Everything’s changing – including school. Much of what we do in schools is outmoded. Schools were created in the industrial age to create compliant factory workers. They were developed in the times of the British Empire to produce an self-regenerating stream of bureaucrats. Replaceable administrators with identical handwriting and adequate computational skills.
Nowadays, factories are automated and the Empire’s dissolved. We could just automate schools. But no one really wants to raise their children in a virtual reality classroom. We know that it makes sense, but it’s not a direction that feels right.
Why? Because learning requires relationship. Because after the world has been taken over by the robots, the only thing left for humans to do that AI can’t, will be to inspire and to relate.
The new economy is not an industrial economy, it is a connection economy. It’s a world of creatives, influencers and visionaries. So as Sir John Jones says later on in this same talk – in an age of Google, maths teachers aren’t really for teaching you maths; they’re for teaching you to love maths.
The best thing we can do for our students is teach them to love learning. Not so that they can keep up with a changing future – but so that they can lead in it.
Have a look at minutes 5-9 of this longer talk by Sir John Jones describing the future of our current students.