I have been saying something that sounds almost offensive at first: school is useless, and work is useless

Of course that sounds harsh. Every time people talk about education, they usually return to the safest lines. Study hard. Get into a good school. Find a stable job. Move forward step by step.

The problem is that the world no longer runs that way.

In an age where AI is moving this fast, the scarce things may not be certificates or routines. They may be your attention, your present time, your ability to feel the world, and your ability to catch new tools before they become ordinary.

If the point of school is to build knowledge, a strong model with good prompts, real questions, and real interaction can already help a child build a personal knowledge tree. It will not shame you for asking badly. It will not crush you with rankings. It will not call you a bad student just because your answer is not the standard one. Is that really weaker than many so-called elite teachers?

If the point of school is a credential for work, the outside world is already changing. OpenAI has opened doors for early-career and self-taught learners. Palantir has built fellowship paths for high school graduates. People are learning machine learning with ChatGPT and getting into real frontier work.

That is the real conflict.

Here, people are still saying: finish school first, do the proper internship first, get trained into a qualified person first. Outside, the question is already different: Can you learn by yourself? Do you have proof of work? Can you solve a real problem? Have you built anything in the real world?

Work experience has the same problem. A lot of work experience is only formalism, old systems, old habits, and organizational inertia. People learn how to report upward, tolerate boredom, work late, and perform maturity.

Young people are facing a different world. New tools appear too quickly. Information changes too quickly. The cost of learning has fallen too far. Many young people do not lack discipline. They lack room to move, build, test, and explore.

So I am not saying learning is meaningless. Basic knowledge, judgment, and expression still matter. What feels absurd is locking children in classrooms, rankings, exams, and parental anxiety, then pretending this is the only path to growth.

In the AI era, education should not only be about improving learning efficiency. Its real value should be giving time back to people. Time to play, explore, meet different people, touch real things, and build a direct relationship with the world.

A person who has never felt life will have a hard time understanding life.

You cannot lock a child inside a sealed system for eighteen years, make him orbit scores and rankings, then suddenly ask him to be awake, free, independent, and clear about the next few decades of life.

That is not education. That is training a person like a machine, then blaming him for having no soul.

The original meaning of reading has also been distorted. In English, reading books is just reading books. It was never equal to learning itself. In Chinese, the word for studying and the word for reading have been mixed together until many people forgot the difference.

So I am not telling people not to read, and I am not telling people not to work. What I reject is packaging school and employment as the only respectable road through life.

Learning is not useless
Assigned learning is useless
Work is not useless
Work that drains your life is useless

What is useful is learning continuously, staying curious, putting yourself back into the real world, and daring to touch people, things, and change. Everyone can say lifelong learning. Very few people actually live it.

AI should not make people more machine-like. It should pull people out of machine-like training and return their time, judgment, and life to them.