ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Wednesday, April 15, 2026, 10:10 am-10:50 am | Unknown
Speakers
- Kaya Henderson, former DC Chancellor of Education
- Rick Hess, American Enterprise Institute
- moderator from Learning Commons
Key Takeaways
- A panel featuring education experts Kaya Henderson and Rick Hess debates what students actually need to learn in the age of AI, drawing on interviews with over 60 experts conducted by the Learning Commons foundation.
- Hess argues forcefully that students need the same academic foundations they have always needed -- literacy, numeracy, history, science -- and warns against repeating historical cycles where new technologies are used as excuses to reduce academic rigor, citing the calculator's misapplication as a cautionary tale.
- Henderson emphasizes that human skills (empathy, civil discourse, collaboration) are more important than ever but agrees they are best developed through rigorous academic work, not as standalone curricula.
- Both panelists are skeptical of "AI literacy" as a major new subject, with Hess calling it "trash" as a 400-hour annual requirement, while acknowledging AI's transformative potential for differentiation, real-time writing feedback, and diagnostic assessment.
Notable Quotes
"If somebody is offering AI as an excuse to consign knowledge or capability to the dustbin of history, I get extraordinarily nervous."
ā Rick Hess
"Technology is a tool. It is not the end. It is a means... At the end of the day, there are always two people talking to one another."
ā Kaya Henderson
"The short answer is they need to know in the age of AI the same things they needed to know before the age of AI."
ā Rick Hess
"I think it's really important for people to understand that this system was designed to withstand all of the vicissitudes that come through. And this is a vicissitude."
ā Kaya Henderson
"When people are suggesting that what we need to do to cultivate critical thinking or collaboration is to have kids learn less academic content, I think that is a very destructive path to go down."
ā Rick Hess
Full Transcript
Well, good morning. What do students need to learn and be good at in the age of AI? Not the how, but the what. Let's see if the slide can come up.
That's the question that our foundation wanted to answer. So we interviewed over 60 experts, educators, education researchers, psychologists, technologists, and kids. The QR code here will take you to a summary of what they said. And today, I'm joined on stage today by two of the experts that we interviewed, Kaya and Eric, and they bring many years of experience to this question.
So what are your views on this question? This is a conversation that we continue to have over and over again. And I think that there are three key things that rise to the top for me in terms of what kids need to know in the age of AI. The first thing that I think they need to know is how to solve problems generally.
Call it critical thinking, call it whatever. It is a skill that doesn't matter with technology, without technology, it's really important for young people to be able to solve problems, to struggle, to build resilience, to figure out how to get to answers in multiple ways. I think that is going to serve them incredibly well. The second piece that I think is discernment.
So in a time where AI produces all kinds of deep fakes and fake news and whatever you want to call it, I think young people are going to need to understand how they can figure out what's real from what's not. And most importantly, I think that kids are really going to need human skills more than anything else. The ability to relate to one another, the ability to agree, disagree, have civil discourse, to have empathy, to work together in teams. Those skills are going to become more important than they've ever been before, I think, in this age of AI.
It's always tough to go after Kaia because Kaia says things so well. Look, for me, the short answer is they need to know in the age of AI the same things they needed to know before the age of AI. This is a conversation we have a lot. Four years ago, the National Council of Teachers of English said kids needed to read fewer books, we needed to de-center books, and kids needed to spend more time on memes and short-form videos.
I thought that was bad advice. Twenty years ago, the then-Dean of Stanford's Graduate School of Education said that because of the existence of the Internet, kids didn't need to know about battles or geography or periodic table of elements because they could Google it. Thirty years ago, Arnold Packer, the co-author of Workforce 2000, said it was a waste of time for high schoolers to learn biology or anatomy or to dissect frogs because they needed to learn future-forward skills instead. They needed to learn how to operate video disks and fax machines.
A century ago, the National Commission that wrote the Cardinal Principles for Education said, look, in a world that had been changed by factories and cars and radios and World War, students needed new skills. They needed to spend less time on academics, more time on the worthy use of leisure. I think we have been through this song and dance time after time. There is a reason that we keep coming back to academics as the grounding of what students should learn in school.
