[Special Report] AI, High School, and the Experience Gap
How Experience-Based Learning Can Reshape High School for an AI Era
Hi. Today we’re releasing a special report on AI, high school, and what we’re calling the Experience Gap.
I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time, but it has felt especially urgent over the last year. We are at the beginning of a profound shift in what human capacity is required to thrive, economically and civically. There is a lot we do not yet understand, and that uncertainty can feel daunting. Moments like this call for clarity about what we do know, even as so much remains unsettled.
Here is one thing I feel real conviction about. It has never been a better time to be a motivated learner. With AI, anyone with curiosity can learn faster, cheaper, and more flexibly than at any point in history.
At the same time, it has never been more risky not to be one. As AI automates routine work, the roles that remain increasingly require judgment, initiative, and experience. Yet our systems of schooling are still not very good at helping young people build motivation, agency, or a sense of relevance. We ask students to persist without giving them many chances to see why what they are learning matters, or how it connects to the lives they want to build.
What makes this gap so concerning is that many of the entry-level jobs and early career pathways that once helped people develop judgment, intuition, and practical experience are disappearing. What is replacing them often assumes those capabilities already exist. The Experience Gap is the growing distance between what young people are expected to be capable of, and the limited opportunities they have to actually develop those capabilities through real-world experience.
This paper is our first attempt to take that problem seriously, starting with high school. Not because high school can solve everything, but because it is one of the last moments when a formal system can help every student experience what it feels like to identify a problem, ask better questions, marshal resources, and learn their way toward a solution. In a future shaped by AI, building that capacity may be among the most important public goods we can offer, both for economic mobility and for a healthy democracy.
The paper asks a simple but provocative question: what if 50 percent of formal learning in high school were experience-based? Not as enrichment or an add-on, but as a core part of how school works in an AI-shaped world. It also lays out four big shifts required to make that kind of change possible at scale.
This is the first of several bodies of work we plan to do on the experience gap. If this is an area you’re working on, thinking about, or wrestling with, I’d genuinely love to hear from you at allison@humanist.xyz.
If you want to dig into the ideas together, I hope you’ll join us for a digital conversation on February 24th. Sign up here. And please read and share the paper.
Thank you to the Walton Family Foundation for supporting this exploration and for encouraging us to ask big questions about where the world is headed and how we prepare young people to thrive.
Allison