I grew up in post-communist Albania. Between the paradox of being and not being, having and not having. Between order and chaos, collapse and reinvention.

In March 1997, what we still call “Rremujat” – “the Disorder” began.

It is difficult to describe it to someone that did not live through it. I sometimes describe it as a civil war, although this is not quite accurate as there were no opposing groups, frontlines or ideology to protect. Just pure chaos. The government fell. Weapons were looted from military depots. Armed groups appeared everywhere. Institutions stopped functioning. Buildings were vandalized. Gunfire became part of everyday life.

I was in third grade when schools closed overnight. There were continuous shootings in the streets and going outside was not safe. We stayed home. Everyone we knew stayed home. In some ways it was similar to the first days of covid lockdown, except of the gunshots. Gunshots during the day; gunshots during the night; gunshots when we woke up; gunshots when we went to bed.

At this moment, something extraordinary happened. Every morning, the national television station began broadcasting school lessons. A teacher would stand in front of a blackboard explaining mathematics, reading, history. At nine o’clock there might be a math lesson for seventh grade students. At ten, grammar lessons for younger children. The curriculum continued as if the country itself had not collapsed.

At the time, I did not fully understand the significance of what I was watching. To me, it simply felt normal that school should somehow continued. But when I return to this memory today, what strikes me is not the educational improvisation itself. It is the symbolism of it.

In a country where the state had collapsed, where people survived each day in fear, where violence had entered everyday life and life itself lost its meaning in many senses, society still insisted on teaching children mathematics on television.

A teacher standing in front of a blackboard became something much bigger than a teacher. It became a declaration that the future still existed.

Those televised lessons were no simply about the school curriculum, there were about preserving continuity and order in the midst of chaos.

As a child, you do not think in terms of institutions, social order, or civilization. You simply sit in front of the television and follow the lesson because adults tell you that school matters. Only years later do you begin to understand what was actually happening. The country was in chaos, yet society still felt an urgency to educate its children.

Education itself was never only about transferring information. Knowledge and information was taught also in families, community, religion and tradition. Long before modern educational institutions existed, humans already knew how to pass knowledge from one generation to another.

So, perhaps the deeper meaning of educational institutions is that they are infrastructures of continuity. A society teaches its children because it believes there will still be a future waiting for them.

That is what now feels so powerful to me about those memories from 1997. The teacher standing in front of a blackboard while shootings echoed through the city was not simply explaining mathematics.

The message was not only: “Here is today’s lesson.” The deeper message was: “This disorder will end. Life will continue. Your future still matters.”

Education in that moment became an anchor of civilization, an anchor of continuity and future. Because you would not keep teaching mathematics to children, in a society that believed the future had disappeared. The very existence of education assumes continuity, assumes hope for the future.

And maybe that is why schools occupy such a unique role in human civilization. They do not merely produce workers or distribute information. They create orientation, stability and a shared structure with similarities worldwide.

Those television lessons were not only protecting education, they were projecting the hope that society itself would return to order.

And yet, for the first time in modern history, we are entering an era where one of the foundational functions of educational institutions is beginning to destabilize. For centuries, schools and universities were build partly on the principle that knowledge was scarce. If you wanted to learn something, you needed physical proximity to the institution that possessed it. You had to go to the teacher, the university, the library or the laboratory. Access to knowledge was limited by geography, infrastructure, social class, and institutional gatekeeping.

Educational institutions became powerful not only because they produced knowledge, but because they controlled access to it.

The architecture of modern society was built around this scarcity. Expertise was scarce. Information was difficult to obtain. Intelligence itself had economic and social value precisely because it was unevenly distributed. To become valuable, humans needed to accumulate knowledge that others did not possess.

But the internet already began weakening this model and artificial intelligence may fundamentally destabilize it.

For the first time in history, humanity is moving toward a world where knowledge is increasingly abundant, immediate, and personalized. Information no longer lives primarily inside institutions. It exists everywhere and is accessible at nearly any moment.

This challenges the fundamental role of education institutions. But the internet began weakening this model. Because if educational institutions derived much of their authority from controlling access to scarce knowledge, what happens when knowledge itself is no longer scarce?

We still tend to discuss AI as if it were simply another educational tool. A more advanced calculator. A personalized tutor. A productivity assistant that can be integrated into existing systems. But I believe this framing is too shallow.

AI does not simply improve learning inside the current educational model. It challenges one of the central assumptions on which the modern educational system was organized. And perhaps this disruption forces us to confront something important:

Maybe the true value of educational institutions was never only informational.

Maybe that is precisely why those television lessons during the collapse of 1997 felt so powerful in retrospect. Their significance was not merely that children continued learning mathematics. Their significance was that society was still trying to preserve continuity, orientation, and belief in the future.

So what must these institutions become and how should they transform in a time when the main resource being transformed is intelligence itself.

So perhaps the big question for education in the age of AI is no longer:
“How do we give people access to knowledge?”

Maybe the real question is:
“What kind of people do we want to become when knowledge is everywhere?”

Because if AI can increasingly explain, summarize, teach, calculate, translate, and generate information instantly, then schools and universities can no longer define their value only through access to information. And maybe that forces us to remember something important. Maybe education was never only about knowledge. Maybe it was always also about helping humans learn how to live together.

For centuries, schools did much more than teach subjects. They created routines, structure, shared references, identity, and ways of understanding the world. They helped people orient themselves inside reality. And perhaps that becomes even more important in the future.

Because the problem of the next decades may not be lack of information. It may be overload.

Too many answers.
Too many perspectives.
Too much noise.
Too much stimulation.
Too much certainty generated by machines.

In that kind of world, the hardest thing may no longer be finding knowledge, but maintaining clarity.

Knowing what matters.
Knowing what is true.
Knowing what deserves attention.
Knowing how to think calmly in the middle of constant acceleration.

Maybe the most valuable human skill in the future will not be intelligence alone, but human intuition: the ability to navigate complexity not only through data, but through human experience, emotion, morality, and meaning.

The ability to ask meaningful questions.
To think deeply instead of reacting instantly.
To stay human in systems increasingly optimized by machines.

And maybe that is why I keep returning to that memory from 1997.

A blackboard.
A television screen.
Gunshots outside.

And a society still choosing to teach its children.

Because even in the middle of chaos, education was an expression of faith that the future would still arrive.