The Fourth Education Revolution

The world over, schools are working to prepare students for the 20th century. Teacher training programmes are preparing teachers for the 20th century. Government ministers across the globe are fixated on exam benchmarks and accountability measures — for the 20th century.

Here in the 21st century, young people are still spending thirteen of their most impressionable and absorbent years honing their minds to do things that algorithms and AI will always do better. AI doesn’t get tired, doesn’t become unwell, doesn’t get emotional, and can process information far faster than any human brain. 

Instead of using adult humans to teach young people to be like machines, we need to use AI-powered machines, guided by adult humans, to teach young people to be more fully human.

All of this is being perpetrated by good people who want to do their best but when you are in the middle of a revolution, it can be hard to understand what is going on.

We find ourselves at the start of the fourth education revolution.

Very roughly, the first happened five million years ago with the beginning of learning by watching and repeating. The second revolution, the beginning of organised learning in schools, happened some 5,000 years ago. The third revolution began roughly 500 years ago, made possible by the invention of the printing press. This was also the time of the great global expansion of universities.

We are living in the twilight years of that revolution. Our current era makes bountiful use of new technologies, but education remains fundamentally the same — students sitting in front of teachers and lecturers, preparing for tests and exams focused on a fixed curriculum on which their future progress will very largely depend.

Schools are still physical places where learning takes place for a few hours each day, for some 40 weeks a year.  Just as in the 19th century, teachers, lecturers and books are the primary sources of knowledge. Teacher training is still fundamentally the same as when I went to King’s College London forty years ago.





Until it changes, radically, we will remain in a rut.