High School Reform for Dummies

“Mere knowledge” is getting sidelined at innovative models that embrace a vaporous notion of success, leaving students and society vulnerable in the “age of AI”

I keep having the same conversation. A self-assured school leader or funder will tell me about a cutting-edge high school model that’s thriving in the “age of AI.” They’ll invariably describe schools rich with projects, “design thinking,” tech, and socially conscious activity.

They’ll share tales of graduates accepted by prestigious colleges or offered summer gigs at tech firms. They’ll brag about students who win competitions, build robots, organize community protests, or launch successful podcasts. It’s all duly impressive and offered up as a dynamic roadmap to the future.

This is accompanied by exhortations to shake off traditional knowledge’s “suffocating influence” and instead focus on “what young people actually need in order to learn and grow.” To shift from an emphasis on “a centuries-old curriculum” to one on preparing “students to thrive, collaborate, and innovate.” To let high schoolers devote less time to academics “so that they can experience more.”

The website for XQ, the high school reform outfit, lists ideas that readers can “steal from the nation’s most innovative high schools.” They include a “culture wall,” a school year segmented into “six interdisciplinary project cycles,” a “personalized learning plan based on what [students] want to do,” and gathering evidence about wrongful incarcerations for the Innocence Project. Whatever the merits, none of this is obviously about books, academic content, or knowing stuff.

Sometimes, almost apologetically, I’ll ask what graduates of these heralded schools need to know about American history, geography, literature, and the like. The responses alternate between patronizing nods prompted by my Gen-X fixations and vague assurances along the lines of, “Sure, they learn that stuff, too.”

I find both responses wholly unsatisfying. Now, politicians and advocates have long insisted that preparing students for college and employment is the goal of high school—so these innovative schools are aiming for the target set before them. That’s fair. I get it. And while I’d never take issue with the goal of “college, career, and military readiness” (I mean, that pretty much covers the gamut), I do have growing concerns about how we’ve understood that goal and what it means high school graduates need to know.

Talk of “college and career readiness” has morphed into calls for high schools to stop wasting time on “mere knowledge,” because future success will turn on one’s ability to manipulate AI, “collaborate,” and “communicate.” I don’t buy it. Indeed, it strikes me that producing wealthy, successful grads can end up being a bad thing if they’re ignorant, morally adrift, and easily manipulated by bad actors—human and machine alike—in the attention economy.

After all, Americans today spend vast swaths of time on social media, swimming in an ecosystem that privileges provocative content, drives youth to misogynistic and antisemitic content, cultivates echo chambers, and leaves heavy users much more likely to endorse political violence. And we’re still in AI’s early days.

This takes on a special salience when we talk about “high-achievers” and the prominence of young people in spheres like media, finance, and tech that have an exaggerated impact on the digital commons and our public square. The other week, the Atlantic ran an excerpt adapted from Theo Baker’s forthcoming book, How to Rule the World, detailing Silicon Valley’s frenzied pursuit of tech-savvy Stanford undergraduate “builders.” Select 20-year-olds are being wooed with access and eye-popping dollars in the hopes that they’ll help the next AI venture take flight. In one vignette, the CEO of a startup offers a young man a “minimum $600,000 salary” if he drops out and comes to work for him.

A happy story of meritocratic success? Well, if you think tech ventures like Meta, Alphabet, or Twitter/X have been an unambiguous boon to American society, then cheer away. But I don’t think I’m alone in doubting the judgment and civic awareness of those who fill the C-suites in these ventures (or their peers purveying other “age of AI” staples, like sportsbooks, streaming, crypto, and prediction markets). And, in a hyper-connected world, the information and algorithms that emerge from these enterprises have enormous consequences.

That’s because of the technology but also because today’s graduates are entering a world where the old information guardrails have been smashed. I certainly don’t mean to romanticize the old media landscape, which had plenty of problems. But, for better and worse, it featured sentinels that could ameliorate the consequences of ignorance. There were no algorithms or personalized feeds; propaganda from hostile nations couldn’t be planted without arduous, laborious effort; and everyone relied on the evening news or the local paper to make sense of the world. Americans inhabited a shared, relatively homogenous cultural narrative, one in which Russian operatives, Islamic extremists, or would-be Nazis lacked access to the mass market. The mainstream news leaned to the left, but it was a genteel liberalism that reflected a traditional deference to norms, institutions, and the rule of law. There just wasn’t much room for those championing fringe views, on the left or the right. This made it less likely that a given individual would encounter (or be in a position to amplify) any of this.

