So thinking about the last year of your life, how many of you have had to use cursive? Written a five paragraph essay? Recited by heart a poem or the last 20 presidents? Been time to see how many math facts you could get right in a minute? OK, different set of questions.
Again, thinking about the last year, how many of you have had to work collaboratively with a partner or a group? Shown compassion or empathy? Problems? solved when something didn't go as planned. Analyze some information for relevance and accuracy in order to apply it to a different situation.
Now, 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 high school? And my answer to that second set of questions is yesterday. I did all of that with varying degrees of success yesterday.
And yet... If you were to ask most of our students in most of our schools what they're learning today in 2023, it would fall into that first category. The stuff I haven't used since the 1990s and they certainly won't need 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 education model is roughly 200 years old and is based off the factory school model in Prussia in the 1800s. The goal of the system was to address the needs of the time during the Industrial Revolution and create docile, agreeable, uniform workers who would show up on time and do what they were told.
But we're now in a post-industrial, highly interconnected world with advanced technology, and we need a different system to address today's needs. The founding fathers held that the success of American democracy would rely on an educated population who understood their role and had the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to be good citizens. The goals of education haven't changed. We still want an educated population with the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to be good citizens. But society has changed, and so with it what we need.
Understanding the needs of society is even more important in an age of AI, because AI is, and will continue, to radically transform our world faster than we can imagine. It is quickly Making irrelevant the skills and knowledge that have been the basis of our education system for the last 200 years. It can give me a five-paragraph essay, or a poem, or a list of presidents, or a bunch of math facts, and it can do it better, faster, and easier. We have a narrow window of opportunity right now to prepare and to take control of the ways in which 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 really hard, but we've done really hard things in our history when we have needed. NAI and the near certain impact it will have on our world is the reason we need to make changes so that our students are ready for their future. I've been in education for a little over 20 years, including earning both a master's and a doctorate in the field.
And one of the big challenges that I faced when I used to work in schools is when parents would come to me with, but that's not how we learned it. Whether it be our math curriculum, or how we handled spelling, or how we scheduled our day. But here's the thing, and I'm going to use myself as an example. I'm 40, which means that I was in elementary school roughly 30 years ago. 30 years ago, how many of us had cell phones, much less smartphones?
How many of us could video chat with friends and family across the country or the world? Or stream any song, television show, or movie instantaneously? You know, a couple months ago, my kids wanted to look through this old box of my stuff from elementary school. So we started pulling out the artifacts. And when I found an old report card...
There were no comments about my stellar grades. Instead it was, I can't believe I'm touching paper from the 1900s. And I had to think about it for a minute, but yeah, I went to elementary school in the 1900s. The fact is that our world today is different than it was 30 years ago, you know, back in the 1900s. And it's different than it was 200 years ago when our education system was formed.
And this world today has different needs. In his 2008 groundbreaking work, The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner, a globally recognized expert in education who spent 20 years at Harvard before joining the Learning Policy Institute, clearly says U.S. schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete.
He 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 actually matter in a globalized world. And while that book is 15 years old at this point, it's still relevant, with the most recent data putting the United States below average in math and significantly behind other developed countries. In fact, the United States is the only country in the world that has a record of States scored in the bottom 25% of industrialized countries.
We, the United States of America, are in the bottom 25% of educating our youth. 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 about who wrote the Bible in a private high school, and my goal for the class was to encourage student thinking, foster high-level discourse, and force the students to really question and think and articulate their beliefs. One day towards the end of the semester, as we were discussing two very different ideas about 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. an advanced high school student who had received early admission to an ivy league school couldn't think for herself this is a huge problem because well that cell phone that we all carry around in our pocket gives us literal instant access to every single piece of content that's ever been around, it doesn't aid us in what's truly important, what this world truly needs.
For that, we need human thinking. human intelligence. What's more important than content knowledge is what we do with it.
What do we do with it that separates us from AI? How do we as humans interact with the other humans around us? us to make us better together? How do we manage ourselves and harness our unique individuality to do something that has never been done before? You know I'm not a futurist.
But I can imagine that 30 years from now, these questions will be even more important than they are today. And it's up to us to be giving our students the skills and the dispositions for them to be successful in their world. I want to give a shout out to all the amazing educators out there who've been doing their very best to optimize an outdated system that was created for an entirely different purpose, preparing entirely different students for an entirely different world. As a scholar practitioner, I look at everything through both the lens of academics and data and also my experience in the field. but I'm also a mom to four kids, and I can't help but look at things through that lens as well.
That means talking about the future of education is deeply personal to me, not only because I've spent my entire professional career in the field, but because I, like the millions of parents out there, take very seriously the responsibility I have to the little humans who live in my house. And I'm constantly asking 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 struggle every morning with sending my kids to school, because inevitably one of them will talk about how boring it is and how nothing that they learn in school has anything to do with the real world.
They will make the very accurate observation that never in the real world will they be asked to sit at a desk completing worksheets for hours on end. They tell me that school stands for seven cruel hours of our lives. And I have no good response for them because they are right. Kids enter this world with this You know, an inherent sense of curiosity and wonder about the world around them.
They are born creative and full of a thirst for knowledge. They like to seek, and sometimes cause, problems, and then look for solutions, experimenting and trying new things. They test the boundaries of what is possible. They are always... They're never afraid of failing and making mistakes because it's all part of the learning process.
They believe anything is possible and don't take no for an answer. They epitomize what it means to be human. They let their instincts guide them in the ways that they need and in the way that today's world needs.
And we, as a school system, do everything we can to take it out of them. Remember how I said that changing our education system was going to be hard? Well I want to invite us to go back to that that wonder of childhood and imagine what might be. I was once observing a classroom of kindergarteners and I overheard a conversation between a student and a teacher.
They were coloring pictures of a cave and the student wanted to color the cave rainbow and the teacher said no the cave has to be brown or gray and the student wanted to know why. And the teacher said, because caves are brown or gray. To which the student promptly responded, no, that's just the caves you have seen.
That doesn't mean that there aren't rainbow caves out there or that there can't be one 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. ChatGPT set records for the fastest growing consumer application in history. Sundar Pichai from Alphabet and Google has called AI the most profound technology.
Bill Gates has said the technology can change the world. So what are we going to do about it? How are we going to ensure it changes our world and the ways that we need? What if we decided we weren't okay with status quo, with our kids spending seven cruel hours of our day not preparing them for our future?
What if we use the transformational impact that AI is having on our world to also transform education? What if we approach the whole thing not from the lens of what we've built and established over the last 200 years, but from a lens of curiosity? and what's possible over the next 200 years.
If you're a parent, I highly encourage you to ask yourself and your school, what are the goals of education and to what extent are we meeting that? I know it's the question that's always on my mind. If you're an educator, let's think about what is best for students and how do we do that. If you're a policymaker, Let's really think about how we can support educational reform so our students get what they need. And we should all be wondering 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 of questions, but we humans need to be the ones to ask the questions. I don't know if there's 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 into our human instincts and allowing students to go back to theirs. They're already there waiting for us. We have this incredible opportunity to use this moment to ask real questions. To make real change.
We don't know what the future holds for these kids. We don't know what jobs will be waiting for them. We don't know what role AI will have or how technology will change their world. But we know what they need.
Because what they need is what we need. Because they hold our future. And if we don't step up now, they won't be ready.
Thank you.