Education reform for the AI era cannot wait

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Education reform for the AI era cannot wait

Published: 09 Jan. 2026, 00:01

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Oh Se-jung

The author is a professor emeritus of physics and astronomy and a former president of Seoul National University.

Just over three years have passed since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late November 2022, yet AI is already reshaping daily life and industrial workplaces. Tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini now excel at tasks such as document summarization and information retrieval and are widely used in schools and companies.

Cha Jeong-in(center), chair of the presidentially affiliated National Education Commission, speaks during the appointment ceremony and first meeting of the Special Committee on Education in the AI Era at the Government Complex Seoul in Jongno District on Nov. 28, 2025. [YONHAP]

Universities are struggling to respond as students increasingly rely on AI for essay assignments and even examinations. AI is also beginning to transform the labor market. Law firms are cutting back on hiring junior lawyers who once specialized in researching past cases. As AI systems become capable of writing computer code, many IT companies are reducing recruitment or laying off programmers. In the United States, even graduates from top universities with computer science degrees are reportedly facing difficulties finding jobs.

A mobile phone display showing the icons of artificial intelligence (AI) apps Deepseek, Chatgpt, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini in Berlin, Germany, 31 October 2025. [EPA/YONHAP]

What makes this challenge more serious is the speed of change. Major U.S. technology firms are investing enormous sums in AI development, effectively staking their corporate futures on it, while Chinese companies are rapidly joining the race. Competition between the United States and China has intensified as both sides believe leadership in AI will determine the fate of companies and nations alike. Against this backdrop, predictions that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, could emerge within the next decade are gaining traction.

Even today’s AI systems, which remain limited to specific domains, are already exerting a significant social impact. If AGI were to appear, the scale of change would be difficult to imagine. It is not clear whether human society could adapt. This may well be a turning point in human civilization. At such a critical moment, even a brief lapse could alter a nation’s trajectory. Korea has responded by making its goal of becoming one of the world’s top three AI powers a key national priority.

Policies pursued under this banner include expanding AI computing infrastructure, developing sovereign AI systems, fostering AI-related industries and training AI specialists. All of these measures are necessary. Yet they share a fundamental limitation: they are supply-side policies. As noted earlier, AI is a technology that affects society as a whole, not only those who develop or deploy it. Every citizen will feel its impact.

The World Economic Forum, which champions an AI-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution, has predicted that two-thirds of children entering elementary school today will work in jobs that do not yet exist. If society is set to change this profoundly, preparation cannot be limited to a small group of AI professionals. All citizens must be equipped to navigate the AI era, and education is the only way to build that capacity.

Can Korea’s education system meet this challenge? The greatest obstacle is that it remains trapped in the “catch-up” model of the industrialization era. Memorization still dominates most classrooms. The multiple-choice format of the College Scholastic Ability Test stifles creativity rather than nurturing it. Compounding the problem, education policy moves at a glacial pace. The national curriculum that was revised in 2015 was not fully implemented until 2020, and it took another three years before it was fully reflected in the college entrance exam. Discussions about introducing descriptive questions to foster creative thinking have dragged on for more than a decade and remain unresolved.

Test-takers wait for the start of the 2026 College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) at an exam hall of Inhwa Girls’ High School in Michuhol District, Incheon, on the morning of Nov. 13, 2025. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

Measured against the pace of AI development, five or 10 years is an eternity. Yet that is how long educational reform routinely takes in Korea. This mismatch is untenable.

To adapt to AI technology advancing at near light speed, education must become more agile. The first question should be what schools ought to teach in the AI era. Just as there is little reason to emphasize mental arithmetic in an age of calculators, it makes little sense to force students to memorize past knowledge when tools like ChatGPT can summarize it instantly.

Instead, education should focus on cultivating the ability to think differently, ask critical questions and solve real-world problems creatively. Once curricula appropriate for the AI era are designed, institutions must be able to adopt them swiftly. If Korea wastes another five or 10 years, the world will have moved far ahead.

That is why education reform to prepare for the AI era must be accelerated without delay.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.