In the year 2050, education will look remarkably different from the classrooms we know today, as noted by psychologist Howard Gardner, Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University and legal scholar Anthea Roberts, serving as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and leading Dragonfly Thinking, an AI innovation firm, as its founder and CEO.
During a recent forum at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, both contended that artificial intelligence will not merely serve to enhance teaching, but will fundamentally transform the way humans acquire knowledge.
According to Gardner, by mid-century every child would require only brief training in the fundamentals: “reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic, and a little bit of coding.”
Gardner, who is famous for his theory of multiple intelligences, called the forthcoming transformation unprecedented. “AI is as big a shift to schooling as the planet has experienced in 1,000 years,” he said, a view reflected by the Harvard Gazette.
He suggested that many skills that he once believed to be necessary could be left to machines before long.
It was called “Thinking in an AI-Augmented World” and was organised by academic dean Martin West. He stressed that educators, as well as policymakers, need to get a handle on the future.
“AI is already remodelling the future of education in ways that everybody working in the sector must come to grips with,” he said, as reported by Harvard Gazette.
Gardner suggested a compressed schooling plan. He indicated that although children would still need initial teaching in basic literacy and numeracy, coding as well, the teacher would then move into a more mentorship role, rather than as conventional professor.
Pupils would be involved in diverse activities that would be geared to challenge the mindset, as well as help them find productive work.
“I don’t think going to school for 10 or 15 years as we’ve done it makes sense,” Gardner said, as was published by Gazette.
Roberts presented a contrasting yet harmonious vision.
She reflected on the past, noting that learning revolved around executing tasks, “the actor on the stage, the athlete on the field, the writer of the book.”
Looking ahead to the next generation, she envisioned a time when students would lead teams of AIs, stepping away from playing every part themselves.
“You become the director of the actor, you become the coach of the athlete, and you become the editor of the writer,” she remarked, as cited by Harvard Gazette.
Gardner’s classic book Frames of Mind (1983) listed seven modes of intelligence.
In a later book, Five Minds for the Future (2005), educators were challenged to cultivate five modes of thinking: disciplined, synthesising, creative, respectful, and ethical.
No longer, he averred, will three of those inevitably be elective. Machines will do the lion’s share of the disciplined, the synthesising and the creating, while respect and ethics will be uniquely human enterprises.
They both also expressed their worries regarding ‘cognitive offloading,’ the temptations to make AI think instead of the students.
Roberts indicated that the problem is making use of machines as part of the expansion, rather than the replacement, of human abilities.
“Our responsibility as people and as educators is to try to determine how we do that expansion rather than that replacement,” she said, as Harvard Gazette indicated.
Roberts explained her practice now of working concurrently with several AI programmes, exchanging their responses back and forth, and then “we’re having a conversation between the four of us.”
Roberts’ experience reveals a budding truth: educators are keeping pace with these machines. It ended without a unanimous prescription, but it engendered among the participants a common conviction.
Classrooms could, by the year 2050, change from rows of students memorising facts to dynamic centres where human beings and AI collaborate.
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