Earlier this year, I became CEO of McGraw Hill. Within days, the question arrived—as it always does: Aren’t you terrified of what AI will do to your industry?
My answer: not even a little.
Nowhere is that truer than in education. Here’s why.
Learning isn’t a data problem. It is physical, social, and emotional—shaped by age, culture, and even what happened at recess. No algorithm captures that. Only a teacher does.
Our brains don’t just store knowledge—they physically rewire around it. Synapses coil, expand, connect, and rearrange every second of every day. That means every student walks into the classroom with a literally different brain than they had yesterday. With a subject like Algebra 2 alone, there are 2384 potential knowledge states. An effective teacher must navigate trillions of distinct learning pathways to comprehension—in real time, for 20 or 30 kids at once.
The best teachers don’t consciously calculate any of this. They just know their students—their strengths, their struggles, the mood they walked in wearing, and exactly which approach will make something click. It’s why they get goosebumps when a kid looks up and says, “I get it.” No LLM has ever felt that. No LLM ever will.
This is especially true in education. Pedagogy shifts by zip code. It shifts by instructor. It shifts by the look on a child’s face at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. What we actually need is a new generation of teacher-centric tools—built for educators, not as replacements for them—that customize learning at the individual level and finally blow up the one-size-fits-all model that has held education back for generations.
That’s the work we’re doing. The industries of the next 50 years—space exploration, robotics, bioinformatics, nanoparticle manufacturing, quantum computing—will demand skills we haven’t fully imagined yet. Education has to keep pace. AI is helping: machine learning has helped teachers identify comprehension gaps for decades, and now LLMs are powering personalized content, adaptive labs, and immersive games—not to answer questions for students, but to give teachers better tools to ask them.
The complexity of developing human intelligence doesn’t just exceed any AI model ever built. It exponentially dwarfs all of them combined. That’s not a reason to fear this moment. That’s a reason to be more excited about education than at any point in history—and to make sure the humans at the center of it have everything they need to make the most of it.
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