This summer, I sat down with the founder of a U.S. edtech company. Their product is used by more than 60 million teachers and students around the world. Over the past year, the team had spent enormous effort weaving AI into every part of the platform. Yet, despite all that work, growth had flatlined. The longer we talked, the more we found ourselves coming back to a paradox neither of us could quite explain.
Parents are willing to spend almost anything on their children’s future. So why are education companies valued so little? In the first half of this year, nearly 80% of global venture funding flowed into AI. Edtech, by comparison, attracted only a tiny fraction of that amount, falling to its lowest level in a decade.
The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Knowledge that once required expensive private tutors is now only a prompt away for anyone with an internet connection. By all accounts, education should be becoming a better business than ever. Instead, the opposite has happened.
After thinking about it for a while, I came to a simple conclusion: AI made knowledge accessible to everyone, but it didn’t make people want to learn. Technology can improve efficiency, lower the cost of learning, and make information almost effortless to access. What it can’t do—no matter how powerful it becomes—is create the desire to know.
Yet much of edtech is still built on the opposite assumption. Teams pour their energy into making better products, believing that if the tool is good enough, people will naturally want to learn. But is that really true? After my conversation with the founder, I realized that before AI, the biggest barrier to learning was not knowing. Today, the bigger barrier is not wanting to know.
Think back to the period when you studied the hardest. Chances are it was during your school years, and not because you loved learning. Most of us were driven by exams, class rankings, our parents’ expectations, or the desire to earn other people’s approval. Once those external pressures disappeared, many people stopped learning altogether. The habit didn’t disappear because knowledge became less valuable; it disappeared because the motivation was never really our own.
So where does that motivation come from? Just watch a child. They ask hundreds of questions every day without anyone forcing them to. They learn faster than anyone else because they genuinely care about the answers. That instinct never really disappears. When learning begins with a question you truly want answered, motivation has a way of taking care of itself.
AI has placed an entire gold mine of knowledge in front of us. Never before has so much information been available to so many people. But a gold mine is only valuable if someone is willing to dig. You can stand on extraordinary wealth and still walk away empty-handed. In that sense, it’s entirely possible to starve on a gold mine.
My hope is that we don’t just inherit this extraordinary mine of knowledge, but hold on to the one thing that gives it any value at all: the curiosity to keep learning.
