Agentic AI and the Future of Personalized Education

In everyday life, we often find that people understand and interpret things differently. I feel this is one of the most underrated facts, yet it’s obvious to everyone, especially in a professional working environment. Because of these differences, people develop career paths differently and at different paces. Not to mention how kids progress through academic areas.

What if there are no academic standards to define what kids should know at different age groups?

I don’t need godly machine learning to predict that the outcome would be controversial; parents will find it odd, since we normally associate seniority with being smarter. This core curriculum offers multiple benefits, including guidance on how adults should teach kids so they have a proper working knowledge and sound judgment to live their lives. However, one drawback of this curriculum is that it is carelessly treated as a means to an end, the level that kids must pass and follow in the footsteps of. This imaginary standard marginalized kids who don’t perform as their peers in the same group do.

In each classroom, kids progress through courses differently, as adults do when navigating life. But for students, the best-case scenario is that they’re forced by friends, parents, and teachers to take classes. Not everyone has this luxury; think of a student whose family is already on the edge. Why would you encourage a kid to go through the trouble of schooling if they can start earning now? This is where two Nobel laureates proposed the “Teaching at the right level” project, which aims to educate students at their current level. Their main idea is that kids don’t perform poorly because they’re stupid; they just need personalization. So, they are recruiting volunteer teachers from the communities to teach the kids based on their current level. Right now they’re scaling worldwide, from India to Africa.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the scaling of this operation. Difficulty controlling the quality of volunteer teachers is one of them. Finding a location for kids to teach. This physical format required a limited time for students to learn. There is an alternative approach worth considering: adopting Agentic AI to teach kids. The advent of agentic systems allows AI to take action as a teacher could, but better, where we can have an AI teacher for every student, as their personal teacher. It can track, analyze, and recommend the learning steps they should take based on their learning style and performance.

One thing I know for certain: the real promise of AI in education is not making students learn faster, but allowing them to learn at the pace that makes sense for them that teachers couldn’t.