Episode Details

Before we can talk about artificial intelligence, we have to talk about the machine we already built. This episode traces the design history of modern education: the tablet houses of ancient Sumer, the anxiety Socrates had about writing, the Chinese exams that invented high-stakes testing, the medieval lecture that existed because books were scarce, the Prussian model that gave us age-graded classrooms, and the Industrial Revolution that gave us bells, rows, and batch processing. Then we look at the strangest fact in education: the world has reorganized itself four or five times since 1900, and the classroom has stayed almost exactly where it was.