She recently spoke on the subject at University College London and met with Reuben College, Oxford principal Lord Tarassenko – a leading voice in artificial intelligence and innovation at the House of Lords – for an in-depth discussion on the matter.
‘Schools are perhaps not moving quickly enough to give our children the skills that they are going to need for the future,’ she said.
‘The UK education review is not being ambitious enough about what needs to happen.’
Ms Harford-Fox said schools are focused on how to navigate around AI rather than planning for how it is going to ‘fundamentally disrupt’ society and the jobs of the future. They need to consider what skills and mindset will be necessary for the fourth industrial revolution.
‘It feels like we’re asking the question, “how do we stop children using ChatGPT to write better essays?”,’ she said.
‘We should be asking, “if ChatGPT can write better essays, why are we spending 11 years of our children’s lives teaching them to write them?” Given that the UK is being quite slow to position on this, Guernsey has an opportunity to take the lead.’
At UCL, she explored what the careers of the future might look like and how the idea of a single, linear career path will become obsolete over the next two decades. She suggests putting AI onto every year of the syllabus in the way that China and UAE are thinking of doing.
‘Our schools need to be ahead rather than behind this curve,’ she said.
‘The children who enter reception this year will leave school in 2040 and the world will be entirely different.’
The Ladies’ College runs a future-ready curriculum in key stage three and this year launched pathways – a programme for sixth formers that encourages adaptability, creative thinking and digital fluency.
Ms Harford-Fox said they working to stress the importance of being flexible.
‘We’ve never tried to teach flexibility in schools, so it’s a really interesting challenge,’ she said.
‘We have some big questions in front of us. I think there’s a risk in radical change.
‘There are brilliant things in our current education system that we need to hang on to, like the ability to analyse and understand what’s true.
‘But the examination system that prioritises memorisation, regurgitation and essentially trains children to be bad computers needs to change.’
With the next 30 years expected to bring more transformation than the last millennium, Ms Harford-Fox said this generation will play a pivotal role in defining the next industrial revolution.
‘These young people will set the rules and influence the way that AI will be used for hundreds of years of generations to come,’ she said.
‘The impact they will have will be exponentially higher than most generations.’
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