“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”
— Voltaire

I like to think Voltaire would have thrived in the age of AI. After all, the most successful people in this era won’t be those who know the most—they’ll be those who can release what they once knew best.

In a world changing faster than anyone or anything (other than AI itself) can keep up, the real skill isn’t acquiring more knowledge. It’s unlearning what no longer serves us. This isn’t about forgetting. It’s about the courage to let go.

Why Unlearning Matters Now

We talk endlessly about lifelong learning and upskilling. But we’ve neglected something more fundamental: the capacity to release outdated frameworks that now limit us more than ignorance ever could.

Whether you’re an educator, a leader, or a parent, you’re navigating terrain where the rules are shifting, like never before, beneath your feet. AI reshapes work. Job descriptions dissolve and reform. Values that seemed permanent reveal themselves as products of their moment.

Yesterday’s certainties become today’s constraints. Or as Edsger Dijkstra put it: perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

So, we must ask: What assumptions are we still carrying from pre-AI education systems, industrial-age leadership models, parenting scripts written for a vanished world? Which of these act like anchors when we need sails?

Here are my thoughts from the lens of an educator, a leader, and a parent.

For Educators: From Content Mastery to Adaptive Fluency

The traditional classroom model is elegant: teacher delivers knowledge, student absorbs, teacher tests mastery. But when AI can retrieve knowledge instantly and recognize patterns across millions of examples, something fundamental shifts.

The question becomes not “how much do students know?” but “what can they do with what they’re still discovering?”

This requires educators to unlearn deeply embedded beliefs, such as: that content coverage is the highest aim, that students must meet or exceed external standards, that the teacher is the primary source of knowledge, that learning follows a linear path.

Instead, we move toward adaptive fluency—teaching students how to learn, unlearn, and relearn. We cultivate metacognition, creative synthesis, and ethical sense-making in algorithmically-mediated environments.

Gloria Steinem understood this instinctively, when she said, “The first problem for all of us is not to learn, but to unlearn.” In teaching children, we are simultaneously undoing and constructing, modeling the very unlearning we hope to instill.

The most powerful thing an educator can do now is to create spaces where students practice releasing certainty and building comfort with emergence.

For Leaders: Letting Go of Control, Enabling Emergence

Leaders today face a peculiar paradox: we have more data and algorithmic decision-support than ever—yet human judgment and adaptive sense-making have become more crucial, not less.

The old leadership paradigm crumbles. The model of “here’s the five-year plan, I control execution” was built for stability. But stability is increasingly scarce, and we must unlearn the myth of control.

Phil Jackson, who led teams to eleven NBA championships, grasped what many still resist, and he stated it like this, “Leadership is not about forcing your will on others, but mastering the art of letting go.”

In an AI-augmented workplace, this means releasing rigid silos when problems demand fluid collaboration, abandoning predetermined job descriptions that can’t keep pace with change, and creating environments where humans and machines co-create.

Leaders don’t become passive. They become architects of possibility rather than enforcers of plans, scaffolding conditions for emergence instead of dictating outcomes. The leader who can unlearn their attachment to control becomes capable of enabling the collective intelligence that uncertainty demands.

For Parents: Guiding Without Anchoring

Perhaps nowhere is unlearning more emotionally charged than in parenting.

The world our children will inhabit differs fundamentally from the one we grew up in. Yet we parent with scripts inherited from our own childhoods, advice from outdated books, assumptions about “safe paths” that may no longer exist.

This calls for profound parental unlearning: letting go of the roadmap we followed, releasing the career archetypes we relied on, abandoning the belief that “if you do X, you’ll be secure.”

Instead of transferring a fixed map, we help our children build capacity for wayfinding in unmapped territory. We cultivate sense-making in uncertainty, ethical orientation in data-saturated environments, emotional resilience when their peer group includes bots and algorithms, and the confidence to question authority—including ours.

We shift from being the “source of truth” to becoming the “scaffolder of exploration.”

Letting go doesn’t mean withdrawal. We still provide love, values, frameworks, boundaries. But we unlearn the script that says: “I will protect you by giving you all the answers.” Instead: “I will prepare you by helping you ask better questions, by showing you that not-knowing is where wisdom begins.”

Concrete Practices for Unlearning

Audit your assumptions. What in your teaching/leading/parenting originated in a pre-AI era? What are you doing simply because “we always did it this way”?

Create dedicated unlearning time. Schedule regular reflection: What beliefs or methods should I release? What’s constraining me that once protected me?

Model vulnerability publicly. When you say “I used to believe X, but now I don’t,” you teach that unlearning is courageous, not shameful.

Encourage iteration over mastery. Replace “master this module” with “try this, reflect, adjust.” Let children, students, and teams pivot without penalty.

Leverage AI as a partner in questioning. Use it to surface blind spots: “What patterns does this reveal about my assumptions? What biases did I unknowingly build in?”

Create ‘unlearning circles.’ Gather with others to discuss what you’re letting go of. Normalize the discomfort.

Unlearning as the Core Skill of the Next Era

In the age of AI, the enduring skill will be the ability to let go: of yesterday’s certainties, of static job roles, of fixed curricula, of rigid leadership styles, of parenting templates built for a vanished world.

As we release what we once knew best, we make space for what we could become—for children, learners, teams, societies to evolve in ways we can’t predict but can enable.

The future won’t simply reward smart machines. It will reward smart humans who know when to set aside what they know and open themselves to what they don’t yet know.

Let us embrace the great unlearning. Because in that shedding—uncomfortable, uncertain, necessary—lies our possibility for flourishing.