As students across the nation finalize their university applications during the college entrance exam season, a stark observation from Chen Tianqiao, founder of Shanda Group, has resonated deeply with parental anxieties. He argues that society is squandering the most precious first two decades of human life by training inherently incalculable individuals into highly predictable, modelable, and replaceable "human APIs." This, he contends, is not an advancement in education but a form of surrender to artificial intelligence.

An Outdated Educational Blueprint

Chen posits that the fundamental logic of today's schooling system remains the "Prussian model," designed over a century ago for the Industrial Revolution. This system, characterized by standardized curricula and uniform testing, aims to polish students into punctual, obedient, standardized cogs. The critical flaw, however, is that the times have changed. AI excels precisely at "transforming A into B within established rules, pursuing maximum efficiency and minimal error." By relentlessly pushing children to memorize standard answers, drill on standard question types, and pursue flawless execution, we are essentially steering them toward the functional area where AI is most proficient and most likely to replace humans. Refining grading systems to ever-greater detail merely accelerates this capitulation.

Charting a New Course for Learning

This critique is not a call to abandon technology in education, but rather a mandate to fundamentally reorient its goals. Chen proposes that education should move toward "the two ends that computation cannot reach." One end is the ability to pose novel questions—born from aesthetics, curiosity, and the pursuit of meaning—which determines the ceiling of civilization. The other end is the willingness to bear real consequences—enduring drudgery, accepting failure, and taking responsibility for one's choices—which determines how far an individual can go. It is the capacity for choice and the act of bearing responsibility that form the human core irreplaceable by AI.

The Core of Human Irreplaceability

"When AI can already far surpass us in all computable matters, if education still stakes all of a child's time on 'how to become a better executor,' it is very likely molding them into the kind of person most easily replaced by machines," Chen asserts. His perspective suggests that in an era where AI outperforms humans in computable tasks, the focus must shift beyond simply "making fewer mistakes and scoring more points." The essential question to ask is how, within the constraints of reality, we can carve out space for a child to grow into an "incalculable person," rather than a screw polished to be ever smoother and more standardized.