Aldridge Enterprise & Entrepreneurship Conference

Reimagining Education for a Reimagined World

Thursday 29th November 2018

Sir Anthony Seldon Vice-Chancellor

University of Buckingham

Metal & coach workers pose in front of the Benz & Co factory in Mannheim.

“AI is coming. To understand the stage we are with Its arrival, we can draw an analogy from the car Industry in 1886. Karl Benz had just invented the Internal combustion engine. People had no idea how the invention would take off, or that it would transform human life across the planet. The comparison is wrong though in one respect. AI is far more wide-ranging than the car, and will carry humans much further.”

AI is infinitely seductive. It will know us better than our best friends, our parents, our partners. It probably already does. Under the guise of plausibility, is it opening our eyes, shielding our sight, or blinding us?

“AI will be 'either best or worst thing' for humanity” “Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation” Steven Hawking

“Artificial intelligence is the biggest risk we face as a civilisation and needs to be checked as soon as possible” Elon Musk

The First Revolution - The Dawn of Learning some five million years ago

Logical The Second Revolution – Organised Learning 6000 years ago, cities sprung up on four rivers

The first schools and the first universities

The first University, Bologna, 1088

The Third Revolution – The Printing Press

and mass education at the time of the Industrial Revolution

We are still living in the third education revolution model

Our schools are fundamentally the same as in 1600 – teachers at the front, children in rows, teacher exposition, writing on board at the front of the class, homework, exams, marking, grades, rankings, reports, teachers complaining about workload, parents complaining about heads…

Until…

The Fourth Revolution – AI

AI/digital is already transforming

• Transport

• Shopping

• Law firms

• Accountancy

• Agriculture

• Banking

• Healthcare

The British Government understands

• The impact of AI on transport, health, industry etc.

• It fails to understand the impact of AI on education

• And on the jobs that education is preparing our young for

• And on the kind of skills that the young need to cope

Why are our schools not doing an even better job for our students, teachers and country?

Because our ministers, officials, MAT and LA leaders, education departments at universities and our education experts are influenced overwhelmingly and without fully acknowledging it by:

• The Past Not

• The Future

Five enduring problems with the factory/third education revolution

model

1. Failure to achieve social mobility

2. One size doesn’t fit all – age not stage

3. Teaching drowned out by administration

4. Narrow focus on just cognitive ability

5. Homogenisation not individuation

AI will address all five problems

5. Homogenisation by learning to individuate each student, which will help their mental strength and mental health

1. Social mobility by an “Eton education” for all

2. “Stage” not “age” by personalised learning/AI teachers

3. Admin burden by enhanced teacher time effectiveness

4. Narrowness by learning across all 8 aptitudes and multiple intelligences

Our schools are preparing students brilliantly – for the twentieth century

What are schools for? • Prepare students for University?

• Prepare students for work?

• Prepare students for life and family?

• Prepare students for meaning and happiness?

What kind of intelligence are schools developing and is it still fit for purpose?

What is intelligence?

The third education era had a very narrow, mean, and limiting understanding of intelligence which is completely out of date in 2018.

Narrowly defined in 1912 as intelligenzquotient, first used at the

University of Breslau

Logical

Linguistic

Social

Personal

Moral

Spiritual

Physical

Cultural

We are not even preparing our school students for the world of work.

• Oxford Martin School 2013

• David Deming - Harvard working paper 2015

• Richard and Daniel Susskind – The future of the professions 2015

• McKinsey Global Institute January 2017

• IPPR, Carys Roberts, 2017

• PriceWaterhouseCoopers March 2017

• Oxford Martin/Pearson/Nesta 2018

Focus Needed

• Schools need to take AI (and VR, AR and MR) much more seriously

• AI will transform classrooms and schools utterly within twenty five years

• They will transform learning and administration

• We need to emphasise the human skills

The School Journey

Pastoral

Social

Lessons

Year 13 Year 1

Skills

Libraries

Admin

Admin

Comms

Comms

Tests

Sport Arts Job Social

Personal

Assessments

Bro

ade

r B

enef

its

Aca

dem

ic C

ore

AS 18.11.12

Exams/Tests

Co-curricular

Transformative

Very significant

Little/none

Key – Impact on Digital

Five levels of teaching

1. Preparing materials

2. Organising the learning spaces

3. Presenting the material to engage students

4. Assessing student learning and giving feedback

5. Preparing students for terminal assessments and write reports

Harbingers of the future

AltSchools

Summit public schools

School of One

Khan Lab School

Riverbend School, Chennai

We are not preparing school students well enough for the world of university.

The five examples of dismembered universities

1. The end of the lecture hall at the University of Northampton

2. The ‘C-Campus’ or bilateral/trilateral degree

3. Virtual degrees or ‘nanodegrees’ from Udacity

4. The Blockchain, the University of One and Woolf University

5. No universities at all

We need AI machines to teach our students to become more fully human - the education system currently deploys humans to teach our

young to become more like machines.

Aldridge Enterprise & Entrepreneurship Conference

28th November 2018