Students no longer read books: they learn everything on YouTube or by asking ChatGPT. It’s not a lack of curiosity, it’s a change of era. The education that survives will be the one that understands that its students are also customers.
Recently I was on the subway on a Monday morning and the girl next to me was copying, with skill and some anguish, the answers that ChatGPT offered to his chemistry problems. On the screen of his mobile phone the formulas were displayed as if a modern oracle dictated its secrets. She tried to organize them before coming to class.
Days later, with Computer Engineering students, some confessed to me that they no longer read books. “Everything is well explained on YouTube,” they said naturally, as if describing an obvious fact. And some colleagues told me with resignation that they could no longer keep their students’ attention for more than ten minutes. “After that, one told me, I lose them. They leave me, like sand between my fingers.”“.
This is not a disinterested generation. What has changed is not his intelligence, but on cognitive ecosystem. They live in a world where knowledge is consumed as an audiovisual flow: brief, fragmented, immediate. They are used to content finding them, not the other way around. They are children of information abundance, but also of permanent distraction.
For years we have been sold the idea of ”digital natives”, as if they were born with a new mind. But science denies it: they do not learn any other way, they learn in another environment. One where attention is a scarce resource and constant stimulation the norm. Asking them to concentrate for an entire hour in a lecture is like asking them to watch a silent movie in the age of TV series. streaming.
Traditional education, designed for information scarcity, faces the paradox of teaching in times of excess. And the solution is not to disguise teaching as a spectacle, but to make it participatory. The evidence in STEM education is clear: students retain more, pass more, and enjoy more when they learn by doing, discussing, solving problems, and applying what they learn in real time.
The call active learning It is not a pedagogical fad, it is the natural response to a new mental environment. Knowledge is no longer transmitted: is built. The teacher stops being a speaker and becomes a designer of learning experiences. And that requires rhythm, purpose and a narrative that keeps curiosity alive.
Institutions that understand this will also see what many still resist: students are customers. And customers, in any industry, no longer buy a product: they buy an experience. Education is no exception. Universities and schools that segment their audiences well, understand their motivations, and combine Live classes with materials that the student can follow at their own paceoffering the best possible learning and community experience.
Higher education today is experiencing the same revolution as the media or entertainment: that of the transition from transmission to engagement. The challenge is not to compete with TikTok, but to learn from it. Understand their language of rhythm, reward and connection. A good course, like a good series, needs structure, tension, and a sense of progress. Each module should leave the student wanting to know what comes next.
The 21st century teacher cannot limit himself to teaching content; It must provoke the desire to learn. When we achieve that, when students write to us at the end of a subject asking when does the next season startwe will know that education has finally learned to speak the language of its time.
*** José María Cuéllar is academic director at IMMUNE Technology Institute.