Is totally useless how we
are teaching our kids today. One simply cannot
imagine anything else. People have always
experienced it this way and have always
done it like that. Hi Samer, my name is Daniel, I will be your language
teacher for today. What language would
you like to learn? The unemployment is potentially
gonna continue to go up, giving the economic
strain on society. Training these young
people to have the mindset of being job creators, is more important
now than ever. What we need to
do is help children become
fearless about lerning, because we are
leaving the era, in which you could
depend on a single skill to last your entire life-time. With the impressive
advances that technology has made in the last few years, it was just a matter of time until those intelligent machines appeared in the
world of education. Robots in the classroom, digital assistants, and AI'S
are enhancing personalize and remote learning, auto-corrections, and access to knowledge at a speed never seen b
efore. These technologies,
with many other applications being
developed every day, have started to disrupt a field which has tended to
be rather conservative, These advancements have started to create a buzz
and simultaneously brought up some fears. One of those concerns is: Will teachers be
superfluous one day and entirely
substituted by A.I.? Hi Samer, my name is Daniel, I will be your language
teacher for today. What language would
you like to learn? I should probably brush up
on my mandarin.
Listen carefully, try to remember and
repeat what they say. "Speaking Mandarin" Well Samer, lets just say you
are going to need to practice a bit more. Ok. Let me know when you
are ready to try again. How will these technologies affect the role of the
teacher in the future? With the engagement
of these AI systems, the role of the teacher
is changing a bit. It is more like
turning into a mentor rather than the teacher, that teaches you the knowledge! The teacher's classical figure as a communica
tor of knowledge could be fading away behind those new AIs and
other technologies. But why? Often, I think,
there is to much standardize knowledge passed on. And so little value
is placed on other forms of learning and knowledge;
that could help dealing more flexibly
with specific situations. We need to learn
less, over time, and be able to do more. That is what is
important for us. Knowledge, of course,
you can look up everything on the
Internet nowadays. Because already
knowledge by itself it'
s not valuable
anymore; because the knowledge
it's very accessible, well, mostly it's accessible,
of course. But the way the human being
is processing it, and giving some
new knowledge out of generated knowledge, I think that is the most
valuable thing. Knowledge, that is just a
mouse click away in the ocean of the internet, has made it
possible for students and many others,
to access a vast amount of data that years ago was only available to teachers
and scholars. But how is this affecting the
way we teach? It is totally useless how we are teaching
our kids today. Starting from
kindergarten and ending
with university like we are
preparing the... experts of 100 years ago. There is a boss,
who sits at the front, and, they lecture and instruct, and then, they give a command, you know, home-work. And all kids, virtually
turn in the same thing. We all are expected tp
know exact the same thing, and to be better than
the next person at it. Right! And our success
is actually measured on how o
ften are we
better than other people. At this, skills that
we have actually no interest
at being good at. All around the world, every country is founding
a public education system. teaching courses that
were designed last century. I think our education systems is... relatively sluggish and slow. And I think we really
need to set the course now. Is our educational system
actually that traditional? Why has it not change at all in the last 50 years? One simply cannot
imagine anything else. People h
ave always
experienced it this way and have always
done it this way; and the habit alone
it makes for many people very difficult and complicated to imagine anything else. Since the dawn of mankind, he transmission of knowledge
from one generation to another has been an essential
part of our lives and history. Through story-telling
or imitation, the act of learning was, always, inherent to our society and a necessary means
to the species' survival. In ancient Greece, with the
academy founded by P
lato, or in the middle
ages, with the establishment or in the middle
ages, with the establishment of the first universities
by Christianity, learning and education
have always played a primordial role in the
growth of our culture. However, those examples
only illustrate a few exceptions related
to higher education, to which only
privileged citizens or the clergy
had access to. For most people, until the 19th century, education occurred within the family circle or in small groups where the studen
ts were expected to learn a specific skill or profession. But with the arrival
of the Industrial Age, the factory-based
production system, the division of labor, and the complexity
of the continuously growing modern cities, the need to create independent
learning centers to train and educate
the future workers became an urgent necessity. This educational system was implemented more
than 200 years ago and it's essentially
very similar to the one we are
still using today. I think there is a lot t
o do. For example, to implement more digitization and modern
learning methods in the whole educational system. I think, especially
in Germany, we're still significantly
behind the times. And I think that would
be an important first step. The countries I don't
think they reform the educational systems fast enough to keep the pace with
the technological changes. But, I think, to be fair, that would have being
