflect on an essay I wrote, Teaching Humans, Not Machines. For decades, schools trained students to follow procedures, memorize answers, and perform for tests. The irony is that artificial intelligence now does those things better than we ever could.

We look at how systems shaped students to value compliance over curiosity, performance over presence, recall over reasoning—and how that left us vulnerable to disruption. But we also ask a deeper question: what capacities remain irreducibly human?

From attention and intellectual courage to real curiosity and creativity, these are the skills that can't be automated. They're also the very foundation of citizenship and meaningful life. If we want education to serve people instead of machines, we need to reclaim and cultivate them.

The article is here at https://bobhutchins.substack.com/p/teaching-humans-not-machines