#046 - Will Orr-Ewing | The tutoring industry is a billion pounds pointed at completely the wrong thing
About this episode
The episode discusses the flaws in the tutoring industry and the implications of a meritocratic elite on education.
Part two of our conversation with Will Orr-Ewing gets into the harder questions: whether a genuinely meritocratic elite is more dangerous than an aristocratic one, why AI tutoring has solved the wrong problem, and what it would take to build an Odyssean education for Britain’s most talented kids. Tom, Calum, and Will discuss: * The internet should have produced a generation of Einsteins — it didn’t: Eric Hoel’s provocation that the most naked conclusion you can draw from the internet, and now AI, is that the constraint was never information availability. The knowledge was always there. We’ve done something bad to intrinsic motivation. “Where are all the people who used the internet to teach themselves untold knowledge?” * Why AI tutoring has solved the wrong problem: Alpha School puts children in pods on the 35th floor of a New York skyscraper, not allowed to communicate, staring at screens. Will’s friend visited and saw four tantrums in a single school trip. The problem isn’t personalisation — it’s that children don’t need education adapted to their interests. They need their interests adapted to what’s worth learning. And AI cannot do the one thing that actually works: be…
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