Parenting in the Age of AGI: What Should Kids Actually Learn?

The Obsolete Curriculum

Today's educational systems are fundamentally designed for an economy that no longer exists. The structure of modern schooling—with its emphasis on memorization, standardized testing, rigid scheduling, and factory-model batch processing of students—was optimized for the industrial economy of the mid-20th century. This system was built to produce compliant workers who could follow instructions, perform repetitive tasks with precision, and recall information on demand. These were valuable skills when economies needed millions of factory workers, office clerks, and middle managers to process paperwork and execute standardized procedures.

The problem is that these are precisely the capabilities where artificial intelligence excels. AI systems can memorize infinitely more information than any human, follow complex instructions with perfect consistency, and perform procedural tasks without fatigue or error. By the time today's kindergarteners enter the workforce in 2040, many of the jobs that current curricula prepare them for—data entry, basic accounting, paralegal document review, routine customer service, even significant portions of software development—will likely be fully automated.

Yet despite this looming transformation, most school systems continue teaching the same subjects in the same ways. Students spend years memorizing historical dates, mathematical formulas, and scientific facts that could be instantly retrieved by any AI assistant. They're evaluated primarily on their ability to reproduce information under test conditions rather than on their capacity to think critically, adapt to novel situations, or collaborate effectively. We are, in essence, training children to compete with machines in precisely the domains where machines will inevitably win. The curriculum is obsolete before the students even graduate.

What Tech Leaders Tell Their Own Kids

There's a revealing disconnect between what technology leaders build and what they teach their own children. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and architect of ChatGPT, doesn't emphasize teaching specific technical skills. Instead, he advocates for resilience, adaptability, and meta-learning—the capacity to learn how to learn. He recognizes that in a world where the half-life of technical knowledge is shrinking rapidly, the ability to quickly master new domains matters far more than expertise in any particular one.

Bill Gates similarly emphasizes mathematical reasoning and systems thinking over rote memorization. He focuses on helping children understand underlying principles and patterns rather than memorizing formulas. Steve Jobs famously sent his children to a Waldorf school that emphasized creativity, hands-on learning, and delayed exposure to technology. Many Silicon Valley executives limit their children's screen time and prioritize interpersonal skills, artistic expression, and philosophical inquiry.

Notably, many of these tech leaders aren't pushing their children into computer science or engineering, despite these fields currently commanding high salaries. They understand something the general public hasn't fully grasped: today's hot job is tomorrow's automated task. Teaching a child to code in Python or JavaScript might be less valuable than teaching them how to think about complex systems, how to collaborate across disciplines, how to ask better questions, and how to maintain psychological equilibrium when their career path becomes obsolete and they need to reinvent themselves. The children of AI architects are being prepared not for specific careers but for navigating perpetual uncertainty.

The Enduring Human Capabilities

If artificial intelligence continues advancing along its current trajectory, handling an ever-expanding range of cognitive tasks, what capabilities remain distinctly and durably human? The answer isn't found in intellectual horsepower—machines will likely surpass us in raw processing power, memory, and logical reasoning. Instead, the enduring human advantages lie in domains that are embodied, emotional, and relational.

Emotional intelligence—the ability to read subtle social cues, empathize with others' experiences, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, and build trust—remains stubbornly difficult to automate. While AI can simulate empathy in text, genuine human connection involves physical presence, shared vulnerability, and mutual recognition that resists replication. Professions centered on caregiving, counseling, teaching young children, and complex negotiation will likely retain human practitioners long after other fields automate.

Creativity, particularly the kind that involves aesthetic judgment, cultural intuition, and the synthesis of disparate influences into something genuinely novel, also resists automation. AI can generate variations on existing patterns, but the kind of creativity that shifts paradigms—that asks entirely new questions rather than optimizing answers to old ones—remains a human strength. Physical dexterity in unstructured environments is another area where humans maintain advantages; robots struggle with tasks like plumbing, electrical work in old buildings, or caring for the elderly, which require improvisation in unpredictable physical spaces.