It is first because the way the human mind works is by channeling working memory through demonstration, deliberate practice, and feedback until those things have migrated to long-term memory where they become us, where they shape our intuitions and our understanding of the world. And the reason we keep coming back to academics is because literacy, numeracy, geometry, geography, history, science, literature, these are the basic building blocks that help a student understand the natural world and the civilization in which they abide. That's why these have remained remarkably stable around the globe and over the centuries. So what should students learn?
They should learn those things. We need to teach them a lot better. We need to use time in school a whole lot more effectively. But this is not an excuse for us not to equip students to have agency of the mind.
It's an excuse to make sure that they have those tools so they can do what Kaya is talking about. Let me ask about another idea that came up, Kaya, that you mentioned in your opening. Many interviewees talked about human skills. What are those and why are they important?
Well, I mean, first of all, I think that we are in person. We see each other every day. We live together in community. We have a society.
And all of that requires human interaction, whether it's in your home or at school or at work. And one of the things that we increasingly see in the youth mental health crisis, if there is one, is an inability to engage with one another in person because of the way screens interact on the brain. And that's not going to change. It doesn't matter if AI becomes even more ubiquitous than it is.
We are still going to live in community and need the ability to connect and work together. I think part of the reason why democracy is imperiled right now is because we can't talk to each other. Our government can't function because people can't talk to one another. And none of that is going to go away.
And so it's very important. Technology is a tool, right? It is not the end. It is a means.
And we can actually use technology to help us with our humanistic skills. I've seen apps that help people disagree. I've seen apps that help people facilitate conversations. That's great.
But at the end of the day, there are always two people talking to one another. And so if we aren't equipping our young people, if we aren't giving them practice at civil discourse, if we aren't giving them the opportunity to work together so that they can disagree and come to a good answer together, then that's the humanistic skills that I think young people need. Empathy, right? We are, you know, people talk about a loneliness crisis for young people.
Actually, young people are looking for opportunities to engage. My young people talk about third spaces, right, where they can gather and be in community, where there's no technology, where they can talk to one another and be in joint endeavors. And so I think that the young people are recognizing that that is even more important than these so-called AI skills that the education ecosystem is discussing. You know, I started teaching high school 36 years ago.
I still don't know what human skills are. I don't think most people do either. In fact, I think part of the problem is the definition of human skills or durable skills or 21st century skills tends to change every time a new grant cycle opens up. One of the great things about human skills is that it's always about anticipating the new skills that are going to be needed.
And what's great about that is we don't know whether or not you're right. So people get to write books, give TED Talks, raise grants, and by the time the future comes around, everybody's forgotten what you were talking about 10, 20 years ago. Look, if you think, if anybody is telling you that creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, that these were not important in 1976 or 1956 or 1936, they're nuts. There's a reason that Dale Carnegie sold millions of copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936.
It's because these skills have always been, as Kaya said, foundational to human endeavor. So look, are these skills, I don't mean to suggest these skills aren't important. Like Kaya said, empathy, understanding, the ability to hear one another, the ability to analyze and discern, these are fundamental skills. But these are best learned, I would argue, through wrestling with heavy cognitive load, by wrestling with great works of literature, by working as teams on important STEM projects.
That is how we actually develop and cultivate these skills in meaningful ways. When people are suggesting that what we need to do to cultivate critical thinking or collaboration is to have kids learn less academic content, I think that is a very destructive path to go down. I remember one of our interviewees, an academic in his 60s, told us that the last time that he did something by himself solo, not in a team, was his PhD defense when he was in his 20s. Okay.
Let's move now to the quick lightning round. I'm going to offer up a couple of provocative statements we heard and then ask you for your quick reactions. Okay. One was, all kids ā oh, we might even have a slide.
Here we go. All kids need to learn a new skill called AI literacy. What's your quick reaction? Trash.
