How AI is already changing the Education System

And in more surprising ways than you think...

Welcome back to Dr Eliza Filby's newsletter. Stick around and you’ll find all my latest insights, essays and research into generational evolution how we can understand the world of our parents, ourselves and the future world of our kids.

This week’s edition:

1. What is the future of education in the 21st century?
2. How Gen Alpha are making their own pocket money
3. Can we really blame Gen Z for being terrified of the telephone?

Saludos desde Madrid

Last week I was in Madrid speaking at a Google conference on the future of education. It was a fascinating and immersive event, with the room full of bold and creative thinkers about the ways in which learning is changing, and has to change. Gen AI played a big role in the content, understandably, but it was also a chance to focus on the human and the personalised elements of a rounded, effective and modern education.

For many of us, AI is still in the novelty phase of new technology. We can entertain and surprise ourselves with it. For some, it’s already an ingrained part of our working life - distilling large volumes of text or synthesising arguments. And you can be sure that for a large number of children it’s already a go-to homework aide and even more so, undergrads. Surely we need to be less worried about students relying on AI answers, and more focused on teaching young people to use AI effectively and intelligently?

I was at the Google conference talking about how different generations have experienced different educational developments, from the rise of High School for the Boomers to Gen Alpha (2010-2025) and the pandemic. I was also grateful to share a project that I’ve been working on for three years with my business partner, Charlotte Riley, founder of WonderWorks Nurseries, looking at the future of education: “A New School Thought”. Our project is global in scope and holistic in approach and seeks to answer a fundamental question that I, as a parent, want answered: how can we create an education system that is befitting the 21st century? (and who better to ask than 21st century pupils themselves).

One thing’s for sure: things are moving quickly. One private school in the UK has already launched an AI-powered chatbot to assist staff and pupils . The head teacher explained that the ‘AI principal’ has been developed to have a wealth of knowledge in machine learning and educational management, with the ability to analyse vast amounts of data.

Policy makers must also be alive to the risk that AI could exacerbate educational inequalities. It’s all well and good for a ￡36,000 per year private school to embed AI into school life, but the extraordinary potential of this technology should not be off limits to those in the state sector or from less privileged backgrounds. Finally if, as expected, AI comes to play a bigger and bigger part of a child’s educational journey, how does the assessment process need to change? Forget coursework and maybe even written exams and shift to oral assessments?

Schools may well find ways to enhance their productivity and efficiency via AI, just as other businesses do. I was at an event this month where a senior executive from a global firm explained that she had seen Generative AI take six seconds to perform a task that ordinarily took a human team six months to complete. When we hear that we think of jobs lost; but surely we should be thinking of new things that have to be learned ….and from a young age. The pandemic forced many parents (and probably more students) to take a hard look at what they were learning; well, the fact is that AI will only further undermine the old system of learning by rote. Millennials, parents of Gen Alpha, are particularly sceptical having been through the conveyer belt themselves. In a recent survey only 12% of Millennial parents in the UK want their kids to attend university. Is it really surprising given their own experience of this sink or swim education culture left them overeducated, in debt and underpaid? There is a new consensus forging within the various stakeholders of the education system and it is absolutely something to feel excited about rather than feared.

And yet, in the UK right now, the government’s biggest education reform of the year is to ban mobile phones from the classroom. Such a move feels a bit like banning the horse and cart just as the motor car takes off.

The Reading Room

1. AI, however impressive, is still only as good as its source material; the internet. It can impress us and amuse us as it turns our descriptions or ideas into beautiful imagery or designs, but as things stand there’s a risk that such generative tools actually perpetuate stereotypes that exist within the foundations of their ‘knowledge.’ A fascinating article in Rest of World looks at this issue and the biases that AI results can be based upon: How AI is creating a stereotyped world . The article notes that “Bloomberg found that [AI-generated] images associated with higher-paying job titles featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most professional roles were male-dominated.” Their own analysis “shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too.” This ought to be included in any educational approach towards AI.
2. Gone are the days when children were limited to doing a paper round or washing cars to earn pocket money. A growing number of youngsters are now running their own businesses online to earn extra cash, according to Visa . Almost 80 per cent of children under 13 earn money, with half using technology to generate income and a quarter using social media, says the payment provider. Mehret Habteab, a vice president at Visa, says: “Our research shows that children as young as eight are already finding creative ways to earn money.” Hats off to the kids, I say.
3. I can’t tell you how often I hear people bemoan the fact that their younger employees are terrible at talking on the phone. There are good reasons for this; they grew up answering Facetime rather than a landline. Now a study confirms that a third of Gen Z adults find calls ‘awkward’ and 24 per cent would never just phone someone out of the blue. In fact, 36 per cent reckon the bulk of the phone calls they make are trying to get hold of their mates on a night out. The poll found 73 per cent would rather catch up on WhatsApp, iMessage or Snapchat than speak on the phone. I remember a cartoon strip in a business paper not long ago, showing an impatient Gen X manager demanding to know if their Gen Z team member had spoken to a client yet… the Gen Z’er replies “they’re not responding to my voice note.”

The inheritance Trap

This week has been slow when it comes to making book progress, in fact non-existent as I just haven’t had the time alongside client events, and I’m stuck on the chapter about financial support in early adulthood. I may not have had much time to put pen to paper but I have kept up my research, and here’s something that caught my eye.

Recent work by neuroscientists and psychologists point to growing scientific evidence for the condition of kidulthood (the delayed route into adulthood and the fact that many of us are taking longer to hit the life stages traditionally associated with maturity). Historically, it was believed that the brain was fully developed by early teenage years, but now there is an emerging body of work suggesting that an individual brain keeps maturing well beyond 18.? Psychologists who have traditionally worked on the definition that a child is anyone under 18 are now being encouraged to redefine the boundaries up to the age of 25, leading to interesting debates on the voting age for example. Can it be justified to lower it to 16, when brains are developing at a slower pace than they once did?? This is partly down to psychological research pointing to the continual development of emotions and hormones in the body beyond 18, but also to neuroscientists who have pointed to evidence that the prefrontal cortex which determines emotional maturity, self-image and judgement continues to mature until the mid-twenties.

On the road…

This half term (yes, I am governed by the school year) I’ve delivered speeches and workshops to name drop a few: the African Counsel at Clifford Chance; the partners at Carey Olsen; PWC Ireland; PWC UK; Insurance firm Canopius; bankers at BNP Paribas; Wesfarmers in Australia; and Google in Madrid. I’m exhausted but also super enlivened by it all, especially when it comes to the debate around A.I. and what it will mean for the future of work. Do get in touch for workshops, speeches, and my new library of online courses on the multi-generational workforce. More news on this soon!

Thanks for reading

Eliza