Why AI is the Catalyst We Need to Change Education Forever. | Sarah Rubinson Levy | TEDxBreckenridge

So, thinking back to the last year of your life, how many of you have had to use cursive? You wrote a five-paragraph essay, you recited a poem from memory, or the last 20 presidents were timed to see how many math acts you could get right. One minute, okay? set of questions again thinking about in the last year how many of you have had to work collaboratively with a partner or group shown Compassion or empathy problem solved when something did not go as planned analyze some information to determine its relevance and accuracy so you can apply it to Now It's a different situation, I don't know about you, but when I think about that first set of questions, my answer would be I don't know, maybe in high school and my answer to that second set of questions is yes, I did all that yesterday. with varying degrees of success yesterday, and yet if you asked most of our students in most of our schools what they are learning today in 2023, they would fall into that first category, the things I haven't used since the 1990s and we certainly won't

need

it in the 2030s, the fact is that our

education

system is fundamentally broken and artificial intelligence or AI is the

catalyst

we desperately

need

to rethink and reimagine what

education

is, can be and should be.

Our current educational model is approximately 200 years old. and is based on the factory school model in Prussia in the 19th century, the goal of the system was to address the needs of the time during the Industrial Revolution and create uniform, docile and pleasant workers who would arrive on time and do what they were told. said, but We are now in a highly interconnected industrial PO world with advanced technology and we need a different system to address today's needs. The founding fathers maintained that the success of American democracy would depend on an educated population that understood its role and had the skills, not the knowledge. and the dispositions to be good citizens, the goals of education have not

change

d, we still want an educated population with the skills, knowledge and dispositions to be good citizens, but society has

change

d and therefore what we need to understand the needs of society is even more important.

In the age of AI, because AI is and will continue to radically transform our world faster than we can imagine, it is rapidly rendering irrelevant the skills and knowledge that have been the foundation of our education system for the last 200 years, I can give myself a five. a paragraph essay or a poem or a list of presidents or a bunch of math facts and you can do it better faster and easier. Right now we have a narrow window of opportunity to prepare and take control of the ways AI changes our world because while it can easily replace the student of the past, it cannot easily replace the potential of our students today and in the future. changing our education system is going to be very difficult, but we have done really difficult things in our history when we needed a AI and the impact it will almost certainly have on our world is why we need to make changes so that our students are prepared for Her future.

I have worked in education for a little over 20 years, and earned a master's degree and a doctorate in the field, and one of the big challenges I faced when I used to work in schools is when parents would come to me, but that's not how we learned it. Whether it's our math curriculum or how we handle spelling or how we schedule our day, but here's the thing and I'm going to use myself as an example. I'm 40 years old, which means I was in elementary school about 30 years ago. 30 years ago, how many of us had cell phones, let alone smartphones?

How many of us? You could video chat with friends and family across the country or world or stream any song, TV show or movie instantly. You know, a couple of months ago my kids wanted to go through this old box of my elementary school stuff, so we started pulling out the artifacts. and when I found an old report card there was no comment on my stellar grades, but it was I can't believe I'm touching paper from the year 1900 and I had to think about it for a minute, but yeah, I went to elementary school in the decade 1900, the fact is that our world today is different from what it was 30 years ago, you know, in the 1900s, and it is different from what it was 200 years ago, when our educational system was formed, and this world Today's school has different needs in its innovative 2008.

Working on the Global Achievement Gap Tony Wagner, a world-renowned education expert who spent 20 years at Harvard before joining the Learning Policy Institute, says clearly that U.S. schools .They are not failing, but are obsolete. It goes on to detail all the challenges our school system faces from standards to testing to the complete lack of emphasis on the skills that really matter in a globalized world, and while that book is 15 years old at this point, it's still relevant as it The most recent data places the United States below average in math and significantly behind others. In fact, the developed United States ranked in the bottom 25% of industrialized countries.

We, the United States of America, are in the bottom 25% in educating our young people. We, as a system, are not doing our job when it comes to preparing them for their future. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I was once teaching a class on who wrote the Bible at a private high school and my goal for the class was to encourage the students' thinking. Encourage featured speech and force students to question and really think. and articulate his beliefs one day toward the end of the semester while we were discussing two very different ideas about the authorship of the text, one of my students said but we still don't know what you think.