Trash? Trash. I love it. You know, we have driver ed.
Kids have learned how to use word processors and protractors over the years. I'm not opposed to having kids learn how to use AI. Like Tyler says in high school, I admire that he's not talking K-8. He says a third of time.
That's 400 hours a year. I can't imagine a human being who needs 400 hours a year for four years to be taught how to use AI. That seems bizarre. But at this point, we're now negotiating about the margins.
It's a useful conversation. Okay. Next provocative statement, K-12 really is not going to change because of AI. Always a safe bet.
Although I would just disagree with you slightly. This was my dissertation, my PhD dissertation almost 30 years ago, the book that made my career. It turns out that, for instance, the problem with urban school reform is not that nothing changes, but that they're rolling out a new initiative every three months. And so everybody in the systems learns to close their door and wait it out and tell each other this too shall pass.
And I think one of the real concerns that folks in a room like this should be wrestling with is how many educators are just looking at their watches and waiting for this stuff to blow over to the next thing. I mean, I'm just reminded of the fact that the film projector was going to revolutionize education. The overhead machine was going to revolutionize copy machines, TV, laptops. And we don't shop the way we used to shop.
We don't bank the way we used to bank. We don't find information out the way we used to find information out. Oh, but we school exactly the way we have been schooling. And so I think it's really important for people to understand that this system was designed to withstand all of the vicissitudes that come through.
And this is a vicissitude. It's the internet was a vicissitude and it didn't change a lot. We use it. It is a tool.
But I do think that if you had to bet on the staying power of schools, it's a good bet. Now, does that mean that we shouldn't integrate AI into the way we're teaching and the way we're learning? Of course not. AI unleashes all kinds of incredible opportunities for teachers to differentiate.
The hardest thing in education is differentiation. Any teacher will tell you. We now have tools that can analyze what happened in classroom today, draw you up a lesson plan for tomorrow that is tailored to each and every single one of those kids. Super amazing.
That's great. There are all kinds of use cases for how AI can actually make schooling better. But change the whole thing? I'm not exactly sure.
Scott, and just one point for folks who are walking away from the session. There's a cynics case and a humanist case for why that works the way Kaia just said. The cynics case is because everybody in education doesn't get it. We don't understand it.
We don't understand how transformative AI is. We're stuck in our contracts and our old vending agreements. The humanist case is that at the end of the day, education is about cultivating the human mind. It's about agency.
And these are things that are developed by human beings in concert with human beings, wrestling with content and problems that are worth challenging. And I think what we want to do is we want to move at the pace that respects that and not imagine that the only obstacle here is that people aren't getting it. Excellent. Now a question.
This one, longer answers are fine. Where do you see AI helping education get better? And what will it be good at? So I think there's at least two really powerful use cases that I find completely compelling.
One is, I mentioned a dean of Stanford 20 years ago. The dean at University of Michigan 20 years ago, Deborah Ball, was doing this phenomenal work on elementary numeracy on math instruction. They were having terrific success figuring out where are the sticking points on things like operations with third and fourth graders and finding diagnostic strategies that seem to be effective. The problem is actually getting the diagnostics and then the interventions in the hands of teachers in real time was insuperable.
Like we have seen in healthcare though, one of the powers of algorithm driven decision making and now of AI is that it is a possibility to equip human educators to understand what they are observing in real time so they can diagnose more precisely and figure out appropriate interventions and see if those are working. Hugely powerful. The second thing is that when you spend much time in the academic core of most American schools, not only is there a lot of wasted time and transitions and the rest, but there is a deadening lack of targeted demonstration, real time practice, real time feedback in ways that create loops of deliberate learning. John Maida, Harvard's John Maida, wrote about this in deeper learning and said look, where do you see that stuff happening in schools?
You see it happening not in the academic core but on the periphery. You find it in the extracurriculars, in drama, and in music, and on the sports teams. And one of the things that those have is A, they use technology much more effectively. Look at your typical high school football locker room to see how to use technology really effectively.