We now live in the era of “do your own research,” where that adage which used to motivate a dweebish cottage industry of Kennedy assassination buffs has now become the m.o. of the information economy. Institutional trust is out, and Substack sleuths are in. Today, anyone with an iPhone and a gift for provocation can become the go-to influencer or podcaster for millions of fervent followers.

Individuals can no longer assume that a handful of familiar institutions will do the civic weeding and marginalize the nuts. This poses an urgent challenge to educators. One constructive response is the kind of “digital literacy” work that’s being tackled by Sam Wineburg and his Digital Inquiry Group. That’s a useful start.

The larger point, though, is that the costs of ignorance have gone up—not down—in this modern era. Knowing what is true, what is dubious, and how to know the difference becomes indispensable as adults increasingly rely on bespoke sources or AI as an all-purpose answerbot.

When news was more homogenized, the extremes less extreme, and the reach of provocateurs much shorter, the personal (and societal) stakes of an individual’s ability to spot propaganda and spurn the appeals of kooks and crooks were smaller. Ignorance was a limited liability thanks to informational guardrails and a cultural safety net. No longer.

Just the other week, we had the spectacle of Hasan Piker, a hotshot left-wing provocateur, going viral for a New York Times podcast in which he endorsed looting and was fairly equivocal on murder. The ensuing furor neatly overlapped with the Washington Post’s profile of right-wing Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes, which detailed how he’s pocketed roughly a million dollars since 2025 from diehard superfans.

Piker and Fuentes aren’t honey-tongued masters of persuasion. These are guys who say things like “The U.S. deserved” 9/11, “Women should be treated like children,” and Hitler was “really f*cking cool.” For people who know anything about the world, possess any sense of history, or have a functioning moral compass, such assertions are credibility deal-breakers. For the fan of Piker and Fuentes, of course, these are not. They’re just asking “thought-provoking” questions.

Keep in mind, the provocateurs don’t need big audiences to wield an outsized influence. In late April, Echelon Insights reported that 79 percent of Americans surveyed had either never heard of Piker or hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion; just 7 percent of respondents had heard of him and liked what he had to say. But that’s enough for him to earn millions, receive adulatory press, and be held out as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan.

The likes of Piker and Fuentes are hardly new archetypes, of course. A half-century ago, Tom Wolfe was eviscerating “radical chic.” But, back then, these characters would have been sad-sack figures speaking in half-empty community center basements and mimeographing newsletters alongside the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army. Today, they’re big-dollar, professional provocateurs.

This brings us back to education. It may seem like a stretch to ask what these very online, very entrepreneurial influencers can tell us about the animating vision of “next-gen” high schools. But, if the aim is to prepare students to innovate, collaborate, communicate, use tech to tackle socially relevant projects, and navigate the new attention economy (to the tune of millions of followers and dollars), Piker and Fuentes sure seem like raging success stories, no?

It’s a reminder that a good education is never just about acquiring a vaporous set of skills. It always comes back to informing judgment and cultivating discernment. It just happens that the costs of failing to do this are exponentially higher in a no-guardrails world. This means that students need to have workable responses to questions like: What is the tension between majority rule and minority rights? How does the machinery of representation work in American government? Why should judges accept or reject textualism? How should we assess the costs and benefits of government regulation? How do we understand the nature of evil?

These are fundamental questions that students should encounter in those hoary old books and old-school subjects, the kind that can help cultivate autonomous adults and citizens. The ability to answer them isn’t as appealing to a college admissions office as organizing an anti-gun protest, and it lacks the transactional allure of a vibe-coding project. But it can help ensure that graduates don’t sound as dangerously incoherent as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei did when he was asked to contemplate the ethics of his enterprise’s world-changing technology. Indeed, it just may prove the key to civilizational survival.

After all, Amodei’s venture is part of a thriving new world in which Piker, Fuentes, Candace Owens, Andrew Tate, and the like are producing a flood of content that’s always one swipe away. What prepares students for such a world? I fear that building robots and pursuing passion projects aren’t going to suffice.

In the “age of AI,” the importance of “mere knowledge” has taken on new gravity (as have its close cousins, discernment and judgment). This is doubly true in those schools seeking to prepare their charges to operate in a tech and media landscape where 20- and 30-somes frequently play an outsized role.

Those crafting “next-gen” high schools would do well to wrestle with that, not dismiss it.

This post originally appeared on the blog Old School with Rick Hess at Education Next.