What Would Education Look Like in a Post-Scarcity Society?
Here is a composite of the versions parents keep posting:
“My daughter is ten. An AI already explains fractions to her better than I can, and everyone tells me robots will be doing most jobs before she’s thirty. Her school still runs on bells, grades and college prep. Prep for what? If the jobs are going away, what is school even for, and what should I want it to turn into?”
Teachers add a clause of their own: and what happens to me?
Unscarcity gives the question a whole chapter, and the chapter starts with where the bells came from.
A School Built for Musketeers
In 1843 Horace Mann, the man most responsible for the American public school, sailed to Prussia looking for a fix. American one-room schoolhouses weren’t producing the disciplined workforce the factories wanted. In a Prussian classroom he found children in straight rows, desks bolted to the floor, moving only when a bell rang.
Prussia had built that system to turn out obedient soldiers and compliant bureaucrats. Mann took it home to Massachusetts, and by 1900 it was the global standard. The book lists the inheritance: the bells, “the batches we call grades, the quality control we call tests,” and one adult in front of thirty children who is supposed to deliver content, mentor character, manage discipline and grade the tests.
The factory school worked. It turned farm kids used to seasons into workers used to clocks, and it built the modern world. It fails now for three reasons. Any task you can define by rules, an algorithm does better, so drilling compliance means “training kids to be inferior robots.” Intelligence is jagged, and age cohorts bore the quick while crushing the struggling. And facts stopped being scarce, which leaves the harder skill of telling which ones are true.
“We still have the school,” the chapter says. “We no longer have the musketeers.”
Why “Just Give Them an AI Tutor” Falls Short
The obvious replacement is the machine, and the evidence for it is strong. In 1984 Benjamin Bloom showed that students tutored one-on-one with mastery learning scored two standard deviations above their classroom peers, and nobody could afford a tutor per child. In 2024 a Harvard physics study found that students with a properly designed AI tutor learned roughly twice as much in half the time.
The words “properly designed” matter. In May 2026, Rismanchian and colleagues analyzed 3.2 million interactions on the ALEKS math platform. After ChatGPT arrived, college students’ study time on problems an AI could solve for them fell 26.9 percent over eleven quarters, and their odds of a correct answer on proctored retention items fell 25 percent. The authors call it “cognitive surrender.”
So the book doesn’t hand the child to the machine. It puts three adults around her.
Leo’s Day
The chapter argues this with an invented scene. Leo is twelve. He drew spaceships during math class, which in the old system made him a “problem student,” with failing grades and medication suggested.
His morning goes to an AI tutor and to his obsession, Mars colonization. For two hours he gets the chemistry of life support, orbital mechanics and the ethics of colonies, taught by question: “Why do you think the Roman Empire fell? What patterns do you see that might apply to a Mars colony?”
In the afternoon he’s at the Makerspace, building a hydroponic filter for the community garden beside Carlos, a 60-year-old retired engineer. The filter will grow food that people will eat.
In the evening a Philosophy Circle takes on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the story of a happy city whose prosperity depends on one child locked in a basement. Leo argues, loudly, for walking away. Then the girl across the circle asks him where the walkers actually go, and whether anyone is locked in a basement there too. He has no answer.
Three Adults, Three Jobs
Three adults taught Leo that day, and none of them stood at the front of a room of thirty. The book calls them the Three Pillars, and it splits the old teaching job among them.
The AI Tutor handles content, at the child’s pace and through the child’s obsessions. It will explain fractions seventeen different ways until one clicks.
The Lead Educator is the human in charge of what the book calls a Learning House. There is one per hundred children, because she no longer dispenses information. She calls out the kid who’s drifting and tells parents the truths they don’t want to hear. In the book she is Sophia, thirty-three, who knows all hundred of her students by name. When the AI flags that nine-year-old Mia has been withdrawing for two weeks, it can’t say why. Sophia sits with her for forty-five minutes and learns that Mia’s parents are separating. That is the book’s reply to the teacher’s clause: “they finally get to do the job they dreamed of when they went into teaching.”
The Parent-Mentor is the adult the factory school could never afford. When most people no longer hold traditional jobs, parents have time, and some spend it at the Learning House, earning Impact, the book’s record of contribution. The model calls for about twenty per Lead Educator. Carlos is one. He watches Leo rewire the pump off-schematic and says nothing, because the kid is right.
The chapter’s shorthand: “The AI teaches. The teacher sees. The parent shows up.”
It also says where the design can break. An AI tutor can teach a wrong thing with perfect patience, so its answers are audited and the misses published. Twenty Parent-Mentors is a bet that parents keep walking through the door, and Sophia has eleven this year.
From the Podcast: A College With No Degree and No Grades
The September 23, 2026 episode of Minds, Bodies & Terawatts, our daily podcast, ran under this headline: Silicon Valley’s Biggest Investor Is Opening a College With No Degree, No Grades, No Federal Aid and Stanford’s Price Tag. Sam Altman Teaches. Fifty Kids Get In.
Degrees and grades are the sorting machinery of the industrial model, and real money is betting, in 2026, that a school can run without them.
Set it beside the Three Pillars, though, and it looks partial. A famous founder in the classroom is the Parent-Mentor idea, an adult who does the thing showing up to teach it, offered to fifty students at Stanford’s price. The book wants a Carlos for every child, plus an audited tutor and one adult who knows all hundred names.
On unscarcity.ai: Two Companion Articles
Education After AI: What School Is For Now is the guide to the chapter. It covers the rivals the book weighs first: Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall, Sudbury Valley and Singapore, and where each one breaks.
The 1843 School Model That AI Just Killed is the research note the podcast episode cites. It has the tutoring evidence, including a University of Maryland trial of 2,379 undergraduates in which students offered an AI tutor finished with final grades 0.37 standard deviations lower.
In the Book: Chapter 5, “The Education of a Citizen”
The full argument is Chapter 5, “The Education of a Citizen.” “The Factory is Failing” makes the historical case. “Leo’s Day” and “The Three Pillars: The Adults Around Each Child” lay out the replacement, and one passage gives the staffing in five short sentences: “Three pillars. One AI tutor for content. One Lead Educator for wisdom. Twenty Parent-Mentors for lived competence. Every child known by name by an adult who chose to be there.”
The chapter also holds something a parent can copy. The author built a small tutor for his own twelve-year-old that writes one Socratic worksheet a week. The first was bland, and his son shrugged. Then the author fed it what the boy cares about, how ordinary people lived in history, and the next worksheet opened on a Mongol raiding party with seventy-two saddlebags of silver and forty-eight chests of spices to split evenly among the riders. It was the same greatest-common-factor math as before. His son asked what an arban was. Ten horsemen.
If the question at the top of this post is yours, the book has the rest of the chapter.
More questions like this one are collected on the blog page. Follow the series on Substack.
