People are naturally ignorant and do not know how to think well.

Filling their heads with well-integrated knowledge and inculcating habits of effective thinking requires education, a process which effectively engraves new neural pathways and remakes the child into something else.

Right now the most effective methods we have for that involves repeated mental exercises. For very young children this can be easy, because their minds are still extremely plastic, but as children grow older it grows increasingly painful. Reforging one's brain into something it's not is sharply at odds with our instinct for self-preservation. Once we have become a person, we want to continue being that person. But education remakes us into someone else -- someone better than we were.

Nobody is born with the self-discipline they need to make that happen. Part of the educational process is inculcating that self-discipline. While it is being learned, a teacher must hold them to task to make up for the lack.

If AI is to solve the problem of people being stupid bags of mostly water, it needs to identify the students' points of cognitive weakness, provide them with instruction and exercises which strengthen those points, and hold them to task practicing those exercises over and over and over until weakness becomes strength.

To prevent the student from simply walking away from the AI tutor, the AI tutor would need to hold some kind of leverage over the student, so that walking away is more painful than performing the educational exercises.

This is treading dreadfully close to dystopian AI-apocalypse territory, but that's just an illustration of how nightmarish the educational process can be. If irons in the forge had mouths, they would certainly scream as they are beaten into steel with hammer and fire. So are schools a crucible for transforming students.

Make no mistake, when we talk about AI solving this problem, we are talking about giving AI our children and a forge.