I asked her why that mattered and she told me. that I was the teacher and how was she supposed to know what was right and what to think if I didn't tell her that an advanced high school student who had received early admission to an Ivy League school couldn't think for herself that this It's a big problem because while that cell phone we all carry in our pockets gives us literal instant access to every piece of content that has ever existed, it doesn't help us and, what's really important, is what this world really needs. We need humans.

Thinking about human intelligence, what is more important than knowledge of content is what we do with it, what we do with it, what separates us from AI, how do we, as humans, interact with the other humans around us To make us better together, how do we manage ourselves? They are a unique individuality to do something that has never been done before. You know I'm not a futurist, but I can imagine that in 30 years these questions will be even more important than they are today and it's up to us to provide them to our students. the skills and dispositions to make them successful in their world.

I want to thank all the amazing educators who have been doing everything they can to optimize an outdated system that was created for a completely different purpose by fully preparing. different students for a completely different world as a practicing academic. I see everything through the lens of academics and data and also my experience in the field, but I'm also a mother of four children and I can't help but look at things. Through that lens, too, that means that talking about the future of education is deeply personal to me, not only because I've spent my entire professional career in this field, but because I like that millions of parents take education very seriously. responsibility I have for the little humans who live in my home and I constantly ask myself if we are doing the best we can to set them up for success in their future.

I don't think we're there. I fight every morning. The morning I was sending my children. to school because inevitably one of them will talk about how boring it is and how nothing they learn in school has anything to do with the real world, they will make the very accurate observation that they will never in the real world be asked to They sit at a desk completing worksheets for hours on end and tell me that school represents seven cruel hours of Our Lives and I don't have a good answer for them because they are right, children enter this world with an inherent sense of curiosity and wonder about the world around them they are born creative and full of thirst for knowledge they like to search and sometimes cause problems and then look for solutions they experiment and try new things they test the limits of what is possible they always are, they never are they have afraid of failing and making mistakes because it's all part of the learning process they believe that anything is possible and don't take no for an answer they embody what it means to be human they let their instincts guide them in the way they need and in the way the Today's world needs it and we as a school system do everything possible to take it away.

Remember how I said that changing our educational system was going to be difficult. Well, I want to invite us to return to that wonder of childhood and imagine what it could be. I was once observing a classroom of kindergarteners and overheard a conversation between a student and a teacher. They were coloring pictures of a cave and the student wanted to color the rainbow in the cave and the teacher said no, the cave has to do it. be brown or gray and the student wanted to know why and the teacher said because the caves are brown or gray, to which the student quickly responded no, that's just the caves you've seen, that doesn't mean there aren't caves. of rainbows out there or that they can't, there can't be a day and she's right, maybe there are rainbow caves out there and maybe there's a whole different kind of education waiting for us to imagine that PT chat set records for the Fastest growing consumer app in history Sundar picai of the alphabet and Google has called AI the most profound technology Bill Gates has said that technology can change the world so what are we going to do about it?

How are we going to make sure it changes our world and the ways we need to? What would happen if we decided? We were not okay with the status quo with our children spending seven cruel hours of our day not preparing them for our future. What if we used the transformational impact that AI is having on our world to transform education as well? What if we approached the whole matter differently? from the point of view of what we have built and established over the last 200 years, but from the point of view of curiosity and what is possible in the next 200 years, if you are a parent, I highly recommend that you ask yourself yourself and your school what the objectives are. of education and to what extent are we meeting that?

I know that's the question that's always on my mind if you're an educator, let's think about what's best for students and how we do it if you're a policymaker, let's really think about how We can support education so that our students get what they need and we should all ask ourselves to what extent education is meeting the goals of creating an educated population with the necessary skills, knowledge and disposition to be good citizens. You know, AI is turning out. to be a great answer to the questions, but we humans should be the ones asking the questions.

I don't know if there is a rainbow cave out there, but I certainly know that if we work together we can harness the power of AI to create our own version by leaning on our human instincts and allowing students to return to theirs - they are already there waiting for us. We have this incredible opportunity to take this moment to ask real questions and make real change. We don't know what the future holds for these children. We don't know what jobs will be waiting for them. We don't know what role AI will play or how technology will change their world. , but we know what they need because what they need is what we need because they have our future and if we don't step forward now they won't be ready, thank you