Perhaps most importantly, ethical judgment in ambiguous situations—where values conflict, where context matters enormously, and where there's no clear right answer—requires the kind of wisdom that emerges from lived human experience. Education should pivot dramatically toward developing these capabilities. Instead of drilling students on information retrieval and procedural compliance, schools should focus on collaboration, emotional regulation, creative problem-solving, ethical reasoning, and the physical and social skills that keep humans irreplaceable. We should stop trying to beat machines at their own game and instead double down on what makes us human.

Learning to Live Without Work

Perhaps the most radical shift required in education is preparing children for the possibility that traditional career-centered life paths may not be available to them. For centuries, Western culture has organized identity, purpose, and social status around occupation. "What do you do?" is typically the second question we ask after learning someone's name. Our education system reflects this priority—everything is subordinated to career preparation. Arts, physical education, and social-emotional learning are treated as supplementary, while STEM subjects and credentials that lead to employment are prioritized.

But if AI eliminates 30%, 50%, or even 70% of current jobs over the coming decades, this entire framework collapses. Millions of people will need to find meaning, structure, and identity outside of traditional employment. This isn't necessarily dystopian—many of the world's great artists, philosophers, and community builders throughout history were supported by patronage or family wealth rather than wages. The question is whether we can systematically prepare people for lives where purpose comes from relationships, creativity, community contribution, lifelong learning, and self-actualization rather than professional achievement.

This would require inverting the current educational hierarchy entirely. Instead of treating music, art, philosophy, physical fitness, and emotional intelligence as "extras" that get cut when budgets tighten, these would become core curriculum. Students would learn how to cultivate deep friendships, how to engage in creative practice for its own sake, how to contribute to community well-being, how to find flow states and intrinsic motivation, and how to construct meaningful lives independent of market validation. This isn't about abandoning rigor or ambition—it's about redirecting them toward human flourishing rather than economic productivity. If we're heading toward a post-work society, education must prepare children not just to earn a living but to live well regardless of employment status.

The Parent's Dilemma

Every parent and educator today faces an impossible decision: how do you prepare a child for a future you cannot predict? The traditional playbook—get good grades, attend a reputable university, acquire professional credentials, climb a career ladder—was built on the assumption of relative stability. You could look at today's successful adults and reverse-engineer their path for your children. That model is breaking down.

Should you push your child into STEM fields because they currently offer high salaries and job security? But what if those are precisely the fields most vulnerable to AI disruption? Software engineering, data analysis, and even significant portions of medical diagnostics may be substantially automated within 15 years. Should you emphasize humanities and social sciences, betting on the enduring value of human insight and communication? But what if the economic returns to those degrees collapse further as credentialism loses value and AI handles much of the writing and analysis work?

The safest strategy might be radical diversification combined with meta-skills. Rather than specializing early, children might benefit from broad exposure to multiple domains—technical literacy without over-specialization, creative and artistic practice, physical and manual skills, emotional and social intelligence, and entrepreneurial thinking. More important than any specific knowledge is developing resilience, adaptability, comfort with ambiguity, and the psychological flexibility to reinvent oneself multiple times across a lifetime.

Parents must also model a different relationship with uncertainty. Rather than pretending to have answers, we might need to teach children to thrive without them. This means cultivating curiosity over certainty, emphasizing process over outcomes, and helping kids develop strong internal compasses rather than relying on external validation. The children who will flourish in the AI age won't be those who memorized the most facts or followed the most prestigious path—they'll be those who learned to navigate ambiguity, who can teach themselves new skills rapidly, who maintain psychological equilibrium through disruption, and who can find meaning and purpose independent of traditional markers of success. The one certainty is that yesterday's strategies won't work for tomorrow's world, and the sooner parents and educators embrace that uncomfortable truth, the better we can prepare the next generation.

Sources:

Politico: Sam Altman Interview

World Economic Forum: Bill Gates on AI Age

WIRED: Demis Hassabis Interview