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I have recently been appointed to the board of my younger son’s international school in Beijing. As you may imagine, many of the discussions we are engaged in center around the impact of artificial intelligence on pedagogy. How can teachers use AI as a tool to enhance learning? What skills will be essential for children in a world where the future of work is so uncertain?
What about cognitive offloading, where humans, both children and adults, will begin to outsource an increasing amount of their cognitive functions to machines, possibly rendering them incapable of dealing with complexity and difficulty. Will AI erode the autonomy of the self? Will it empower humans and help make them more effective at their work, or will it denude them of their capabilities, perhaps rendering them irrelevant? What will it mean for their generation to even be human?
What is increasingly clear is that education must rethink its purpose. For generations, schools were built around information scarcity: students memorized knowledge because access to information was limited. That world no longer exists.
We inhabit a world of information abundance, where machines can retrieve and process knowledge faster than any human ever could. If AI can increasingly handle memory, and even analysis, schools must ask a deeper question: what remains uniquely human?
The hours that school students today spend on handwriting and spelling are similarly an anachronism. For future generations, using keyboards and spell checks – let alone pen, paper and dictionaries – will feel archaic. Ongoing technological advances are arriving at the point where the brain can directly interface with intelligent machines. In other words, humans will be able to communicate with machines simply by thinking. Writing may one day, fairy soon, become redundant.
Schools are consequently in urgent need of reorienting their role away from being instructors of Math, Science and English — something YouTube tutorials are already better at than most teachers — toward nurturing the human in their students. The question of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines is an urgent one.
Our anthropocentric view of the world has always put “Man” at the center, differentiating us from other animals by virtue of our use of language, reason and logic. So, what happens when the phone in our pocket is suddenly better than us at all these things? It becomes clear that what still makes us “special” is not memory, writing or knowledge, but our emotional lives. Our passions, grief, longings and other deeply felt experiences.
It is our imagination, intuitions, moral compass, idiosyncrasies, epiphanies and non-transactional kindnesses that schools today need to nurture. They could, for example, offer courses in Unusual World Views: where the emphasis is on thinking unpredictably, out-of-algorithms. Philosophy, with its smorgasbord of human thought from Advaita Vedanta to Epicureanism, Charvaka thought to Stoicism, would be better off being introduced in middle-school, rather than at the university level, as is currently the norm, at least in India.
Other subjects might include Empathy or the art of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Reading the Room or situational awareness is another candidate for a new curriculum where the focus would be on honing the ability to have an accurate perception of what is going on in one’s immediate surroundings, even without it being explicitly articulated.
Then there could be, Sitting with Difficulty. If AI can solve, summarize or shortcut almost anything, the muscle most at risk of atrophy is the one that lets a person stay with a hard problem, an uncomfortable feeling, or a failure long enough to actually learn from it. A curriculum here might involve deliberately difficult problems with no AI assistance permitted, and explicit reflection on what frustration and setbacks feel like and how to move through them, rather than around them.
And perhaps we also need to teach the art of Welcoming Boredom. Children today rarely experience an un-instrumentalized moment. Yet boredom has long been the precondition for daydreaming, for noticing, for the kind of idle mental wandering out of which original thought and epiphanies emerge. A course here would be a provocation: scheduled stretches of nothing, no device and no task, with the explicit goal of teaching children to tolerate and eventually appreciate their own unoccupied minds.
The international school my boys go to already has courses in emotional intelligence from primary school on. To give an example of their curriculum: in first grade they were taught to recognize their feelings using color-coded schemes and then asked to devise solutions for bringing themselves back into the green zone (calm), if they had begun to cross the line into red (anger) or blue (sadness).
Children came up with solutions that ranged from listening to music, to hugging their moms. My favorite was a girl who drew a picture of a fish and declared her “happy strategy” was to eat salmon.
The point is not to be terrified. Panic about humans losing their free will to technology has existed around every breakthrough, from the telegraph to the typewriter. And long before these, when the alphabet itself was ‘new-tech,’ someone as exalted as the Greek philosopher Socrates had been convinced that writing would ‘introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it’, degrading the capacity of humans to remember. Socrates believed that writing would give students the appearance of wisdom without the actuality of intellect.
So, are we truly in danger from our phones? Or is our preoccupation with AI along the historic continuum of moral panics around new technologies? I would venture that the truth lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Technology has rarely been inherently good or evil despite what the techno-utopians or dystopians would have us believe.
My view is that AI will undoubtedly take over more of our mental labor. But as machines become more capable, we are being forced to ask an ancient question with new urgency: what does it mean to be human? The future of education may depend on how seriously schools are willing to engage with that question. Are they listening?
