Vocational schools do exist and they are useful but that's not what we are concerned about. People who cheat not to learn useful skills simply spend their time and money.
I'm not sure this is so significant. Humans naturally communicate and synthesize information. The school system is like a stick that pokes and prods the tip of the iceberg to try to nudge it here or there. By comparison, people's interests, skills, and drives play such an overwhelming role that I think we could chop off several years off the standard education curriculum and be better off.
I would argue the main limitation isn't education, but the opportunity for a student to pursue what their instincts are telling them to pursue. This is difficult today because school is designed for scale at the expense of being one size fits all. This is because teachers are a limited resource, not because it's the ideal way to do things. AI has the potential to provide more targeted education, where different students could take wildly different paths.
Why just use the written word via essays? You could use other forms of media such as video, physical art, or maybe programming to teach this as well. The five paragraph essay isn’t the only game in town!
It will go the same way. You need to understand the basics (to various degrees depending on the direction of your education), then learn how to use the new tools we are creating.
Honestly, I'd prefer we treat this as an opportunity to introduce tight feedback loops into essay writing the way we do with programming. Then evaluate the end result as a whole rather than a way to nitpick grammar rules.
While you likely always have a calculator with you which can do division much more quickly than you can do long division, if you want to teach students more advanced math, it is nonetheless useful to have previously taught them long division of numbers, so that you can teach them long division of polynomials.
If students haven't learned how to do long division of decimals, and how that works, it is harder to teach them to do long division of polynomials.
Of course, nowadays there are computer programs which can do long division of polynomials more quickly than a person can, but this is just an example.
Suppose there are a sequence of levels, where for each level n, it is much easier to teach someone level n+1 if they already have an understanding of level n. If computers can do levels up to level k faster than humans can, it may still be useful to start teaching someone at level 1 and then proceed to level 2, and so on, even though computers can already do those levels, until finally it is time to teach them level k+1 which we have not yet managed to teach computers to do.
You're missing the point. Why are we making them achieve progress on something that is being trivialized by AI? Let them use AI as a complementary tool and test them on something that requires measurable human skill. If this is difficult it's a sign that perhaps you're not teaching anything valuable.