It’s Time for a RESET — Because the Old Model of Learning 🚨 Can’t Survive the Wisdom Economy
We’re in the middle of the biggest cognitive pivot of our lifetime. Evidence... The New York Magazine article — Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College — misses the point. The crisis isn’t that students are finding ways around the system. It’s that the system hasn’t evolved. We’re using assessment models from a pre-digital age in a world that now moves at light speed.
Students aren’t gaming the system. They’re doing what humans have always done — using better tools. And the institutions calling it cheating? They're just stuck in “uninformed pessimism,” clinging to the past because they don’t know how to win the new game.
The rules of work, learning, and value creation are being rewritten in real-time. And if you’re still playing by the industrial-age education playbook — memorize, repeat, regurgitate — you’re not just behind, you’re irrelevant.
That’s why we need a RESET.
In the Wisdom Economy, it’s not about who knows the most. It’s about who can think, synthesize, and adapt — especially when collaborating with machines. And AI isn’t a threat to that. It’s the jet fuel.
And here’s the kicker: our education system is still grading for compliance, not capability. That’s the real crisis. If we don’t wake up fast, we’re not just cheating students — we’re cheating the future.
💥 The Education Crisis Isn’t AI. It’s Obsolescence.
Let’s be honest: using AI to write your paper is no more cheating than using a calculator or Grammarly. It’s leverage. It’s efficiency. It’s working smarter — not harder.
People who panic over students using ChatGPT are the same ones still driving across town to pay their water bill, in person, with a check, because that's how they've always done it.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are automating workflows so we can spend more time doing the one thing machines can’t replace — being human.
The crisis isn’t that students are using AI.
The crisis is that educators don’t know how to teach with it.
I know firsthand that educators can learn how to teach with AI — as a partner, a facilitator, a creative outlet, a collaborator. Several months ago, I led an in-service program for the grad school faculty of a large university in San Francisco. They saw the options. And they saw that their own methods needed to adapt to best serve their students for future success.
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🎯 Outdated Learning Assessment Is the Real Problem
The essay? It was never sacred. It was just cheap.
We’ve romanticized the essay. We’ve treated it like a sacred rite of passage. But let’s be honest — we didn’t use essays because they were effective. We used them because they were cheap. One professor grades 100 papers. Done.
As Sam Holland observed: “They lament the death of the essay not because it’s pedagogically sound — it isn’t — but because it’s economically efficient.” Yep.
AI just exposed the cost-cutting hacks education is built on. The system wasn’t built to teach people how to think — it was built to scale grading. And now that model is breaking.
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📚 Education Needs a New Product. Not Just a Patch.
Right now, education is like a broken software company. The product doesn’t work anymore, so instead of fixing it, we just add more terms of service, more restrictions, more firewalls. But you can’t patch over a crumbling foundation.
We need to build a new model — one where learning is the product, and AI is part of the infrastructure. Here’s what that looks like:
🧠 Formative Over Final
Forget “grade the paper.” What about:
🤝 Group Work That... Works
🔍 Thinking as a Skill (Not a Byproduct)
We’re not just changing tools. We’re changing what it means to learn. This is not a rebrand. It’s a rebuild.
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🤖 The Future Is “Co-Intelligence,” Not Compliance
Like Ethan Mollick said — this is about co-intelligence. AI doesn’t replace smart people. It replaces mediocre workflows. The smartest people will use it to get 10x output on the same effort.
In five years, employers won’t care if you can write an essay without ChatGPT. They’ll care whether you can:
Want to “future-proof” students? Teach them how to use the tools. Because the future won’t wait for our hall pass.
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🚨 The Real Cheating? Institutions That Refuse to Evolve
Here's what I think: The real cheating is happening at the institution level.
It’s the universities that refuse to adapt. It’s the programs still grading like it’s 1987. It’s the professors scared that AI will expose how little they evolved their own craft.
Want to serve students? Then teach them the skills that compound:
Don’t punish students for being faster. Train them to be better.
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💬 Agree? Disagree? Want to build this new model together?
I’d love to discuss your input in the comments.
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Tonya J. Long is a technology transformation leader who’s shipped over 400 products, built $1.5B in economic value and helps boards & executive teams architect AI strategy and governance for the Wisdom Economy. She's not talking about the future — she's building it.
#thejourneyisthejob
It definitely is. In Education and so many other fields. But it starts with the need to unlearn, relearn and be willing to embrace that "past performance is no guarantee of future results". Very unsettling. But the only way to adapt. Thanks for raising awareness on this Tonya!
Societies first used oral methods to record and pass knowledge on. Then someone invented writing, which allowed for more efficient recording and transmission of information. Would societies that used oral methods have considered writing "cheating"? Certainly those skilled in oral techniques would have been threatened by the new technology.
I’ve been waiting for this conversation as a homeschooling mom of two. it’s an exciting time!
This is so true Tonya - The old way of doing things are just not relevant anymore. We need to adapt to the new world or find ourselves being left behind.