Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So I'd like to tell a story about the future of learning,
and it begins 10 years ago in a classroom just off the old Kent Road in South London
on my very first day as an English teacher.
And at first we struggled;
the kids didn't know much about Shakespeare,
and I knew even less about teaching.
I was a fresh-faced university graduate
who'd been to this lovely primary school in the countryside
and then onto a secondary school that even had its own pack of beagles,
and I thought that teaching was really simple.
You stood at the front of the classroom and talked about ideas.
But it wasn't that simple.
The kids I taught faced real challenges:
about half of them were on free school meals
and two-thirds spoke English as a second language.
And all of them came to school years behind where they ought to have been
in their reading and writing.
And it was frustrating.
The kids were smart and they were witty;
they just weren't doing well academically.
And around us, I was aware, the world was changing really fast.
My students were using smartphones and beginning to live in the future,
but I thought the methods I was using as a teacher
might have been familiar to the ancient Greeks,
particularly if their students made jokes every morning
about their failure to properly iron their togas.
And at the same time,
I felt pushed by the system towards focusing on their exams,
helping the kids get that C grade that they needed.
But by the time they left school,
it was being predicted that by their 30th birthdays,
about half of the jobs they were planning on doing as adults
were going to be automated by robots.
And if the robots were coming to get all the jobs,
I thought we had to do a lot better.
I was hopeful, however.
I thought if we could take all that we now knew about the human mind,
our neuroscience and psychology and early child development,
and combine it with our new technologies,
our computers and the internet, big data and AI,
that we might be able to transform human learning
and get more out of our minds than we ever had before.
But what is it that our minds are capable of?
And what is it we should be learning today to thrive in the future?
These were the two questions
that set me off on a two-year journey
around the world
and into the future that became my book.
And it took in visits to ground-breaking schools
on six different continents,
meetings with trailblazing teachers
and explorations of the most cutting-edge science and technology.
And it left me sure of one thing above all:
that in this age of AI,
we've to turn our attention away from our devices
and instead invest everything we have in developing ourselves.
So I begin with this idea that human intelligence is under threat.
In 1997, when the chess grandmaster guy Kasparov
was beaten by IBM's computer Deep Blue,
it was seen as a sign
that computers were already becoming more powerful than our human minds.
Some people predicted that soon we'd see the singularity,
a moment when we could merge our minds with superintelligent machines
and transcend our biological limitations.
But I wasn't sure we should be giving up on our brains just yet,
and so first I traveled to South Korea
to see how much we were capable of learning.
So on a warm Thursday morning in November,
I stood outside this concrete school hall
in Songdo future city, on the outskirts of Seoul,
as all across the country
hundreds of thousands of South Korean teenagers
were sitting down to the eight grueling hours
of a Suneung,
an exam that takes place on a single day each year
and is considered the world's toughest.
Afterwards, school leavers are given a national rank
that decides their whole lives:
what university they'll go to, what job they can do -
their whole health, wealth and happiness.
And I was there to hear the story of Seung-Bin Lee,
who was a mild-mannered, softly spoken 17-year-old
who at that moment was sitting inside the exam hall,
his hands shaking,
about to get started.
The country was exam crazy.
Earlier that morning,
police on motorcycles had lined the streets,
ready to accompany any latecomers to the exam hall.
In the weeks leading up to the exam,
newspapers ran articles
about what you should eat for optimum performance,
what clothes you should wear,
even what offerings you should leave at the temple for the gods.
During the 45 minutes of the English-listening exam,
all flights in the country were grounded
so as not to affect the kids' concentration.
You see, Korean learning was all about these kind of marginal gains.
Seung-Bin even confided to me
that he'd been worried about overheating during the exam,
and so he'd sneaked off halfway through to remove his underpants -
which begs the question
of what he did with them for the rest of the exam.
But you see, success was in these details.
He said you had to get into the zone
and become an instrument of pure exam-taking technique.
It was better, he said, not to think at all.
Now, it's extreme,
but Korea actually shows us the power that education can have on our minds.
Sixty years ago, the country was broke coming out of the Korean War
and four in five Koreans were illiterate.
Today, its GDP has grown 40,000%
and it's one of the world's top high-tech economies,
with companies like Samsung and Hyundai.
It's also now got the highest proportion of university graduates, of population,
of any country in the world,
and in 2010, it's teens were ranked the smartest teenagers in the world.
An education minister there I talked to
told me that you had to understand that Korea has no resources,
just their minds and hard work.
But this hard work is taking a heavy toll in Korea.
Before I left, Seung-Bin showed me his revision time table.
In the three years leading up to the Suneung,
he'd worked 14 hours a day, five days a week,
and a relatively chilled out 12 hours a day
on both Saturday and Sunday.
He told me that to relax, once a month he would watch a DVD.
Korea has the highest teen suicide rate in the world.
Adults I spoke to cried recalling their school days.
When I asked Seung-Bin what he did to beat this stress,
he just looked at me and said,
"I know it sounds strange, but I have to work even harder."
So, convinced of the power of our minds to learn more,
I traveled next to Silicon Valley, point zero of the tech tsunami.
I'd heard we might be able to harness our computers
and make our minds unimaginably more powerful.
I wanted to know if that was the case.
So at a place called Rocketship Schools
in San Jose,
I met my first robot teacher.
But it wasn't an android with a human face;
instead, it was a bit of intelligent software
inside an online learning environment.
So at Rocketship Schools, they've got the "Learning Lab."
And I went there with the head teacher, Miss Guerrero,
after I had watched her lead 500 primary-school kids
in a sing-and-dance-along to "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift,
which she called "morning coffee for the kids."
And they were certainly pumped up.
