The student on one side of the artificial process will be acknowledged to have a credential that grants him access to further opportunities, whereas the teacher will be treated by the system as though he has taught and given some small share of the revenue from the student, by way of the state. Any sense of a personal relationship will have been squeezed out in the name of efficiency, to the point that-for example- even my emails are pre-written by my department.
AI makes it easy to learn. It makes it even easier not to learn. You will need a new humanity before autodidacticism becomes any kind of default, even with economic incentives. “I was there, Gandalf, 30 years ago, when men had the chance to end evil once and for all, but chose downloadable nudes instead…” -Elrond of AOL
Combined with the new emphasis on industrial technology and trades that the economic policies of the administration are emphasizing, this will make education options much more diverse in the very near future.
Colleges as we know them today are a product of the Middle Ages. College comes from the Latin collegium, which had a far greater range of meaning than today. A collegium was any sort of formal association- a guild, a social club, or some special-purpose body. The broader idea lingers on in things like the College of Cardinals or the Electoral College (my students will often assume the latter has something to do with education). A collegium is a brotherhood.
The emphasis was never on mere job-training, however. Much like the successive dynasties of China assumed that a knowledge of Confucian philosophy equipped a man to maintain dikes or suppress bandits, the medievals took it as an article of faith that the liberal arts were the necessary foundation of a useful professional. It was, from the outset, a profoundly middle-class enterprise and remains so today.
It was in the Renaissance that the idea of the educated gentleman found its fullest expression. The son of a wool merchant or a vinter or even a peasant could ennoble himself through a formative process of cultivation. This involved humbling oneself before the legacy of the Classical world interpreted through the lens of a normative Christianity, a vision that combined the best of the wise pagans with revealed truth. It had as its highest goal the manifestation of eternal beauty in transient human life.
