The Educational Mission in the AI Era: Cultivating the "Incomputable" Human

Prussian-style education was once the perfect supporting facility for the Industrial Revolution. Its design purpose was pure: to train humans into screws that could be precisely fitted into machines—punctual, obedient, possessing basic arithmetic skills, and completing standardized tasks on a standardized assembly line. It uses uniform courseware, uniform exams, and uniform advancement paths to polish independent lives into replaceable "social components."

Over a century has passed, and this paradigm remains almost untouched in today’s schools. Yet, the world before our children has shifted from steam engines and assembly lines to a massive computing network soon to be taken over by AI.

In this new world, given a clear objective function, algorithms can find the optimal path in milliseconds; given enough clean data, they can make more stable judgments in pattern space than any human. Any task that can be abstracted into a single sentence—"Transform A into B within established rules, maximizing efficiency and minimizing error"—is essentially an execution task. And execution tasks are naturally the home turf of AI.

The problem is, our education system is still expending all its energy—even utilizing AI—to train children to be "Perfect Executors." Memorizing standard answers, grinding through standard question types, walking standard paths; measuring everything by scores, defining good and bad by "accuracy rates," and treating "zero-error execution" as the highest virtue.

The result? We use the most precious first twenty years of a human life to train a batch of originally incomputable beings into highly predictable, modelable, and batch-replaceable "Human APIs."

This is not a failing of education, but a chronological misalignment of educational paradigms.

If education is to have a future, its center of gravity must shift toward the two poles of execution, occupying the "Bilateral Long Tail" that computation cannot reach.

At the Front End, humans choose and decide what AI should do. This choice depends on one's view of the world—what new questions can be conceived? It depends on the definition of beauty and happiness; no matter how intelligent AI becomes, it cannot replace our choices regarding joy and aesthetics. It also depends on humanity's curiosity that should never be filled, and our persistence regarding "meaning."

At the Back End, it is the cost humans are willing to pay for the consequences of these choices, because AI cannot benefit or suffer from the correctness or incorrectness of consequences in the real world. This cost depends on humanity's threshold for pain, tolerance for costs, and respect for risk, resistance, and irreversible causality. It is the shouldering and feedback of a biological subject regarding consequences and responsibilities in the real world. As I detailed in the article "I Choose, I Shoulder, Therefore I Am," Choosing and Shouldering are the core human capabilities that cannot be calculated by AI, constituting our "Cognitive Sovereignty" in the AI era.

Therefore, I believe the mission of education is to teach children to initiate soulful choices at the front end, and pay weighty costs at the back end. The goal of education will shift from "cultivating humans who meet standards" to "cultivating humans incomputable by AI."

I. Choice: The Starting Point of Cognitive Sovereignty

In the AI era, choice is the most important form of rights confirmation for a sovereign. In the past, we thought choosing meant "ticking one box among several"; but in the AI-Native era, choice is a complete behavioral framework, specifically including five parts:

1. Will & Intent: What do I actually want? Not shallow desires like "I want to be relaxed" or "I want to be rich," but: What problem do I really want to verify in this world? Where do I want to push this conclusion further? In what way do I want to participate in the process of civilization?

2. Knowledge Boundaries: Do I know what I am choosing? If a person has no concept of physical boundaries and logical laws, their so-called "choice" is merely idiotic randomness. True knowledge is there to let you know: under what rules and conditions are you deducing the world?

3. Data Sovereignty: How to let my behavioral data participate in the choice? In a comprehensively recorded world, every pause and hesitation can become a tool for others to shape you. But conversely, if you do not know how to use your own data to participate in choosing, you are a passive object with no room to bargain with AI.

4. Iterative Inquiry: After receiving a "looks good" answer from AI, can I ask one more step? This ability determines whether a person can survive independently outside the context built by others.

5. Aesthetic Adjudication: When all options make sense rationally, what do I use for the final verdict? Which kind of life do you feel is "worth living"? Which structure is "worth completing"? This aesthetic adjudication is the terminal station of all rational discussion.

These five layers together constitute the framework of a person's "Cognitive Sovereignty."

II. Four Imperfect Muscles

To make good choices actually happen, we must also, at the tactical level, introduce four muscles named "Imperfection":

1. The Right to be Wrong

AI's goal is to approach the optimal solution with as few errors as possible; human growth relies on a massive amount of errors—some seeming stupid to bystanders—to wade out one's own path in chaos.

The greatest danger to us now is that AI systems default to the idea that all errors should be corrected immediately. But that "naive" hypothesis in a physics problem, that "off-track" direction in an essay, that "counter-intuitive" idea in career planning—from the perspective of an incomputable person—are often the anomalies most worth preserving. Education must carve out a protected zone for errors, helping every child learn how to shift from "reducing errors" to "utilizing errors."

2. Active Slowness

The biggest temptation AI brings to education is ubiquitous "real-time feedback": knowing right or wrong immediately after a question, quantifying learning progress in real-time. This greatly improves efficiency but quietly hollows out a key capability: Can our children still finish a task independently when there is no feedback?

A child truly preparing for the AI era must learn to complete a "seemingly useless but important" thing solely on their own rhythm and judgment in a situation with no immediate feedback and no smart assistant prompts for a long time. Active Slowness means having the ability to consciously slow down parts of the process even where everything could be faster, so that we can hold onto the right to self-determination in the rhythm of choice.