So then we went to this cavernous room
in which there are 120 five-year-old kids sitting in long rows in front of laptops.
Each of them was wearing a purple polo shirt and outsize headphones.
And the room was eerily silent
except for the sound of soft fingers tapping on keys.
So each kid was using a program called ST Math or Lexile,
and as they were using it,
the computer began to understand their individual strengths and weaknesses
and adapt the experience to them.
So they were building on their strengths
or tackling errors that they weren't so strong in -
personalizing the experience to each individual kid.
And every student would spend between 60 and 90 minutes
on their laptop each day,
and there were no teachers in the room,
just a pair of untrained young adult supervisors.
And it worked.
At Rocketship Schools, the kids do pretty well in their math and English
compared to their peers from similar backgrounds.
But I was struck by this thought:
Did it really make sense for computers to be teaching kids things
that the computers themselves could already do so much better?
A similar thought had occurred to Gary Kasparov
when he was defeated by Deep Blue.
And this new kind of chess competition emerged, called "Advanced Chess."
In these competitions,
any combination of humans and computers can play chess against one another,
and until very recently,
the winners of those tournaments
weren't the most powerful computers nor the greatest human grandmasters;
instead, they were teams of amateur human players
who had learned to coach their laptops to play chess really well.
Our ability to learn to coach our machines
makes us more powerful than machines can ever be alone.
Down the coast from Rocketship, at a place called High Tech High,
I saw kids learning to use technology in this way.
So at High Tech High,
they spend about half their time in these big cross-disciplinary projects.
And in a single classroom of 16-year-olds,
they had divided themselves up into three groups.
One group was experimenting with making biodegradable seed pods;
another group was planning and scripting a documentary they were going to film;
and a third group was building their own drones, completely from scratch.
The class was going to end
with an excursion into the California wilderness,
where they were going to make an aerial survey
of the loss of plant species due to drought,
replenish the ones missing using the seed pods,
and the documentary crew was going to film the whole thing
and put it up on YouTube
to raise awareness of environmental issues.
And it showed me that although machines do risk making us stupid,
they can be harnessed to make us smarter.
But to what end should we put this new knowledge about the brain
and this new technology?
How can we develop our full collective capacity?
To find out, I went to Finland
and visited the classroom of one of its most famous teachers,
a guy called Pekka Peura.
So at the start of his class,
he put up a question on the interactive whiteboard
that had the students beaming answers using their smartphones,
A, B, C, D or E,
which he then displayed in a bar chart on the whiteboard.
He didn't give them the answer,
but asked them to talk to each other.
What answer had they given and why?
And then got them to beam in their answers for a second time.
And the bar chart had shifted significantly;
the kids had taught each other.
Afterwards, Pekka Peura explained to me
that he saw his role
as being one of giving students
the skills and attitudes they needed to learn things for themselves.
He'd studied how Google creates its most successful teams
and was using those principles to guide the practice in his classroom.
So he'd give the students everything they needed at the start of the term:
the textbook, the links to online resources, the test,
even the answers to all the tests,
and he would simply coach them individually and together
on their capacity to persevere, to learn, to create, to imagine or to cooperate.
At the end of the term,
he even got the students to choose their own grades,
which he would enter into the school system.
When I asked him what he did if students fell behind in this approach,
he looked at me strangely:
"What is behind?" he said.
He thought we had to delete this idea of competition entirely from education
and allow young people to fail continually in small ways.
That was how he thought we would best learn.
So Finns love education.
The country has ten applicants for every one place
on its primary-teacher training programs.
That training includes learning how to play the piano
and learning how to ice-skate.
Finland also, by many measures,
makes more of its people than any other country in the world.
It comes top of the World Economic Forum's human capital index.
It's the happiest country in the world according to a UN survey recently.
It's also a hive of creativity,
home to companies like Nokia and Angry Birds,
and it's also home to unique sports like hobby horsing,
which is an imaginary form of show jumping,
which was invented by Finnish teenagers.
Finland also has more heavy metal bands per capita
than any other country in the world,
and Pekka Peura, that teacher, was the drummer in one of them.
So as I encountered these stories around the world,
I thought often of my own students back in South London.
We succeeded in the end - at least in what we set out to do.
All of the kids got the C grade that they needed, or better, at GCSE,
but the way that we'd got there,
with these long hours of exam practice and extra English classes,
left me feeling like I'd failed them.
Today, I think that we risk failing a whole generation of young people.
I'm not sure that we're setting up our education systems
to give young people everything that is needed to thrive in today's world,
let alone to take on the big challenges of the future,
like the automation of jobs or global inequality or climate change.
But we could.
Everybody is capable of learning as much as kids do in South Korea or Shanghai.
Everybody is capable of learning to use the latest technology,
like they're doing at High Tech High.
Everyone is capable of developing
their full human faculties of creativity and cooperation,
like they're doing in Finland.
If we can harness all this understanding,
I think we can transform human learning.
So to date, there have been three big revolutions in the way that we learn.
The first was cognitive.
About 100,000 years ago, something changed in our brains
and language emerged,
with which we could share ideas
and pass knowledge down between the generations.
About 10,000 years ago came the schooling revolution.
Simultaneously in ancient China and ancient Mesopotamia,
schools sprang up in which to teach the new human technologies
of reading and writing.
About 500 years ago, then, came a mass education revolution -
the printing press and an opening up of religion -
and that literacy exploded across the world.
Today, I think that you have the potential
to bring about a fourth learning revolution.
Science now shows us that each of us is literally born to learn.
In our heads are learning devices
which, when put together, are more powerful
than any computer that's been invented.
To thrive in our digital future, we need to learn to master our machines
by investing everything we have in upgrading our own minds.
Thank you.
(Applause)