The Quiet Question: Why We Really Need to Rethink the Purpose of Education

Last week I attended an evening seminar with an organization I deeply admire — Challenge Success —discussing what has quickly become one of the most pressing topics in schools today. Following a compelling keynote from founder Denise Pope, PhD., a senior lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, a panel of experts explored the emerging role of AI in education. They then shared a video of their recent research interviews with students themselves. One high school student asked a question that stopped the room cold.

“If AI can do my homework better than I can,” she asked boldly, “what does that say about the design of the homework?” Furthermore, you could imply, “If AI can write essays, access research, and ultimately do most jobs faster than I can, why am I here at all?”

The room was full of educators, and all shifted uneasily in their seats. No one had a ready answer. And in that silence, I heard something important: a generation asking the question that we, the adults in the room, have been too busy to ask ourselves.

Ezra Klein recently posed a version of this same question to Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Disengaged Teen. Klein admitted on his podcast that he doesn’t know how to educate his young children in an AI-saturated world — and that his uncertainty isn’t really about technology. It’s about purpose. “Now that AI can pass the bar exam, write A-level essays, and do AP exams as well or better than our kids,” Winthrop responded, “we have to really rethink the purpose of education.”

She’s right. But I’d argue we need to go further than even she’s suggesting. The problem isn’t just that AI has rendered our current model obsolete. It’s that our current model was never quite right to begin with.

The Question We’ve Been Avoiding

For generations, the implicit answer to “what is education for?” has been remarkably simple: to prepare young people to compete in an economy that rewards credential-collecting, fact-retention, and compliance. Klein is refreshingly candid about this. He describes the de facto purpose of education — at least the way most of us have measured its success — as simply “do they get a good job?” If they did, we succeeded. If they didn’t, we failed. Everything else — the beauty of ideas, the development of character, the cultivation of a rich inner life — was nice to have, not the point.

This transactional model worked, more or less, because it mirrored the economy it was designed to serve. We needed people who could do what machines couldn’t: follow instructions, memorize facts, reproduce processes reliably. We built schools to produce exactly that. And for a long time, we called it success.

Now the machines are better at those things than we are. And so we’re left staring at a mirror that no longer shows us who we need to become.

Winthrop’s research with Brookings and Transcend surveyed more than 65,000 students across the United States. What they found was damning in its clarity: fewer than 30 percent of American students between third and twelfth grade say that what they learn in school feels connected to their lives outside the classroom. Only 1 in 3 students are genuinely engaged. Only 10 percent have regular experiences in school that let them explore their own ideas, build independent thinking skills, or develop what Winthrop calls the capacity to be an “Explorer” — someone driven by internal curiosity rather than external grades.

The rest? They’re passengers, achievers chasing perfect scores at the cost of their mental health, or quiet resisters slowly going invisible. Simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. Disengaged not from school, but from themselves.

From the Age of Achievement to the Age of Agency

Winthrop and her co-author Jenny Anderson frame the challenge beautifully: we are living through a transition from the “Age of Achievement” to the “Age of Agency.” The old model optimized for measurable performance. The new world demands something deeper: young people who know themselves, who can navigate uncertainty, who are capable of learning and re-learning in a landscape that will shift beneath their feet more than once in a lifetime.

But here’s what I think the conversation still misses — even in its best forms: agency without inner development is just cleverness without a compass. We can teach students to be better learners, more agile thinkers, more effective collaborators. All of that matters. And yet, if those skills serve only the self — if we develop more capable people without developing more aware, compassionate, and purposeful ones — we will simply produce a more sophisticated version of what we already have.

At Millennium, we believe that education’s deepest purpose is the integration of the whole self: the spirit (awareness), the heart (compassion), the mind (wisdom), and the body (purpose). These aren’t supplementary. They’re foundational. And they’re precisely what our current system — however well-intentioned — has starved.

What’s Left for the Human Mind to Do

Klein poses what he calls the deepest question of the AI moment in education: “If we can offload more and more tasks to generative AI, what’s left for the human mind to do?” It’s a genuinely powerful question. And I think the answer points us directly toward what education must become.

What’s left for the human mind to do is what only the human self can do: to ask why, not just how. To sit with paradox. To feel the weight of a moral choice. To know one’s own interior well enough to act from it rather than react against it. To see a system — ecological, social, institutional — and understand one’s place within it. To be moved by another person’s suffering and take responsibility for what to do about it.

None of those capacities can be downloaded or auto generated. All of them require the kind of slow, interior development that no algorithm can replicate — and that our current schools are not systematically building.

Klein referenced what he called the classical vision of education — one that “deepened your appreciation of beauty and your capacities as a human being.” Winthrop agreed that this is the direction we need to move. She’s right about the destination. But the path there requires more than curriculum reform or engagement strategies. It requires a fundamental reimagining of what we believe education is actually for.

The Explorer Isn’t Enough

I have enormous respect for Winthrop’s framework of four learner modes — the Passenger, the Achiever, the Resister, the Explorer — and for the insight that most of our students are stuck somewhere short of genuine engagement. Moving more students into Explorer Mode, where they are driven by internal curiosity and genuine investment in their own learning, is a worthy and urgent goal.

But exploration without integration can still be a form of ego-driven consumption. A student who is curious, agile, and intrinsically motivated but lacks awareness of their own inner life, lacks empathy for those who are different, lacks the capacity to hold paradox rather than collapse into certainty — that student, for all their brightness, is not fully educated.

