Three Movements of Educational Change in the Wake of AI
AI is an accelerant, prompting many educators to finally re-examine the entire education system. Out of this I believe will come three movements of change.
We think we have the kids in our classrooms. If they’re sitting quietly, not causing too much trouble, we think we’ve won the battle. That they are ours, tamed, learning.
But I am here to tell you: you have not.
Most of what you’re seeing is passive compliance: bodies that are sitting quietly, making notes, perhaps even from time to time contributing to class discussion, but whose minds are elsewhere. When I was at school I was a terrible daydreamer, and would often miss entire lessons lost in my head. But there was no exciting, immersive reality outside of school to speak of. I’d watch children’s TV from 3.30 to 5pm (followed by Neighbours), perhaps play out with my friends, then (occasionally) do my homework after dinner.
What I didn’t have is social media, e-sports, Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, TikTok, VR, and any one of a thousand other 3D, 8K, highly social experiences that I could lose myself in when I wasn’t at school.
Children’s communities are now online. Their playgrounds are the Fortnite battles, the Call of Duty multiplayer missions, and the endless stream of comments on influencer accounts. Their world is so utterly enmeshed with the technology they use that they checked out of filling in questions one to ten on a worksheet a long time ago.
However, because they understand the game they need to play, by and large they keep quiet, go through the motions, learn what they need to get through their exams, and focus on what’s important outside of school.
What I am finding, in the schools I work with across the world, is that a shift is happening. It is partly COVID - children did spend a lot of time alone, away from friends, isolated and scared. But that was 2-3 years ago and whilst it is still a factor we shouldn’t keep it at the centre of why we are seeing this change. Children are remarkably resilient creatures.
What I think is actually happening is due to two factors: firstly, students are increasingly questioning why they are still learning the things we were taught thirty or forty years ago when the world is unrecognisable from that time. Why do they have an hour of maths worksheets followed by an hour of history worksheets, and learn so many things that will have no bearing on their lives in the future? What is the point?
(Yes, I dislike worksheets.)
Secondly, they are realising that they can get almost everything they need to succeed with these subjects through Youtube, Khan Academy, and now through AI applications such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Perplexity. With every engaging and adaptive solution that comes online, so the stressed, tired and harassed individual talking at them at the front of the classroom recedes in significance.
Have we totally lost the battle? Perhaps not quite. There are still examples of traditional schools that teach effectively, create well-rounded young people and are supportive, caring and forward-thinking. I would not, nor will I, tarnish an entire profession as out of touch and losing a generation of children.
What I am trying to stress is this: it is not our fault that we are in this position - teachers didn’t invent digital technologies. They have been gifted to us by the tech companies and promoted by the media. That’s not to say that the majority of them aren’t fabulously helpful and have enriched our lives no end. But none of it was our of choice. We are the consumers of these innovations, not the producers.
However - it will be entirely our fault if we continue to ignore the seismic impact they have had, and are having, on children’s lives and minds. We are already seeing the significantly negative impact that social media is having on young people’s image of themselves.
When I was growing up all I had to worry about was comparing myself to a pop star on the cover of a Smash Hits magazine (or in my case black and white images of James Dean and Morrissey). These images were static, ‘real’, and largely unmediated.
Now, not only do we have a flood of Photoshop retouched images with smoothed skin and enlarged breasts, eyes and lips, we have AI generated facial mapping tools like TikTok’s Bold Glamour feature, that turns anyone, in real time, into a significantly more conventionally beautiful version of themselves.
Try it and see, and search for the Gen-Z TikTokers who have posted videos of themselves looking forlorn as they record this idealised vision of themselves and know that they will never be able to reach that vision in reality.
Making the shift
There is a danger that we believe there is nothing we can do to change things and that it is only going to get worse. That we have, essentially, lost an entire generation who will grow up not knowing the boundary between real and fake and who base their identities on a set of unstable, constantly shifting and relative principles, like building onto quicksand. This is deeply worrying and potentially damaging to the future of humanity, as without a foundation, buildings collapse.
We must attempt to answer this challenge and it must happen now. To step up to the plate and propose the opposite: that what AI could offer us is an opportunity to create new educational and social structures, shifting from where we are now, to where we were before the steam engine kicked off the last 200+ years of progress. I am not saying that we should move back into the dark ages, a pre-enlightenment time where we burned women as witches and treated cancer with leeches.
What I believe, however, is that three big changes will occur as a result of AI removing a lot of what we do on a daily basis, and that by harnessing these changes positively, we stand to have much happier and more fulfilled lives, with an education system that truly supports this.
Three Movements of Educational Change
I believe there will be three movements of educational change that will come out of the AI revolution. If handled well they stand to make the entire education system far more suited to the end user (aka the student):
We will see greater democratisation of the education systems of which we are a part, with flattened leadership structures and more ownership and control of schools by all those who benefit from them. By distributing leadership and disaggregating data, we can gain hugely from a shift towards schools that recognise and listen to the value that everyone in the community can bring.
We will see a move from centralised systems to a more decentralised way of organising education, with more control given to those schools serve. This will include students being given ownership of their learning pathways and parents taking ownership of their children’s data through moving the storage of personal data onto the blockchain. This decentralisation will impact how we organise schools, into more localised, community-facing structures, harnessing the best that technology can offer us whilst focusing more attention on looking after the world around us and the people in it.
There will be far greater differentiation and dynamism: through democratisation and decentralisation we will shift away from the traditional, one-size-fits-all model of education to one that is tailored and adaptable to each student’s unique needs, capabilities, and learning styles. AI-powered tools will allow for the curation, dissemination and real-time tracking of student learning, enabling a more nuanced and effective approach to education. This will move even beyond academic ability, taking into account student interests, optimal time of day for learning, and even emotional states, fostering a more holistic and engaging learning experience. Not only will this lead to true differentiation for the very first time, but it will create more inclusive atmosphere that will respect and nurture all abilities and learning styles.
This movement towards democratisation, decentralisation and differentiation is essential if we wish to evolve our education system, and society more broadly. However, there are always risks associated with this, and in my book Re.Generate I explore what these might be and how we can tackle them. The book will be available later this year.
Let’s end with a quote from one of the most important books written on education, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction - how to teach himself. (Freire, 1970).
To Freire, education must not be a process of domination, where the teacher simply transmits knowledge to the student. He argues instead that education should be a “process of liberation, where the student is empowered to think critically and take action to transform the world.” Perhaps now, for the first time, his words from more than 50 years ago can take root and be translated into action. It is surely time.
This excerpt is taken from the book ‘Re.Generate’, to be published later in 2023