In the AI age, school age lasts a lifetime

Lee Jeong-dong 

The author is a professor of the Technology Management, Economics and Policy Program at Seoul National University’s College of Engineering. 

Korea has two strangely contrasting report cards on education. In the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which measures the abilities of 15-year-olds, Korean students have consistently ranked among the top performers. Korea built schools, trained teachers and educated children when the country had little else. Education became a foundation of national development and an achievement admired abroad.

The report card changes in adulthood. In the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills, or PIAAC, Korean adults score below the OECD average in literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving, while skill gaps between age groups are wider than average. Learning after leaving school is also uncommon. Across the OECD, roughly four in 10 adults participate in formal education during a year, compared with little more than one in 10 in Korea. The surveys do not track the same individuals, so direct comparison has limits. Still, Korea’s exceptional school achievement is not carrying through into adult learning.

In the industrial age, people typically studied intensively early in life, worked for decades using the knowledge and skills acquired and retired. Governments invested heavily in schools and teachers because individual capabilities determined both personal prospects and national competitiveness.

Rapid technological change is dismantling that timetable. Healthy life expectancy is lengthening while the useful life of knowledge and skills is shrinking. As the technological frontier advances, people must build deeper expertise on what they learned at school and sometimes relearn the foundations themselves. We are entering an era in which people must repeatedly return to learning throughout their lives.

I study theories of technological innovation. The hottest global question in the field today is how AI will affect future jobs. No one can yet know which occupations will disappear or emerge, how humans and AI will divide work or how far the familiar sequence of “learn first, then work” will change.

Researchers disagree. One thing, however, is clear. People without repeated opportunities to learn and absorb new technologies will be left behind, as will countries that fail to provide those opportunities. The learning gap will matter as much as the technology gap in determining national competitiveness.

Korea succeeded in building a strong educational foundation early in life. Now it must ensure that achievement does not end when people leave school. Foundations built in school should lead to deeper expertise at university and be renewed whenever technology and industry change.

Primary and secondary education, higher education and lifelong learning are not rivals or substitutes. What is accumulated at one stage becomes the starting point for the next. That continuing accumulation builds an individual’s capabilities.

The “teaching” and “nurturing” of the industrial age must expand into lifelong “learning” and “practice” in the AI age. Adult learning should become a core mission of education, not merely a subsidiary instrument of labor or welfare policy.

Just as Korea did not leave children’s education to their families’ financial means, the state must build a dense ladder of opportunity so learning does not stop after graduation because someone cannot afford it. If learning has become lifelong, the social foundation supporting it must also last a lifetime. Unesco’s emphasis that the right to education covers all ages reflects the same principle. The right to learn should have no graduation date.

This changed life timetable also raises questions about education funding. How to support the needs of different stages while preserving stability and predictability in school education should be debated carefully by experts who understand education finance and administration, based on voices from the field.

From the perspective of technological innovation, however, one point must be considered. Education is no longer an investment made once at the beginning of life but an accumulation spanning an entire lifetime. Education funding must likewise take the long view, supporting continuity of learning at every stage.

Korea built the education system demanded by the industrial age with remarkable success. Now it is time for the next evolution: from a country where children learn well to one where everyone can learn throughout life.

The Korean term haknyeong traditionally means “school age,” the age at which a person attends school. In the future, however, that age will not come only once. It will return again and again over time whenever technology and work change. In the age of AI, school age lasts a lifetime.