Survival of the Fittest : Endurance of Schools

People often ask if technology will make schools obsolete. Despite what the tech universe may have told us, one can say that it’s not happening any time soon. The contextual basis for this opinion is quite simple: It hasn't happened yet. When radio became ubiquitous, smart people thought it would make schools obsolete. It didn’t. Neither did slide projectors, VCRs, educational TV, PCs, the Internet, or iPads, despite similar ambitions. Of course, this time it is different, say the guardians of technology, but, guess what, we’ve heard that one before. Schools have existed in a recognisable form for thousands of years as they speak to a basic human drive - social connection.  Gadgets may change, but schools as organisations are here to stay.

The more proximate reason for believing that schools will endure is the response to the pandemic. In March 2020 India began a gigantic two-year involuntary experiment: Compelled by COVID, all schools moved to providing learning at a distance. Although the exact implementation may have varied, the common factor was that students stopped learning at school and started learning at home. Are we aware of a single school which chose to continue that model after the end of the panic? Everyone came back to school. Much of the discussion surrounding technology centres on what is possible, but human behaviour is driven by what is preferable. The pandemic experience proves incontrovertibly that people prefer to learn at school

A Predictable Future (?)

The current wave of technology, driven by machine learning, is different and will transform our practice more profoundly than before. Unfortunately it is difficult to quantify the likely effect with any confidence. Estimates of the overall impact of AI on our societies range from ‘not very much' to ‘the total extinction of the human race when the machines take over’. With such a range of predictions, the likelihood of correctly anticipating the impact of AI is very small. For this reason, trying to guess the future and prepare for it now appears ill advised. For example, we have been told for decades to produce more computer programmers, yet now we read that AI will do all the coding and we don’t need programmers after all. It is a mistake to base our current practice in schools on speculation about what the future might bring.

Shifting Priorities

That does not mean we cannot speculate at all about what the future holds. In my view, the impact of machine learning will be first to change how we teach the same material, then it will change what we teach and, in the distant future, will probably change who we teach. In the short term, curriculum will largely be unchanged, but new tools driven by AI will alter how we teach it: It is not too much of a stretch to foresee individual AI tutors, for instance.

In the short term, curriculum will largely be unchanged, but new tools driven by AI will alter how we teach it: It is not too much of a stretch to foresee individual AI tutors, for instance. The role of teachers will shift from supplying cognitive feedback to managing motivation, stimulating curiosity, and providing social context.

In the medium term, curriculum will change as technology makes some skills obsolete. Some of the earliest schools taught students how to stamp characters onto clay tablets with cut reeds; we no longer teach this because it is no longer useful. When machines are doing all the mathematics and science what really will be the need to continue the compulsory teaching of those subjects? This does not mean that mathematics will disappear but it will be learned, like it was in the classical past, as a preference rather than as a necessity.

Conclusion

We should not base our view of education on the unknown future. Instead, our pedagogy must be grounded in human constants, such as our relationship with nature, our need for social connection, and our struggle to understand ourselves. Our goal must be to meet the needs our students have now, not to guess what they may need in the future. Next year, phones will be better but people will be the same.