Robots, no set exams, artificial intelligence: is this the future of education? Angus Cater asks three public-school heads how they’re preparing pupils for a radically different world to the one their parents knew.
THERE have only been three education revolutions during the past three to five million years and much that goes on in schools and universities today, technology notwithstanding, would be recognised by a student from the year 1600. This is the premise put forward by leading educationalist Sir Anthony Seldon in his latest book.
In The Fourth Education Revolution, the former Master of Wellington College reasons: ‘The teacher or lecturer today remains the dominant presence… students are organized into groups by age; class size typically varies between 20 and 50; the day is divided into the teaching of different ‘subjects’… teachers and lecturers prepare students for, oversee and mark regular tests and periodic exams.’
In South Downs, the David Hare play set in a Woodard school in 1962, the education is described as being ‘put here to serve an empire which no longer exists’. Most of this will be swept away by the fourth education revolution, created through the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) plus augmented reality and virtual reality.
The future is already here. Huge strides have been made to replace tasks that are currently done by humans with technologically advanced machines that, increasingly, are being made to respond like humans. It’s unlikely that they will ever reproduce the subtlety of human emotional responses, but they can do an awful lot that a person does—and do it rather better.
Sir Anthony, now vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, and his co-writer, Oladimeji Abidoye, argue that this will transform education. They quote a teacher, Simon Balderson, from the Times Educational Supplement: ‘AI will manage data for each pupil, ensuring that work is always pitched at exactly the right level… it will be possible for lessons to be delivered by the best teachers and most knowledgeable subject specialists in the world.’
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