The Great Horse Manure Crisis

I was inspired to write this post by Danny Seals, who sent me a link to yet another utterly idiotic and ill-informed piece by a ‘futurist’ on the future of education.

 I am not going to name names, because the problem is widespread. Instead, let me explain why articles you read about the ‘future of education’, ‘AI teachers’ and ‘Robots in the classroom’ are wrong. In short: people are fixated on the image of a robot lecturing students, regardless of how insanely ridiculous this is. But to understand quite why this is so silly, I need to take you back to the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.

 In 1894 the Times of London reported that in 50 years “every street in London will be buried under 9 feet of manure”, such was the number of horses. London would grind to a halt. But the horse manure crisis never happened. Technology happened, and the crisis evaporated. We got cars.

 This is analogous to the ‘future skills crisis’ that many anticipate – ‘how will we train workers for the jobs of tomorrow?’ they cry. There is no future skills crisis.

 Take a look at the pictures below. On the left is my first computer – a BBC micro B. Back then we were all busily learning programming languages because people thought the future would be full of computers and we would need to know how to communicate with them. Then we invented iPads and the learning challenge evaporated. Next comes voice – and soon we will barely need to read or write*.

 So the central problem with all these pieces about the future of education is they all start with the same hidden premise: education is about how we force information into people’s heads. ‘How will we do it more effectively?’ ‘Will we get robots to do it?’ people ask.

 But if you are thinking like this, the trend is not your friend: the 'future of education' debate is tied up wondering how to force more information into people’s heads where everywhere around them the exact opposite is happening: we google our way through life, we look things up when we need them, we create intuitive interfaces, and guidance systems. In other words, we are creating systems that eliminate the need to learn.

 So I can tell you what the future of education is: we’re eliminating it. There will be performance guidance for everything, for every job, so that employers can tackle the immense challenges of coping with change, competition, and staggeringly low levels of capability. Back in the day, taxi drivers used to have to memorise every street in London. Now they have GPS. Soon it will be automated. We're doing this with aircraft and trucks. Even journalism. Yes, I know it gives us the heebie-jeebies.

 So please – stop writing these silly articles about wizard wheezes for pushing more stuff into people’s heads with 'AI' or 'personalization', or 'gamification', or 'robots'.

I am not saying that people won’t learn (there may even be some formal organisations that help them do that) – but they will learn by doing stuff, not memorizing things. Who on earth is still memorising information!? Content dumping will come to an end. The manure will be gone.

*yes, we will still need programmers and highly-skilled people but fewer with each passing year.