Imagine two circles in a Venn diagram. We are looking to see if there is any overlap.
In circle one is Artificial Intelligence (AI).
OpenAI’s ChatGPT3 was released late in 2022. In early 2023 schools and universities where panicking. “How will we stop students from cheating?” Schools and universities immediately banned the technology to buy time to figure out what to do—reactive.
Well, the Pandora’s Box is open. You cannot put the Genie back in the bottle. Generative AI is here to stay, and it’s getting more powerful by the day.
Here we are in August of 2024 and ChatGPT5 is about to be released. This is what it will bring:
“ChatGPT5 will be a state-of-the-art language model that makes it feel like you are communicating with a person rather than a machine. It’s not like that this model is going to get a little bit better, it’s going to be better across the board (Readwrite, 8 August 2024).”
In a mere two years we have gone from GPT3, to GPT4, to GPT5. That’s a faster timeframe Apple used to release their next generation of iPhone, which actually didn’t bring the significant improvements each GPT release does.
Have a look at what is happening in the robotic world. Figure 01 was released in March of 2024. Figure 02 was released in August, a mere five months later, the world's first commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot. Figure 02 “brings together the dexterity of the human form and cutting-edge AI to go beyond single-function robots and lend support across manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, and retail.” At that rate of development, Figure 03 will be released before the year’s end and will be hard to tell if it is human or not.
This is the world of accelerations, the Age of AI. One circle in our Venn diagram.
The second circle in the proposed Venn diagram is our schooling system. Is there any overlap?
Increasingly we are seeing that our schooling system is stuck in the 19th century, with headlines like the one in The Australian on 14 August 2024, “Epic Fail: Students failing NAPLAN fast” and governments looking backwards, reverting to approaches like direct teaching, or explicit instruction, to solve a problem that has been staring people in the face for two decades now. Money has been thrown at schools, interventions have been offered, new policies introduced, but all for naught. The decline in PISA and NAPLAN results continues unabated. Why?
We are starting to see some intersection of the two circles in the Venn diagram. Some schools are working hard to look at AI and its use in education. But what worries me is that while these schools (and big education companies like Pearson) are bravely looking at how they can use AI in learning, they are just looking at AI as a new tool for current (19th century) learning, just like we saw when the calculator was introduced in the 60s. They aren’t thinking about the more important question, “what should students be learning now that AI is here?”
Some schools are adopting personalised AI tutors for students, a fabulous idea but the AI tutors are being used to teach students what has always been taught, for example, ChatGPT 4 can teach Pythagoras theorem. In the Age of AI do young people even need to know Pythagoras? Now, I am not suggesting Pythagoras isn’t a valuable piece of content, but think back to when you were at school, did you ask the teacher, “Miss/Sir, why are we learning this, when will I ever use it?” If we struggled to see the relevance of what we were learning when we were at school, what do you think our current young people think when they can open the ChatGPT App on their phone? Do you really think those young people will be engaged in class with learning that seems even less relevant than it did when we went to school?
Does our AI circle intersect in any meaningful way with our current industrial model of schooling circle? What needs to happen is not an intersection of the two worlds, but a transformation of what was relevant but is no longer.
What needs to happen is not a Venn Diagram approach—schools looking for opportunities to bring AI into our current schooling system—but a concentric circle approach where we allow AI to be the disrupter and we redesign our education system. Let’s not be reactive to AI, let’s use its arrival as an opportunity to be proactive.
This is not just Paul Browning saying this. People across the globe have been saying it for years now. Professor Yong Zhao, the world-renowned educator just published an article “Artificial Intelligence and Education: End the Grammar of Schooling.”
I have pulled a few pertinent paragraphs from that article:
"Too much has been written and spoken about artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, in education. Since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI has taken the central stage in educational discussions. Numerous conference presentations, journal articles, and books have appeared, all trying to suggest, recommend, and predict the future of AI uses in education. But most of the discussions, regardless of their scholarly quality, are primarily focused on using AI in the traditional arrangement of schools or following the “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). The assumption is that everything the traditional school has operated with shall remain the same: curriculum and curriculum standards, age-based grouping, fragmented knowledge or subjects, standardized assessments, and teacher-centered classrooms. AI tools, according to most of the advice, are to be incorporated into teaching by teachers just like previous technologies.
What if we consider education in the age of AI without thinking about the existing schooling system? We know that schools are extremely resilient social organizations. They have not changed much since their conceptualization in the nineteenth century despite numerous efforts.
The new type of education should focus on developing great individuals instead of average members of a workforce. To develop great individuals, we must consider the starting point of each child. As mentioned before, every child is a young specialist when they arrive at school. Every child has strengths. No matter where they come from, every child is better at something and worse at others.
In the age of AI, the first thing students need to do is to find problems worth solving because when they enter the society, they need to create value for others using their unique greatness.
Today, everyone needs to have an entrepreneurial mindset as everyone has the potential, opportunity, and perhaps necessity to create solutions to problems with the assistance of AI.
Teachers are still needed but their role would change dramatically.
Zhao is right. Governments and educators need to get their head out of the sand and realise pretty quickly that the age of “grammar schooling” is on its very last breaths. No amount of direct teaching, public humiliation of teachers, or money is going to fix a system that is no longer relevant. NAPLAN is never going to improve with the current system. But NAPLAN results will improve if we re-engage young people in their learning.
Neither Zhao, nor I are not suggesting that we throw “the baby out with the bath water” but schools have to change what and how they teach to remain relevant. Employers across the globe, highlighted by the World Economic Forum, are saying that the number one thing they look at in a new employee is their character, closely followed by their skill set, and not just any skills, but the ones that cannot be performed by AI and robotics, like creativity. A distant criterion is the person’s qualifications. Why then, does our education system primarily focus on a young person achieving qualifications to the detriment of the development of their character and skills?
Surely an education should be setting a young person up for a life of thriving.
The Age of AI will disrupt every part of the life we know, including schools. The Genie is out of the bottle. There is no going back. Putting our heads in the sand doesn’t make it go away. Don’t let the AI disruption just happen to schools and schools react, like they reacted with the release of ChatGPT3. Let’s be proactive and use this as an opportunity before it is too late.
This is Vivedus.
Vivedus works with forward-thinking leaders to adapt teaching and learning activity for the development of creative intelligence. It’s this reshaping of teaching practice that makes it possible for your school to be proactive and effectively prepare young people to thrive in the AI era. Get in contact if you would like to learn more about working with us.
www.vivedus.com/contact
