⑥ Saying Goodbye to Cheap Tickets

Looking back at the five essays in this series, they all converge on one sentence: knowledge and education are not the same thing. When AI taught me robotics in two weeks, that was knowledge. When I asked a student heading in the wrong direction, "Are you sure that assumption holds?" that was education. What AI does best is knowledge. What it still cannot do is education. But we have treated these as the same thing for so long that universities have been built on the premise that delivering knowledge is the same as educating people.

This premise still holds firmly in people's minds, even though reality has already moved past it. And that is where a dangerous illusion takes root: the belief that AI will make education cheaper and more equal.

What AI replaces is knowledge delivery. One professor standing before seventy students, transmitting the same content at the same speed. We called it education, but it was never really that. It was, however, cheap. Now that AI has taken over this cheap part, what remains? Only the expensive part. Small-group mentoring, correction of thinking, close feedback. This is what universities should be doing in the age of AI. And it costs money. A great deal of it.

In LABA, one professor works with four students. To teach the same number of students this way, you would need fifteen times as many professors. No matter how advanced AI becomes, the work of correcting a student's thinking and setting their direction can only be done by a person, and a person can only attend to a few at a time. This cost cannot be optimized away. On top of that, the people who can do this work are scarce, and no system exists to produce more of them. The costs compound.

Knowledge is getting cheaper. Education has always been expensive. But society does not recognize the difference.

Consider this: in Korea, premium puppy daycare costs roughly two million won per month. University tuition, spread across the year, comes to less than 600,000 won. People pay for puppy daycare willingly, not because anyone forces them, but because they perceive its value. When people say university tuition is too expensive, it is because they do not perceive the value of what the university provides.

Why not? Because, and I may draw criticism for saying this, most people have never experienced real education. Not students, not parents, not the people who make policy. From middle school onward, they received knowledge through rote instruction. In university, they received more of the same. Having never experienced anything else, they cannot recognize its value. No one willingly pays for something they have never seen.

This is not only a university problem. Can a national entrance exam measure a student's real capability? Can quantitative KPIs capture a person's true ability? These methods are cheap and convenient, but they measure form, not substance. Real assessment is expensive. And this society has consistently chosen form over substance.

Perhaps this was an unavoidable inheritance. When a country goes from extreme poverty to developed-nation status in forty years, speed is survival, and form is faster than substance. Sort millions of students quickly. Process thousands of learners cheaply. Measure everything by numbers. As long as the music was playing, everyone kept dancing. Universities delivered knowledge, students collected credits, employers screened by degrees. No one questioned the arrangement because no one had to.

AI is when the music stops. And when it does, we discover that the chairs; real educational capacity, the ability to develop thinking rather than deliver information; were quietly removed while everyone was dancing. The problem is that the people who succeeded in this game of musical chairs are now designing the next generation's education. People who were sorted by exams, graded by lectures, and promoted by metrics are now making education policy, freezing tuition, and calling 500-person lectures "innovation."

People who have only ever experienced form are reproducing form.

The same pattern operates well beyond education. Parents spend millions on cram school tutors who promise exam shortcuts. People watch a few minutes of a self-proclaimed expert on YouTube and believe they've learned something. Viral trends flare and vanish; the next sensation replaces the last. The same pattern of consuming what is fast and stimulating, and discarding it when the novelty fades, is operating in education too.

And here is what frightens me most. These people are not choosing form over substance knowingly. They genuinely believe form is substance. I once met a lawyer, a graduate of Korea's top university, working at a major firm. She told me proudly that she still solved college entrance math problems every day. She saw this as proof that she never stopped studying. I found it baffling. Entrance exam problems are exercises in memorization and pattern repetition. They have nothing to do with intellectual growth. Yet one of the most credentialed people in this society could not tell the difference.

In accounting, there is a principle called Substance over Form: look at economic reality, not legal appearance. It is one of the first things taught in business school. And yet, ironically, our society seems to have forgotten this principle entirely when it comes to education.

For people who succeeded through form, form is substance. People who do not know the play is a play are staging the next one. And turning on the lights and ending the performance is far more expensive than any of us imagine.