3. Structural Ignorance

Technology pushes us into an era of "Omniscient Illusion": everything is searchable, and all ignorance is seen as a gap. Therefore, we are unwilling and afraid to endure the cost of deep cultivation in any single direction.

True powerful education is not about filling all the blanks, but teaching students to live with ignorance: knowing something is important, yet still being able to say confidently—"At this stage of my life, I decide not to understand this for now. I reserve my limited understanding for the one or two things worth gnawing on for ten years."

4. Data Asymmetry

The sharpest weapon of AI-driven education systems is panoramic data control: every click, dwell time on every question, every change in expression is converted into a trajectory, accumulated into a highly precise "student profile." On the surface, it is precise teaching customized for students; essentially, it is making humans give up completely before the X-ray vision of AI.

We must teach children how to resist the temptation of short-term pleasure brought by AI, how to identify and preserve their most important data and privacy, and avoid "lying flat" comprehensively before AI. This is precisely where we begin to surrender our "Cognitive Sovereignty."

III. Shouldering: The Heaviest Confirmation of Sovereignty

Having discussed Choice, we must talk about Shouldering. We know that the stronger AI's capability, the greater the consequences and impact on society after execution. But who bears these consequences? Obviously, it can only be humans, because so far we cannot imagine any way to reward or punish a machine.

And true shouldering must first be built upon a sober estimation of one's capability boundaries. It is not emotionally saying "I'll take it all," but having self-knowledge: Where is my mental limit? Where is my physical limit? How large a consequence can I collateralize? Specifically, this shouldering has roughly three layers:

• The Shallowest Layer: Wealth Shouldering. It determines how a person utilizes AI to participate in social gaming: Do you dare to give up a "very stable" high-paying opportunity for a direction? Do you dare to invest real money into a project? Do you dare to admit, "This investment may not be recoverable, but I am willing to try"?

• The Deeper Layer: Spiritual Shouldering. Including Endurance of Time—willingness to invest ten years in a direction, accepting the anxiety of "seeing no results" for a very long time; Endurance of Failure—being able to say calmly in front of the result after massive effort but no success: "This is the choice I made, I accept it"; and Endurance of Loneliness—do you still have the ability to walk further on your own judgment when most people do not understand or even oppose you?

• The Final and Most Fundamental Layer: Physical Shouldering. Real pain, exhaustion, and resistance are the only things in the real world that AI can understand but cannot experience. It can be whitewashed in narratives and beautified in data, but it does not have a body that has been well-used and has withstood damage. The human flesh that can feel pain, bleed, and be harmed is the last chip we dare to shoulder. Precisely because humans have such chips, even in an era where AI is omnipotent, we are still qualified to say: "I will carry this consequence."

IV. Role Rewriting for Family and School

Family: From "Choosing for Him" to "Shouldering with Him"

Therefore, what parents truly need to do is not to meticulously isolate children from all risks, but to learn to shift from "Choosing for him" to "Shouldering with him."

This means allowing children to choose wrong within a controllable range. You watch him fall, but you know this fall won't kill him, so you grit your teeth and offer a hand, instead of filling all the pits in advance. Parents themselves must be willing to use their own choices and shouldering to give children a clear demonstration. Do not just tell success stories, but speak honestly: What wrong choices have I made in my life? What consequences am I still bearing? Which of these consequences, though painful, do I not regret?

Tell the child that the most important step is moving from "Can I?" to "Am I willing to pay for this?" When a child can seriously say: "I know this path won't be the easiest, but I still want to choose it," at that moment, they have begun to transform from "a person being educated" to "a person educating themselves."

School: Rewriting the "Educational Goals" Behind Subjects

What schools need to do is not to overthrow all existing subjects, but to rewrite the "Educational Goals" behind them.

• Science Education can shift from "Problem Solving Process" to "Decision Sandbox." Strip away purely mechanical calculations and turn the classroom into a testing ground for modeling and decision-making. Don't just ask "What is the standard answer?", but ask: "If we change one variable here, what chain reactions will occur in the entire system?"

• Humanities and Arts can shift from "Information Hoarding" to "Value Adjudication." The main task is no longer memorizing dates and rhetoric, but training children to adjudicate "what is good" amidst massive mediocre works. History classes should let students stand in different positions and make a decision personally: If you were the party involved, what would you choose? What are you willing to shoulder?

• Sports and Labor should be reshaped into a laboratory for "Hardcore Shouldering." Children should know the world with their flesh through challenges that are truly difficult, risky, but within controllable boundaries. Walking an extra kilometer through gritted teeth after exhaustion, watering a tree punctually every day for it to survive, repairing an object with one's own hands—these experiences will tell them more profoundly than any "motivational class": Who are you? Where is your limit? How much do you actually weigh in this world?

Epilogue

This entry is a bit long, not because I intend to run a school, but because in my imagined landscape of society's holistic transition to AI-Native, education remains the epicenter that cannot be bypassed. Yet regretfully, the Prussian paradigm remains solid as a mountain, poured together by the narrow gate of entrance exams, brutal employment competition, and the real anxiety of millions of parents with nowhere to place it in the dead of night.

But I must tirelessly remind everyone: When AI can far outperform us humans in all computable matters, when the position of "Perfect Executor" is destined to be occupied by machines, the purpose of education is to teach a child how to establish their "Cognitive Sovereignty" in an era where AI can do anything.

That is: I know what I want; I know what I am choosing; I optimized the path through questioning; I defined value through aesthetics; and, I am ready to pledge my flesh, spirit, and wealth in exchange for this result!