impossible to do. In the educational
system, there is a delay
in relation to technology b
ecause new teaching content must first be developed. The pace of technological
changes seems to be too fast to be followed easily by
educators and teachers. So, what must be done? What we need to do is, help children became
fearless about learning. Because we are leaving the era in which you can
depend in a single skill to last your
entire life time. My dad's generation, they had an average of five jobs between the age
of 18 and retirement. My generation in America, we will have 12 jobs between
the age of
18 and retirement, and, we should expect
a similar increase for the coming generation. The next generations are
expected to have between twenty and thirty different
jobs in their lifetime, And those jobs could be in
different sectors or trades. So, there will be a growing necessity to learn new abilities every time. So, what are the
fundamental skills of future education? AI Literacy. So, we will have to
start very early in child education to, actually, train people to understand
how
these systems work. How to question them; because it will affect
you in the future. Actually, already
affects you now, because if you using Google, you are technically
using an AI, and it's a valuable
skill to know how do you get the
information out of Google that you are looking for. We learn in school
and kindergarten, how to walk
across a street. We look left and right. We have to understand
the traffic lights. But we don't
teach how to navigate confidently in this
new digital world. And
the AI education is one
of the important things, I think, in this direction, because if we will
not teach our children how all of this blackbox and algorithms
are working, they will also raise up with this
idea of nonsense that's:
Ok; it's doing something and I can not do
anything about it. Every public education
in the world needs to think more deliberately about how do we make
computer science part of the primary
and secondary curriculum. Adding computer
science to the curriculum is a step tha
t public
education worldwide must start considering. Every day, more and
more of our interaction with the world runs through
computers, algorithms, and A.I.’s. So, what are the benefits of computational literacy
for young students? The greatest potential that
artificial intelligence has in the field of
education is surely, that it helps us to access information in
an easier way. From the learning perspective, I think that is an amazing tool that can teach
our kids new knowledge, creativity, inte
raction. Also, there is a lot of kids
with disabilities who have a very low level of engagement and that is a perfect environment to be engaged. But these new
robots and assistants are only available to a handful of schools
and universities. Why is that? I would say, it is
mainly linked to the lack of
investment in education. And in the past years, I mean, many austerity police in Europe lead to lack of investments. A school system in which we can see the complete upgrading to iPads in some priv
ate schools or a small computer pool,
in a public school, where you get access
once a week briefly. And that is, eventually,
the problem: that this change is to
be seen everywhere but does not... take place as a whole. The austerity policies
of the last two decades, lack of public and private sector investment, and general skepticism
of bringing children into contact with new
technology at an early age are some of the reasons why these new
developments are still not an integral part of schools.
But, there is another
crucial question leading to this delay: Is technology
making us slower and, therefore, more vulnerable? The question is rather: Are we facing a certain
dumbing-down of society, which,then, is being mistreated? The Internet and all
the services around it creates a problematic where
the users lose a certain degree of
self-determination with those AIs
and algorithms. Creating a vicious circle, in which we, as users, star to think
less and less about what
its going on. Educati
on is about... making people grow, in responsibility, making people more able to discern, to have judgments, on very difficult matters. But on the contrary, we are building assistant that can do the
job for you. So where is your creating leading to? Nowhere. You don't need any creativity. You don't need any... skills. You don't need any... education, at all. Because you won't
have to interface directly with other people. That's perhaps, the main problem, that I sort of surrender my own thinking
and then I become
less critical. The gradual loss of
our critical thinking and grasp of reality is
one of the main concerns surrounding technology's integration into our kindergartens and schools. Many see this
as a danger in which we could gradually lose
contact with ourselves. So, how can educators prepare younger students for AIs and personalized
robots in schools? From educational perspective, when you have a robot in your school or in your playground, I think the main focus should be the
social
engagement of the kid, not the isolation. Because when we are talking about the personalized toys, by personalization we
mean that the robot it's only attached to one kid, and to nothing else. And, that sometimes can lead
to loneliness, or to some emotional
attachment to the robot and to no on else. That is also one
of the things that... we should take care about. So, if technology could help people to get skills, to get knowledge,
with their own tools, then use it! Only if it is in an en
vironment where there is human interaction. Paradoxically, human interaction will become our strongest weapon
in our relationship with machines. But how will that change us? I think that it could
be easier but, also, how much
are we gonna lose, from our own skills. I prefer humans, basically. To talk to humans.