The Explorer Winthrop describes is necessary but not sufficient. What we need are students who are not just curious about the world but curious about themselves — who can see the relationship between their inner state and their outer actions, who have developed enough self-awareness to recognize when fear is driving a decision rather than wisdom, who understand that becoming a whole person and becoming a productive one are not competing goals.

This is the work that Millennium’s Theory of Change has been built over the past decade. Our Forum for Education Leaders brings together school heads and division leaders not to share best practices about scheduling or governance, but to develop the interior capacities that make great leadership possible: awareness, compassion, wisdom, and purpose. Our work begins with the conviction, grounded in decades of research, that adult inner development is the hidden curriculum of every school — and that students cannot flourish beyond the inner development of the adults who guide them.

The Role of the Educator Must Change

If education’s purpose must change, then the role of the educator must change with it. Not from subject-matter expert to technology facilitator, though that matters. But from information-deliverer to guide of internal development.

The teacher who changes a student’s life is rarely the one who covered the most content. She’s the one who saw something in a child that the child couldn’t yet see in herself. He’s the one who modeled what it looks like to be genuinely curious, genuinely humble, genuinely engaged with ideas that matter. The educator who stays with a struggling student not because the rubric requires it but because that student’s dignity demands it — that educator is doing something no AI will replicate.

Winthrop argues persuasively that we need school experiences that help students develop oracy, agency, emotional regulation, and the metacognitive skills to understand themselves as learners. All of that is true. But those capacities are transmitted relationally, not transactionally. They are caught more than they are taught. And they are caught from adults who have developed them in themselves.

The educator who guides students toward awareness, curiosity, empathy, the capacity to hold paradox and think in systems, the instinct toward pro-social service — that educator must herself have done the work of building those things within herself. You cannot model what you have not integrated.

What a Rethought Education Actually Looks Like

So, what does this mean, practically, for education leaders across the country who are trying to lead schools through a genuinely disorienting moment?

It means starting with why — but not stopping there. If the purpose of education is to help young people become whole human beings who think for themselves, act with compassion, and contribute to a world larger than their own interests, then every curriculum decision, every discipline policy, every community norm should be tested against that purpose.

It means investing in the inner development of adults as a school strategy, not a wellbeing indulgence. The research is clear: when adults model awareness, compassion, wisdom, and purpose, students internalize those capacities. When adults are reactive, isolated, burned out, or operating purely from performance anxiety, students internalize that too. School culture is the hidden curriculum, and the culture starts at the top.

It means creating structures that give students genuine agency — not the illusion of choice but the real experience of authoring their own learning. Winthrop’s research with John Marshall Reeve found that in 35 randomized control trials across 18 countries, students who were given genuine opportunities for initiative were more engaged, mastered more skills, had better grades, fewer peer problems, and were happier. Agency is not a pedagogical luxury. It is a biological need.

And it means being willing to ask the uncomfortable question: not just “Are our students succeeding?” but “Succeeding at what?” If our students are achieving flawlessly but haven’t developed the interior resources to know who they are and think for themselves, to sit with uncertainty, to feel genuine empathy for lives unlike their own, to understand and integrate the perspectives of others, and to find meaning in contribution rather than just achievement — then we have not educated them. We have decorated them.

The Moment We’re Actually In

Klein describes this as a critical inflection point. He’s right. But inflection points are only useful if we recognize what they’re calling us toward, not just what they’re pushing us away from.

The disengagement crisis Winthrop documents is real. The mental health crisis is real. The AI disruption is real. But underneath all of it is a deeper crisis that has been brewing for decades: we have been educating students for a world that rewards doing without developing the being that makes the doing meaningful.

The good news is that the path forward is not a mystery. We know what whole-student education looks like when it’s working. We know what happens when school leaders model the capacities they hope to develop in students. We know, from Winthrop’s research and from our own work at Millennium, that engagement, well-being, and genuine learning are not in tension with each other. They are the same project.

That student in the Challenge Success video — the one who asked why she was there — was asking the most important question any student has ever asked. She deserves an honest answer. Not a defensive one. Not a motivational one.

She deserves to be told: you are here to become yourself. To develop the awareness that lets you see clearly, the compassion that lets you act wisely, the wisdom to navigate a world of uncertainty, and the sense of purpose that makes your life — and the lives around you — better for your presence. You are here not to become a credential. You are here to become a person.

That’s a purpose worth building a school around. And it’s one that no AI, however impressive, will ever make obsolete.

Jeff Snipes

Founder & Board Chair, Millennium.org

References:

Klein, Ezra and Winthrop, Rebecca. “We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education.” The Ezra Klein Show. The New York Times, May 13, 2025.

Winthrop, Rebecca and Anderson, Jenny. The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. Crown, 2025.

Winthrop, Rebecca, Youssef Shoukry, and David Nitkin. “The Disengagement Gap: Why Student Engagement Isn’t What Parents Expect.” Brookings Institution and Transcend Education, January 2025. (Nationally representative survey of over 65,000 U.S. students in grades 3–12.)

Reeve, John Marshall and Sung Hyeon Cheon. “Autonomy-Supportive Teaching: Its Malleability, Benefits, and Potential to Improve Educational Practice.” Educational Psychologist, 56(1), 2021. (Cited in Anderson and Winthrop, “Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results,” The New York Times, January 2, 2025, as 35 randomized control trials in 18 countries.)

Millennium Institute. “Whole Self Leadership White Paper.” millennium.org.

Jennings, P. A., et al. (2017). Impacts of the CARE for Teachers program on teachers’ social and emotional competence and classroom interactions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(7), 1010–1028.