But they also have much more opportunity to work closely with learners. I think there's real possibility for AI to help create those cycles of demonstration, deliberate practice, feedback. What worries me? Two main things.
One, I worry about distraction and depersonalization. Basically, you can just go back to all of the cheerful sales pitches we got on screens and social media and cell phones in schools from 2010 to 2016 and understand all of the devastating effects we've had on reading, on comprehension, on engagement, on social interactions. I worry that when kids are ear-butted up staring at screens with AI, it's going to be all of that and more so. The second thing, and let me stop with this, the big lesson for me, the most illuminating example for me, is the calculator.
Any of you doing this long enough, remember two generations ago when the calculator was introduced to schools, there was a very vocal contingent which said, we don't need to teach computation anymore. It's a waste of time. It's like cursive. Kids have these devices.
They can punch in numbers. The problem is that if you don't master computation through working memory to long-term memory where you have mastered automaticity, you are at sea when you get to higher math. You're also at sea when it comes to personal finance and to probability later in life. Now, the right use case of the calculator was once you developed automaticity, it was a huge time saver in trigonometry or calculus because instead of spending 20 minutes working something through on a slide rule, kids could just focus on the parts of the problem that mattered.
But for me, the takeaway here is that if we understand AI is a tool for developing discernment, knowledge, agency, it could be a very powerful device. When somebody is offering AI as an excuse to consign knowledge or capability to the dustbin of history, I get extraordinarily nervous. There are a couple of use cases that make me excited. First, the differentiation case that I talked about earlier, total game changer for teachers.
I think we're still working out how that makes its way into the practical day-to-day classroom, but I'm confident, especially as I see more educators creating the educational technology products that are powered by AI. I think before there were a bunch of technologists who were creating solutions for problems that they didn't understand, but now what I see is educators who are using these tools to create real solutions that are able to be integrated in the classroom. Writing is an incredibly important skill, and I actually have seen people use AI in writing. So a quick example is, you know, it took us months to get test scores back if there was a writing component.
Now you can have AI analyze writing incredibly quickly, and we don't have to wait months and months in order to get feedback. That feedback loop for teachers, for students, is incredible. I'm watching college professors, English professors, ask their young people to write an essay, ask AI to improve it, take note of the differences between the drafts, and use it as a tool, right? Not say you cannot use it for writing, but actually it helps.
helps people.
Writing is a hard thing to master and so if we have a tool that's helping us improve our writing, I think that's a great use case. There's also the idea of lesson planning. So how many teachers are sitting at home on a Sunday night trying to figure out how to make their lessons more engaging or how to reflect kids' interests or, you know, to see kids, their cultures, their communities, and what they're teaching? You can actually zhuzh up a lesson plan incredibly quickly with whatever kinds of things that you want that are going to make your young people more engaged.
That is game-changing, right? Totally game-changing. So I think that there are a number of ways that we can use AI to enhance support, but again, it is not the destination. It is, you know, it helps us on the journey.
Boy, let me ask about writing. In the scenario you described where a student writes and then the AI gives the edits or gives the suggestions, how fast does that feedback loop happen? In seconds, literally in seconds, yeah. So I've always marveled at comparison to sports, which you were talking about, Rick.
How well would you learn to shoot baskets if when you took a shot you had to wait to the next week or the next month to find out if the ball went in? Learning thrives with fast feedback. It dies without it. And the ability, it's impossible for teachers to give that fast feedback because they have 30 papers to grade, but the ability of AI to do that in seconds is really thrilling.
And then for the student to try again and again. Well, that's fantastic. Now, let me just move to the final slide. We'll wind up here.
So we encourage you to share your ideas. We have this website. You can get there through the QR code. And in addition to showing hundreds of the quotes from the people we interviewed, it also lists at the end some of the challenges facing the incorporation of AI and what students should learn.
And then it seeks for feedback from those in the field who have thoughts on those challenges and more. So we look forward to your feedback. And now as we finish, join me in thanking our two experts, Kaya and Rick. Thank you.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.