Humans! I think we need to be careful with it as it can take a lot of our humanity too. That gradual loss
of our humanity and grasp of reality are some of the fears surrounding A.I.'s an
d robots' implementation in our
schools and our lives. Indeed, the last two decades
of living with the Internet are not very promising: A society torn
apart and radicalized by technologies that many of us use daily but don't fully comprehend. It is understandable that some educators don't
want those technologies in the hands of our young students. But what could we
teach our youngest to avoid such
misuse of technology? It's not about
operating computers. The students don't have to
learn how to w
rite a text or how to calculate
something with a spreadsheet. They’ll learn that anyway! It's really about
media literacy; it's about
questioning things. It's about learning that,
for example, what you read in
Wikipedia is not all truth. It's not so much about
individual technologies, but directions. For example:
What does it mean If I go from one place on
the Internet to another? What can a third
party learn about me? And, at the end of the day, it's about teaching students to think critically
about what they're using. In the future, it would
make a lot of sense to address this question
more strongly: Where does my
information come from, and how do I have to classify
it in a certain context. And, I think that, in an information-based
society like ours, it is a necessary step. We need to teach all generations to be critical of digital
assistants and robots, to question and confront the information we
receive and its sources. But, primarily, we
should adapt ourselves and be prepared
f
or an everchanging world altered by technologies like A.I. Hi there, I am Aldo, the producer
and director of the documentary you're watching.
I hope you're enjoying it. And if that's the case, check down below, where you will find the links
to our other three documentaries about AI. Keep watching and have a great day. And in this changing world, the attention, of the last years
has been centered on introducing those devices in our schools and universities. What about our
educational curriculum?
Is it following the pace of technological development? People all the time
think about: How can we
improve school? And what they
think about is: How do we use technology
in the classroom, but to still teach
the same stuff that they learned
when they were young. Where today's kids, what they want to learn
more than anything else it's things like coding
and computer science. And meanwhile,
as you go into a school, in almost any
part of the world, and you look in
the face of the students, their eye
s are glaze over because they
are memorizing something from a history book, which is important, but not as engaging as where it be to create an app, to create a small business, to create a web-site. Using technology to be creative and entrepreneurial is one of the current generations' main characteristics
and interests. Entrepreneurship is
seeing as a model to fight technological
unemployment and one of the central pillars in the education of the future. If you reach people at a young age, where
... you can actually get
to think of themselves as people
who actually are an economical agent of change. Who has the confidence
and the capabilities to be an entrepreneur, it lasts for a long, long time. Being responsible and
independent from an employer, while owning your business and doing what you love the most is a beautiful
goal to aspire to. Unfortunately, the reasons pushing the younger generations
towards that direction are not always
motivated by passion. The unemployment is,
potential
ly, gonna continue to go up, giving the economic
strain on society. Training these
young people to have
the mindset of ben job creators, is more important
now than ever. Automatization, global recession, and ultimately, Covid-19, have led to the loss of many jobs in the last years. And it seems that this trend will continue in the
foreseeable future. In the next five years, it is expected that 85 million jobs more
will be displaced, and around 90 million
new jobs will be created. All jobs will
disappear. New jobs will emerge. But then the new jobs will
rapidly change and vanish. If you take the average job, in just the next five years alone, 40% of the core skills, on that job, will change. Whether it is now in industry,
logistics, or service, the core of those industries
will change significantly. That means, you have
to learn new skills that will enable dealing
with this transition better. New skills are to be
learned by our workforce but also taught in schools and universities
arou
nd the world. But what are those
essential skills of the future? Analytical thinking and innovation, active listening and
learning strategies, technologies use ad monitoring, creativity, originality,
and initiative. These are the type of
things that traditionally have not being emphasized
by education systems and, are things that people tend to pick up
in the workplace. Now, these they gonna
be at a premium and rising. But also social skills, behavioral skills. I mean, how to interact not only w
ith a machine
but also with a human. It's something where we
will definitely and still need strong public and
privat investment. Creativity, flexibility to learn new things, technological know-how, human interaction. These are the skills
needed to be prepared for the labor market changes that the future brings
toward us at high speed. But what are the private sector and employers doing to
support this rethinking? If you don't get it, or if you consider that
the educational system does not provi
de you. Just take the people,
train them; train skilled people, train disadvantaged people, Two out of three
employers said, that they will get a
return on investment if they invest in people skills, but in this current recession and with the economic
pressures that they are facing are taking very
short-term decisions that lead to layoffs. And this is exactly the
contrary that we should do, I mean, everybody again, the over-narrative
on new technologies: skills, skills,
up-skilling, up-skilling,
but we are doing the contrary. The educational system and the private sector are
going into different directions. Entrepreneurship and
further education are two of the foundations of our
labor market in the future. Both of them can be
taught and enhanced in schools and universities. Still, if the private sector
is unwilling to play along, we will have challenging
times ahead of us. And there is the main problem: Which are the driving
forces of digitalization? Why it is not something that we bui
ld together
from the base where the people could have a voice in the
important decisions? Rethinking education
as a collective good, where people have
