In the Age of Technology, What Should Schools Teach?

Public education matters.

I'm an odd case, admittedly. I dropped out of high school and have lived by learning what I needed outside the prescribed curriculum. That doesn't mean I think public education is unimportant.

Quite the opposite.

For some, public education is an essential foundation of life.

It is a joyful playground where you meet friends every day, an infrastructure for study and growth. It is the most universal social system there is — one that connects a child to the world regardless of family circumstances or economic conditions.

Then we must ask again.

What is public education?

No — what is education?

More precisely:

What role should educational institutions play in the age of technology?

Through primary, secondary, and higher education, what should we teach?

The times have changed too much for knowledge transfer alone to be called education.

Information is already everywhere. When you don't know something, you can search, you can ask an AI, you can reach the world's best lectures and materials in seconds. If schools and teachers once held a monopoly on transferring knowledge, knowledge itself is no longer scarce.

Then education must go beyond a place that delivers knowledge, and become a place that makes human beings capable of handling knowledge and technology.

I believe the education ahead must cultivate at least three powers.

Everyone fails in life.

You can fail an exam, fail to get hired. A business can collapse; a person you trusted can betray you. You can lose what you built in a single moment.

What matters is not the ability to avoid failure.

It is the ability to stand back up after failing.

The person who can start again after losing ten billion won, a hundred billion, a trillion. Not that one must literally hold such money — I mean the spirit and capability to rebuild a life even after losing nearly everything.

Yet education until now has made failure something excessively fearful.

Get it wrong and points are deducted; fall behind and you're left out; miss the correct answer and you're judged deficient. In such an environment, students learn to hide failure rather than learn from it.

Educational institutions must be spaces where students can fail safely.

Let them attempt, stumble, and try again — and let them experience that failure does not negate their entire existence. A person who can rise after collapse will carry a long life much further than a person who merely holds much knowledge.

As technology advances, one person can do ever more alone.

Yet paradoxically, the more one can do alone, the more vital the ability to live with others becomes.

School is not merely a place to study.

It is a small society where people of different temperaments and backgrounds meet daily, clash, cooperate, and learn relationships. Fighting with a friend and reconciling, dividing roles toward a common goal, working to understand someone different from you — none of this can be learned from books alone.

And education must no longer stop at producing citizens of a single nation.

Climate crisis, war, pandemics, technology ethics, poverty and inequality — today's problems cannot be solved within borders. Students must learn that they are members of Korean society and, at the same time, citizens connected to the world.

But global citizenship is not built from grand slogans.

It begins with compassion for human beings.

Learning that people different from me also feel pain, that everyone carries their own circumstances and fears, that the weak must never be treated carelessly.

Technology extends human capability.

But if the person wielding that technology lacks compassion for others, what gets extended may not be human goodness but greed and violence.

That is why, in the age of technology, education that understands the human matters even more.

Living an entire life on knowledge learned once will only get harder.

Occupations keep changing, industries restructure, and today's expertise can be obsolete in a few years. AI and automation will rapidly transform existing work and create new roles.

The most important ability in this era is not knowing everything in advance.

It is the ability to learn on your own when you need to.

The power to identify what you don't know, find the right materials, form good questions, attempt things yourself, verify the results, and learn again.

But a student who only follows a fixed timetable, fixed textbooks, fixed problems and fixed answers will struggle to build self-directed learning.

Educational institutions must be places that help students form their own questions, not places that keep supplying answers.

Not ending at “memorize this,”

but asking: “What are you curious about?”

“How will you verify it?”

“How will you use what you learned in the real world?”

That is what we must ask.

The teacher's role, too, must expand — from one who delivers knowledge one-way to a guide and coach who helps students design their own learning paths.

Technology will take over more and more intellectual labor.

Calculating, translating, writing, coding, analyzing data — AI will perform these ever faster.

Then school must not be a place that produces people who calculate faster than AI.

School must produce people who can use technology to carve out their own lives.

People who stand back up after failure.

People who cooperate with others, understand the world, and can feel the pain of the weak.

People who question and learn on their own without being told.

A person with these three abilities can redesign their life no matter how fast the era changes.

The role of public education is not to lead every student to the same answer.

It is to give each one the power to find the answer to their own life.

In the age of technology, what educational institutions must do is clearer than ever.

Rather than obsessing over packing more knowledge into heads: raising people who can live humanly amid any technology and any environment.

Isn't that the reason schools should exist?

When I see a problem, I try to solve it.

When something breaks, I go all in — twenty-four hours, no sleep, nothing else.

In short, I'm the charging type.

At times I lack the ability to look around at the people beside me.

Because the problem has to be solved.

Solve one, and the next problem is waiting.

Life is a succession of problems. Does that make life joyless? No. Solving them is exhilarating.

The dopamine hits. Solving a customer's problem, earning the reward, hearing a single word of thanks.

There is no moment in life more moving than that.

Honestly, I read, comprehend, and write abnormally fast.

By my mother's official account, I read Hangul at age two. She read books aloud to me constantly — through sound and sensation.

And in kindergarten I received Montessori education, which seems to have suited me. During ages six to seven (Korean age), I had already covered the equivalent of the entire sixth-grade elementary curriculum.

Yet what I always feel is this: naturally, even now, I am still learning so many lives.

I feel my shortcomings often.

How should I treat customers?

How do you win a person's heart?

How can I make this business succeed?

And what record will I leave in the world —

and in the end, as an old man, what must I do

to vanish with a smile?