A shape and power
Collage by TR Koubois
Henny Penny
A million giddy influencers obsessing about the transformation that AI will deliver for education, schools and schooling.
This is inevitable (and no doubt important work), but I can’t help feeling that this somehow gets people off the hook for not properly deploying the truly transformational energy that actual human beings bring to education, schools and schooling.
To sit down at a drawing board and conjure us up would be the heady madness of the most visionary and outré science fiction. I mean, our brain alone is more complex than anything in the known universe; more capable than the most powerful computer with potentially endless storage; a thing able to carry out trillions of logical operations per second and all using less power than a lightbulb. And what’s more, it’s free, portable and safely carried around in a body that can adapt, change, grow and heal itself all on its own.
It really is quite something.
Yet we seem unable to do much with this, and our schools remain bogged down in a derelict imaginary that is incapable of meeting the challenges of the now and next. We are distracting ourselves again with the promise of new tech’s emancipatory powers when we haven’t yet got the basics right. Rather than enabling schools to truly liberate learners or learning, we’ve allowed ourselves to waste the hugest of all potentials; the greatest ever of all resources and the richest of all raw materials - the human being. 30 of these wonders come into each of our classrooms every single day, yet what do we actually do with them? With that much innate creativity, divergent thinking, originality, humour, and raw processing power in every classroom across the country our education system should be moving mountains. But it’s not and it isn’t even close.
Anyone that denies that there is an existential crisis in education has not been paying attention. AI will help, but it won’t save us. We need to go back to the drawing board and the original plans.
A Carolean education imaginary
So we mustn’t get distracted.
We’ve had a bump to the head and now genuinely fear a falling sky. But this time, we’re not heading for the palace. The king alone can’t help, not in that way. But bequeathing us his name for a new education imaginary will do just fine for the moment. He can be satisfied that we know what needs to be done to buttress the plunging firmament before it’s too late and we are all squashed flat. Our plans are taking on a shape and power that will astound.
And just so we’re clear, we’re not playing follow the fox either.
Not this time.