decisionmaking power, where the goal is the collective
empowering of students and the workforce,
and where technology is used to develop this vision
faster and more efficiently. How can we create the conditions for these technologies
to positively impact our educational system? Technology works, following the parameters
that has being given. So, w
e need to focus on "Who",
is right now, giving those parametrs
on Digitalization. Exactly. With digital technologies, there has been a disconnect between the public
and private sectors from the start. Finding a balance
between these two sectors will be one of the
greatest challenges for the educational
systems of the future. What other challenges will people face in their quest for more
and more knowledge? Realizing, that life is a
learning process, and that learning will
continue throughout lif
e is one of the great challenges. We know this, but our school system
keep on pretending that there is a
certain break in life. In which, one at some
point ends and, after that, becomes
a professional. I think is bizarre, that we spend so
much time trying to get children to arrive at this age
of eighteen, when they becaome an adult. We push them out
of home and school, and we ask them to choose, a single skill, that they should depend on for the rest of their lives. When really what's going on i
n the
minds of children is: they're not monogamous
to a single skill. There's actually
many things in life that interest them. And often, what teachers
and parents are doing is discouraging variety and insisting that they focus because you need
to be focused in order to be competitive. Counteracting this
understanding of education is the great challenge
for the future. The idea that we
never stop learning has strengthened
in the last decades. An always-changing social, work and
educational land
scape, impulsed mainly
through technology, has made us realize that our classical and, somehow outdated,
educational system is not prepared to
carry those fast changes. That is where a lot
of the focus needs to be; if we want to ensure that as a revival comes
back into the economy, as the job market
gets more dynamic again; we use this current
window of opportunity to actually give people
the right kind of skills. It won't be from
government alone, it won't be from business alone, but if we brin
g those
two sectors together and provide a lot more of online learning and training, this can work. Life-long learning, encouraged and driven
by the internet and the accessibility
to online studies, courses, and workshops. It's an incredible social experience to learn something
together in a real space
and collaboration, but it's not always
possible for everyone, everywhere to have... that privilege, of having a school with peers that share the passion
that you have. So, that's why online
is so
powerful, because you
can live anywhere and you can go online
and be anyone with anybody How will this improvement
in remote learning affect schools and universities? How will it look the
classroom of the future? Will it be a hybrid of online learning and in-school learning? Will it be a combination of group work and individual work? I think that university and the school will
still be needed. Because we are
social beings and I believe,
the essential thing you learn in those places is to work in
groups, to work socially. Group work and
interaction with others will always be the most
pleasant and fruitful way to acquire knowledge
and develop new ideas. But, the new opportunities
that the Internet offers us are almost unlimited. However, is our current
educational system prepared for those learning platforms? Will it be flexible enough under the pressure of those
new learning methods? I can very well imagine that in the future, students will have
much more opportunities to decide about
their
own educational curriculum. More possibilities to
decide about the methodology to use on the learning process. Also that parents
will be more involved in the earlier years and
in the various possibilities. And I imagine a school system flexible enough, to accommodate all the
qualifications that a person acquires in the course of a lifetime, and not just what happens within a certain framework. The validation of online education
as a part of our curriculum will definitely improve
employment
prospects in the future. But who exactly is invited
to be part of this educational revolution? The main problem, which remains an old one,
is an insane correlation between people's
social background and their educational opportunities. Which, supposedly, have been
counteracted over and over but clearly, it's still
happening everywhere. Any technology, whoever is inventing
and creating a tool needs to include everyone. We have connectivity,
connection, infrastructure; I mean, you just have to n
ame it. Everyone is inventing, but, distribution.
Who is distributing what? Who is having access? The access to
those technologies that promise to
improve our learning is still far away from being
distributed as it should. There is an enormous difference between rich and
developing countries and even in developing countries between public
and private schools. And at the moment, the signs of improvement in
this area are minor. Online learning, A.I. assistants, robots, and incentives
for entrepr
eneurship, are the flagships of
the education of the future. A future where efficiency,
perseverance, and initiative are
the goals to aspire to. A future altered almost every day at the speed
dictated by technology. Are we prepared
for such a challenge? Learning more and more so that we
don't lose our job or fall behind. This kind of situation
could become a huge stress factor and
burden in our working life. But, Up-skilling and learning
should open up new possibilities, should be an empowering
activity for the workers, and not become an added
external pressure on them, which could result in even
more anxiety or fear. We should try at all costs
to avoid turning education into a stress mechanism
that oppresses our lives between jobs. Rather, transform it into a tool, an instrument that
guides each of us in our long life
of self-discovery. Education, wherever is school or life-long learning, this is a way also where people can not only up-skills but to get empowered by the society. The
y shouldn't prepare
you for a job. They should prepare
you for life. They should help you to
grow up to be a human! Preparing you for your life! A goal that we all should aim for. With our children, our students, and our friends. We should never stop pursuing our internal self growth and personal development. Never forgetting our humanity. Never letting any technology taking it from us. Because that, is what empowers us. That is education of the future.
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