The essay's central move is disarmingly honest: a programmer watches his most marketable skill lose its scarcity premium in real time and asks what, exactly, he should teach the child on the way. It's a personal essay dressed in intellectual history, and the ratio works. The Lindy Effect argument — that schools have survived radio, film, MOOCs, and the internet, so bet on them surviving AI — is deployed with self-aware humor. The author admits to having been wrong about MOOCs in 2013 and flags that he's "at risk of doing it yet again." This reflexivity is the essay's strongest quality. Most technologist-education pieces are breathlessly certain in one direction; this one sits in the discomfort. The structural insight worth keeping is the table metaphor: education survives because it rests on multiple purposes — citizenship, character, earning, childcare — and when one leg wobbles, the others hold. The author's realization that "earn a living" was load-bearing for him personally, and that AI is now stressing that specific leg, is more useful than any grand theory about AGI and schools. Postman's suggested replacement purposes — Spaceship Earth, the American Experiment, the World Makers — are presented lightly, which is appropriate given that the essay's real argument isn't about any specific curriculum. It's about the meta-move: that purposes for education are invented, not discovered, and that inventing new ones is the job when old ones falter. The weakest section is the brief nod to AI mathematics threatening Einstein-style scientific contribution. This is asserted in a sentence and then dropped. It's the one place where the essay waves at a massive claim without earning it. The essay's final gesture — inviting children to co-create the purpose of their own education — is Alfie Kohn filtered through a programmer's pragmatism. It's warm without being naive, and it lands because the author has spent the preceding paragraphs demonstrating that he genuinely doesn't know the answer. What you're getting here is a thoughtful, short personal essay by someone processing a real life transition through a real intellectual tradition. It doesn't pretend to solve the problem. That restraint is its best feature.
