I guess the whole discussion (in 1963, in 2025), is about 'knowledge acquisition' (or lack thereof). He mentions the Brazilian students memorising 'stuff' without understanding - as a former Brazilian educator, I can tell you that when I was working there in 2010-2020, it hadn't changed, and, to my point, got worse in late years. I think a lot of students care about 'getting a diploma' without actually learning something, but my main concern is about fairness: how could I praise good students from 'devious' students altogether?

The education system is a prime example of Goodhart's Law and I'm so surprised how little it's done to avoid that.

I guess that as long as possessing a piece of paper stating "Mr. White passed all hoops we put in front of them" is a baseline requirement for many jobs nowadays, we will always have this problem.

At least in tech, the piece of paper helps but it's mostly about hobby projects, external contributions, past job experiences and referrals which matter the most.

But in more and more countries even just working at a supermarket requires a high degeee, so the non-academically inclined people will try to keep finding ways to pass with as little effort as possible (and any learning takes effort). So, I can't really blame them.

> why does literally any discussion must have a mention of AI/LLMs?

Your sentiment is right but in this case not applicable.

A Teacher who did not really understand what he was teaching can easily have LLMs generate lectures/notes/etc. and pass it along to students without any thought put into it. A Student on his part can simply have LLMs generate answers for all of his problem sets and pass it along to the teacher.

The above would be a disaster for the overall spread of Science in the Society.

That is one of the points of the essay. You just need the appropriate credentials to qualify as a Teacher (i.e. passing B.Ed/M.Ed etc.) and not necessarily "domain understanding" in the Feynman sense.