Finding an answer isn't always an objective, though. I agree it often has been too much in baseline schooling.

First, there's a certain amount of baseline knowledge we'd like students to possess. Without a certain prerequisite amount of underlying information committed to memory, it gets far more difficult to achieve fluency in a topic.

But more than that, there's other skills we're trying to build: frustration tolerance, processing contradictory information, disciplined problem solving. You only really develop these skills through productive struggle. If you find a way to shortcut the productive struggle, students truggle.

> but tutors have always made people better students.

Sure. Bloom showed us that students taught with a combination of tutorial and mastery methods, one-on-one, outperform students in a normal classroom by roughly 2 sigma.

The paradox has always been-- why hasn't technology unlocked these gains for students in normal classrooms? If we could boost everyone's performance by this amount, it would be huge for society-- but society can't afford to teach everyone with tutorial methods.

Since the 1970s, we've invested in edtech towards trying to make this happen, but most of it has actually had net-negative effects as best as we can measure. AI, so far, looks to be much worse.

I think part of the answer is that a big part of what makes a conventional classroom work are social pressures. So far, it looks like AI (and edtech in general) does more to dismantle conventional pedagogy and to break down the social fabric of the classroom, than it has improved differentiation or unlocked this tutorial effect more broadly.