Last night around midnight I sent my older brother a message that I’d been chewing on for a while: “In an era where academic credentials are being devalued as assets, does Zeaman still need to go to school?” Zeaman is my niece — his daughter, still a kid. The question wasn’t rhetorical. I’d just finished watching a video essay that threw out the phrase “the bankruptcy of the credentialism era,” and it landed harder than I expected.

I told him the video also covered things like critical thinking, first-principles reasoning, growth mindset — and that I found the argument compelling, but these were exactly the things schools don’t really teach. Then I added the part that’s been quietly sitting in my head for months: once AI flattens the technical moat, the entire institutional model of “school” might not survive the next ten years. Maybe not, but maybe.

His reply was measured in a way mine wasn’t. Schools will have to reform, he said. But the purpose of school was never purely knowledge transfer. Social skills. Public speaking. The ability to persuade. The ability to learn how to learn. That’s the hidden curriculum, and it’s not going anywhere just because GPT can write your essays.

I floated the idea that maybe we could just start a school that teaches those things directly. He pushed back — starting a school is genuinely hard, and running it as a training program runs into the problem of finding your target audience. But the direction, he agreed, is right.

Then the conversation turned toward Zeaman specifically, and this is where it got interesting for me.

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The China-specific problem

I said something offhand: honestly, it feels like Zeaman shouldn’t go through the domestic Chinese school system. He agreed immediately — she’s going international, 100%, probably IB. And then he added the line that I keep coming back to:

“There are still too many people in China. The only way to filter them is through exams.”

That’s a brutal but honest framing of what gaokao actually is. It’s not primarily a learning instrument — it’s a sorting mechanism. The content being tested is almost incidental. What matters is that the system produces a clean ranking that can be used to allocate a limited number of seats at good universities, and by extension, good jobs. The learning part is a byproduct of the filtering part.

I replied with what felt like the punchline of the whole exchange: the domestic school system only teaches you how to take the exam.

And if that’s true, then the credential you walk out with is a proof-of-exam-passing, not a proof-of-capability. Which is exactly the asset that’s being devalued right now. The credential worked when it was a reliable proxy for skill. The proxy is breaking.

What my brother said that I can’t stop thinking about

Two things he said near the end of the conversation hit differently than the rest.

First: “By the time she’s grown up, America might not hold the position it holds now.” I’m an international student at UIUC right now, on an F-1, planning around the US tech industry as the default endgame. It’s easy to plan as if the current global order is stable. It isn’t. Planning for Zeaman’s life in 15 years means accepting that the entire geopolitical and economic map might look completely different. That’s a sobering thing to internalize when you’re 20 and your own plans are mostly calibrated to the present.

Second, after I spiraled a bit (I sent a crying emoji, to be honest): “It’s fine, you just have to keep up with the times. Go study how American tech companies actually improve — learn their capacity to explore new territory.”

That reframe is the entire thing. The answer to “what’s worth learning in a world where credentials are collapsing” isn’t a new curriculum. It’s not a new school. It’s the meta-skill of being able to explore unfamiliar domains and extract value from them faster than the next person.

What this means for my actual plans

I’m a CS + Education (Learning Science) student. I graduate in December. I’m heading into a Chicago co-op this fall through CCS, and somewhere in the back of my head I’ve been noodling on edtech as a long-term direction. This conversation forced me to articulate something I’d been dancing around:

Most of “edtech” is just the old schooling model with a screen bolted on. Duolingo is flashcards with streaks. Khan Academy is a really good textbook. The business model of nearly every major edtech company is still downstream of the credential economy — people pay because a certificate or a score or a grade is tied to opportunity. When the credential loses its value as an asset, that entire business layer is in trouble.

The interesting edtech question isn’t “how do we teach calculus better” — it’s “what does learning look like when the goal is no longer to pass a test that sorts you?” What do you build for someone whose only real competitive advantage is the speed at which they can become competent in something new?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I notice that the things my brother listed — interpersonal ability, public speaking, persuasion, learning-to-learn — share a common property: they’re all skills that compound with practice and cannot be faked by an AI on your behalf. You can have Claude write your essay. You cannot have Claude be charismatic in a meeting for you. You cannot have Claude build trust with a colleague for you. Not yet, anyway.

So the post-credential curriculum, if someone were to build it, probably looks less like “courses” and more like structured environments where these compounding skills get reps. Debate clubs, startups, theater, sports teams, research groups. The stuff that has always worked but was treated as extracurricular because it didn’t fit on a transcript cleanly.

Maybe the transcript was the bug, not the feature.

The line I texted that I meant more than it sounded

At one point in the thread I sent: “It feels good when the brain is developing.”

It was half a joke. But it’s also the most honest thing I’ve said about learning in a while. When the credential is stripped away as a motivator — when you’re not learning to get a grade, or a degree, or a job offer — what’s left is just the raw thing. The click of a concept landing. The feeling of a system becoming legible. That’s the only part of school that was ever really mine, and it turns out it’s also the only part that’s AI-proof, credential-proof, and future-proof.

Zeaman probably won’t grow up in a world where “which school did you go to” means what it means today. My brother’s right that she’ll need to move with the times. But if she grows up actually enjoying the feeling of her own brain expanding — not performing learning for a test, but wanting the reps for their own sake — then whatever the world looks like in 2040, she’ll be fine.

That might be the only durable asset left. Not the credential. The appetite for the reps.

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One more thing worth flagging, because I want to be honest with myself: I’m writing this as a 20-year-old who has benefited enormously from exactly the credential economy I’m now questioning. UIUC on my resume opens doors. I’d be lying if I said I’d reject that leverage. The question isn’t whether credentials still work in 2026 — they do. The question is whether I’d be making the same bet if I were starting today, for someone who’ll be 20 in 2040. I wouldn’t. And that gap is probably the most useful thing I learned from last night’s conversation.