CONCEPT
The Transmission Model of Education
The dominant paradigm of Western schooling — education as the delivery of knowledge into the student — that AI has rendered structurally obsolete by performing the transmission faster, more accurately, and more personally than any teacher can.
The transmission model conceives education as a process in which content is transferred from those who possess it (teachers, textbooks, curricula) to those who lack it (students). Every institutional structure of conventional schooling — the lecture, the textbook, the recitation, the examination that tests recall — was built to manage this transfer. Egan spent his career arguing the model was misconceived from the start: that education is not content delivery but the development of cognitive capacities that allow the mind to engage with content. The AI moment has made his argument unavoidable. When a machine can transmit any content instantly and personally, the transmission model has lost its rationale. What remains is the question Egan was asking all along: what should education develop, if not the mere acquisition of facts?
In The You On AI Field Guide
The transmission model's persistence has been institutional rather than intellectual. Its inadequacy has been visible