The Goalposts Keep Moving: Who Gets to ‘Futureproof’ Their Children?
Adejumo and Iruka: In the age of AI, tech elites say their children need more agency, something early educators and Black mothers have long advocated.
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If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen the flood of headlines and hot takes about raising kids in the age of AI.
As AI threatens conventional careers, some that their children need agency — choice, risk-taking, problem-solving — in their learning environments. As early childhood education scholars, advocates and Black mothers, this “discovery” evokes frustration, irony and the weary sense of privilege repackaged as innovation.
On its face, this embrace of child-led, relational learning should feel like vindication for those of us who’ve spent decades advocating for for all children. Instead, it feels like watching the goalposts move once more — just as our children were learning to kick.
Let us be clear: Agency in child-rearing is not a Silicon Valley innovation. It is ancient wisdom that colonization, civilization, capitalism and industrialization have spent centuries trying to erase from Indigenous and minoritized communities.
Developmental researchers have always known that children’s learning and human development are fundamentally a, as across the globe foster children’s agency through real participation in community life.
Mayan mothers teach weaving by, rarely forcing compliance. Navajo parents practice non-intervention, without explanation. In Mazahua families in Mexico, the “responsible child” emerges not through coercion but through paired with community responsibility.
Across African societies, similar patterns emerge: embrace the proverb “a single hand cannot nurse a child,” with the entire village participating in children’s upbringing through shared responsibility and collective wisdom. In, children develop through meaningful participation in real community tasks — from caring for siblings to contributing to household economies — learning agency through graduated responsibility rather than artificial instruction.
In other words, in historic Indigenous communities, autonomy and interdependence are not opposites; they co-produce one another in healthy cultural ecologies. Children belong not just to their parents but to the entire community, creating networks of relationships where elders can guide, correct and nurture them — a system that builds both individual agency and communal belonging simultaneously.
It was only with industrialization and the rise of age-graded schools that we began segregating children from real-life’s work, breaking their will to fit them into assembly lines.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Native children were forced into boarding schools to strip them of their languages and communal learning traditions. Enslaved Africans and their descendants were denied the right to assemble or teach their children skills outside plantation work.
In colonized countries like our country of origin, Nigeria, our languages were called vernacular by the colonizers and spanking was the norm for those who dared to speak their dialects in school, while farming and apprenticeships were considered backward.
Now, after decades of being told that standardized tests are the only path into “American Dream” prosperity, elites announce that traditional schooling is obsolete—at least for them. They’re that look suspiciously like the community-based learning that other elites spent centuries systematically devaluing and destroying in our communities.
For years, those of us in early childhood education have been shouting into the void that—it’s the engine of learning. We’ve known that relationships and belonging—not worksheets—anchor learning.
Yet while micro-schools build entire pedagogies around these play-based principles— some with tuition that exceeds many families’ annual income—public schools continue drilling facts into our children.
Black children in U.S. schools face what anthropologist and author Barbara Rogoff calls an “adversarial model”—behavior policing and compliance—while wealthier peers pursue passion projects. The families of venture capitalists can pay where kids cross oceans and “run Airbnbs,” and where teachers coach rather than control. But most families—especially immigrants working multiple jobs and those in generational poverty—can’t gamble on which careers matter or rely on a trust-fund cushion.
For generations, communities of color were told education was the ladder out of poverty. We sacrificed so our children mastered reading, writing, and arithmetic—and learned to code not for “joy” but stability. Yet we remainmost vulnerable when . As we near the top, those who never needed ladders kick them away and declare the game irrelevant.
We cannot assume our children will thrive in an or that their creativity will be rewarded in a society that still sees their skin color first. Public education has not earned our trust: still face disproportionate exclusion, biased discipline, and uneven access to well-prepared educators and high-quality early learning.
Like all anxious parents, we, too, lie awake wondering what world awaits our children. But our fears are compounded by the knowledge that whatever that future holds, they will navigate it as Black men and women in America. We must prepare them to be twice as good to get half as far.
If AI truly makes cognitive work obsolete, embodied skills — creating, building, caring — will matter more. But will our children’s embodied skills be valued equally? History suggests not, unless we act now to dismantle the systems that have always sorted children into winners and losers based on ZIP codes and skin tones rather than potential. We must:
- Protect the time of childhood with opportunities for play in every school day
- Invest in outdoor and community-based learning that connects children to real work and real purpose
- Pay early educators living wages that reflect their expertise in fostering development
- Provide universal child care and paid family leave so all families can afford to engage with their children’s learning
- Fund continuous adult learning—time for rest, reflection, community—so teachers can truly act as guides and co-constructors of knowledge
- Replace one-size-fits-all accountability with culturally sustaining measures of children’s participation, growth, and belonging
These aren’t radical ideas. They are implementations of what research has shown for decades and what Indigenous communities across the globe have known for millennia. But they require something techno-optimist individualism resists: collective investment in all children, not just one’s own.
The question now is whether we’ll let this moment deepen educational apartheid or use it to finally build the equitable, humanizing system all children deserve. As Nelson Mandela reminded us, “The true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children.”
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Tobi Adejumo is a Black immigrant mother from Nigeria who serves as director of movement building at Trust for Learning. A PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Denver and researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, her work bridges research, policy, and lived experience to advance equity for immigrant educators and children.
Dr. Iheoma Iruka is a Black mother, scholar, and founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition at UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. A nationally recognized leader in early childhood equity, and the author of We Are the Change We Seek, her work champions the intersection of research, policy, and practice to dismantle systemic inequities.
