When we evaluate the potential impact of AI in education, as has almost always been the case with educational reform, we merely speculate, timidly, on what school could look like in a not too distant yet seemingly utopian future.
Our collective reticence, I think, mainly stems from the fact that we are keenly aware that schools should undergo a radical transformation. This is a change of such a magnitude that it contradicts nearly everything we currently hold dear, and that, if anything, the advent of AI is a kind of ticking bomb that compels us to prepare students for a future that is very different from the one we have envisaged so far.
As usual, context is paramount in schools, and this definitive evolution of schooling will take different forms and expressions depending on the local setting, idiosyncrasies, and culture, but we can start by outlining the main principles of the school of a future when AI becomes even more ubiquitous, and embedded in ways that might even render it unrecognizable:
- Greater emphasis on social-emotional learning. Despite our loud proclamations to the contrary, educating the person has always been an afterthought in school curricula, a desirable and yet never quite doable proposition in the current zeitgeist that still values numerical measures and contents in the ancestral curricular hierarchy. Augmented and virtual reality (see Apple Vision Pro and Meta's Metaverse), exponential growth in the use and complexity of AI applications, future developments in robotics and even humanoids, algorithmic AI and big data-driven decisions, all conspire to create a perfect storm that not only challenges to dehumanize us but also to hinder the development of social skills. This will finally and inevitably result in that schools will dedicate a lot more time per week to help students acquire skills that help them in their healthy development, to relate with each other and to try to make sense of an ever more complex world with overwhelming and often confusing stimuli.
- Physical education and contact with nature. Similarly, in a hyper-technological world that may even offer us to decouple from our physical existence in the metaverse, in another reversal of priorities, exercising, nature experiences, health, and wellness education, will take an indispensable front seat in curriculum development, as students will be increasingly challenged to maintain an acceptable level of mental and physical fitness. In the same way that we now painstakingly measure cognitive development, lest our students be found lacking in the super competitive world that used to await them, we will carefully monitor health and wellness variables to ensure that children and teenagers grow up within acceptable health parameters.
- Connecting with our purpose will become a major objective of schooling. Amidst a world that will become even more uncertain, volatile, and vulnerable, and facing what will become a worsening crisis regarding the future of a workplace that finds no meaning in the usual career-related milestones, we will be forced (irony intended) to have our students connect with their sense of purpose from a very early age. The only way to survive this fragile hyperconnected world that we live in, as was ephemerally shown by the COVID pandemic, whose lessons were not heeded, is an enhanced awareness of our identity, how we express it and attempt to resonate with our deeper sense of purpose that transcends the instability of life's circumstances. Schools will have to create programs that help students explicitly explore their identities from a very early age, nurse their sense of self-esteem and build a solid personal foundation.
- Assessment will be situational and in real-time. An inevitable evolution of assessment will transition from the venerable anachronistic sit-down written test, closed book, to real-time solving of problems in contexts that are as similar to real life as possible. Games and simulations, both virtual and real, will help students learn by practicing, in individual and team settings, with personalized outcomes and, lo and behold, learning from their mistakes in a safe non-judgmental environment.
- AI will be judiciously used as a developmentally appropriate exo-brain. The main cognitive challenge before us is how to determine the most appropriate use of AI tools to not stifle but rather enhance and supplement the learning of skills and content at each age level. From developing children's imagination by providing them with the possibility of having an AI create, animate and give life to their stories, to helping teenagers solve real-life technical problems with calculus, utilizing the AI to simulate results as scientists do, we have a massive ontological challenge in applying our evolved developmental skills and coming up with creative age-appropriate uses of AI to extend our human capabilities in the context of schools.
- Contents will be mostly learned at home, without physical barriers. Schools may very well reduce their physical number of hours, to give way to online learning programs that will perhaps operate independently and connect students with global affinity groups where they will learn and interact with their peers from all over the world. I have deliberately only placed this likely scenario after clarifying that schools will have important roles, but in other areas. It will no longer make ?sense to reproduce the traditional choreography of learning when there are already infinitely rich and engaging learning resources, from documentaries to games and simulations to live cams, offering us an unlimited fun learning playground through the Internet.
- Personalization in learning will become a reality. The dreaded one-size-fits-all model of schooling will be a bygone, to be superseded by an AI-enriched initial diagnostic and continuous redesign of optimal learning paths, with developmental milestones that may be supervised and enforced by schools. These AI-enriched systems will provide an unparalleled individualized experience – though not isolated, since it will also include collaborative projects with other learners from all over the world – that not only cater to students' passions and interests, a long overdue aspirational goal for education but also, in similar ways to how e-commerce systems predict what we will buy, will present learners with a predictive analytics-based unique learning journey. Add to it a detailed, customized level of reporting that helps teachers monitor student performance and the attainment of personalized learning goals, making it a fundamental application of AI to learning.
- Yes, teachers' roles will fundamentally change. As we can surmise from all of the above, teachers will face a completely new landscape and, as such, require an evolved skill set, finally becoming what we always knew was the essence of our noble profession, far more important than our subject matter expertise. The teacher of the future will not be an instructor, but a coach, mentor, creator of learning resources, a guide on the side, a stimulating and encouraging presence, somebody who can inspire students with their passion for learning, all of which have always defined great teachers.
- The definitive end of the deficit model. The greatest and most revolutionary change of all will be, hopefully, that we will decisively and forever transcend a model that is based on students' shortcomings and what they cannot do, including the tragic branding of them as learning-disabled, to focus on a personalized model that builds upon learning successes. Of all the dimensions of the badly needed transformation of education, this is, without a doubt, the most impactful and important one, and that will naturally emerge from this redefined model, where the use of AI can finally deliver on the many unfulfilled promises of the future of learning, most prominently, as stated earlier, personalization and learning from mistakes.
This, by no means, represents a taxonomy of sorts, or any rigid framework for the school of the future, it is just a roadmap of what is a logical positive evolution of schools. If it intuitively makes sense, if despite the massive changes brought forth by AI this vision of the future sounds familiar, it is because AI is just a tool, a powerful catalyst to propel this vision forward, the long-awaited killer app that can help us build the future of learning that we have long known was not only possible, but necessary and better.
Derek Sivers, in his book “Anything you want”, says “When you’re on to something great, it won’t feel like revolution. It’ll feel like uncommon sense.” AI can, indeed, revolutionize learning and create a future of learning that, literally, makes sense.
