In 1999 the Indian physicist Sugata Mitra got interested in education. He knew there were places in the world without schools and places in the world where good teachers didn’t want to teach. What could be done for kids living in those spots was his question. Self-directed learning was one possible solution, but were kids living in slums capable of all that much self-direction?
At the time, Mitra was head of research and development for NIIT Technologies, a top computer software and development company in New Delhi, India. His posh twenty-first-century office abutted an urban slum but was kept separate by a tall brick wall. So Mitra designed a simple experiment. He cut a hole in the wall and installed a computer and a track pad, with the screen and the pad facing into the slum. He did it in such a way that theft was not a problem, then connected the computer to the Internet, added a web browser, and walked away.
The kids who lived in the slums could not speak English, did not know how to use a computer, and had no knowledge of the Internet, but they were curious. Within minutes, they’d figured out how to point and click. By the end of the first day, they were surfing the web and—even more importantly—teaching one another how to surf the web. These results raised more questions than they answered. Were they real? Did these kids really teach themselves how to use this computer, or did someone, perhaps out of sight of Mitra’s hidden video camera, explain the technology to them?
So Mitra moved the experiment to the slums of Shivpuri, where, as he says, “I’d been assured no one had ever taught anybody anything.” He got similar results. Then he moved it to a rural village and found the same thing. Since then, this experiment has been replicated all over India, and all over the world, and always with the same outcome: kids, working in small, unsupervised groups, and without any formal training, could learn to use computers very quickly and with a great degree of proficiency.
This led Mitra to an ever-expanding series of experiments about what else kids could learn on their own. One of the more ambitious of these was conducted in the small village of Kalikkuppam in southern India. This time Mitra decided to see if a bunch of impoverished Tamil-speaking, twelve-year-olds could learn to use the Internet, which they’d never seen before; to teach themselves biotechnology, a subject they’d never heard of; in English, a language none of them spoke. “All I did was tell them that there was some very difficult information on this computer, they probably wouldn’t understand any of it, and I’ll be back to test them on it in a few months.”
Two months later, he returned and asked the students if they’d understood the material. A young girl raised her hand. “Other than the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease,” she said, “we’ve understood nothing.” In fact, this was not quite the case. When Mitra tested them, scores averaged around 30 percent. From 0 percent to 30 percent in two months with no formal instruction was a fairly remarkable result, but still not good enough to pass a standard exam. So Mitra brought in help. He recruited a slightly older girl from the village to serve as a tutor. She didn’t know any biotechnology, but was told to use the “grandmother method”: just stand behind the kids and provide encouragement. “Wow, that’s cool, that’s fantastic, show me something else!” Two months later, Mitra came back. This time, when tested, average scores had jumped to 50 percent, which was the same average as high-school kids studying biotech at the best schools in New Delhi.
Next Mitra started refining the method. He began installing computer terminals in schools. Rather than giving students a broad subject to learn—for example, biotechnology—he started asking directed questions such as “Was World War II good or bad?” The students could use every available resource to answer the question, but schools were asked to restrict the number of Internet portals to one per every four students because, as Matt Ridley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “one child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot.” When they were tested on the subject matter afterward (without use of the computer), the mean score was 76 percent. That’s pretty impressive on its own, but the question arose as to the real depth of learning. So Mitra came back two months later, retested the students, and got the exact same results. This wasn’t just deep learning, this was an unprecedented retention of information.
Mitra has since taken a job as a professor of education technology at the University of Newcastle in England, where he’s developing a new model of primary school education he calls “minimally invasive education.” To this end, he’s created “self-organized learning environments” (SOLES) in countries around the world. These SOLES are really just computer workstations with benches in front of them. The benches seat four. Because SOLES are also installed in places where good teachers cannot be found, these machines are hooked up to what Mitra calls the “granny cloud”—literally groups of grandmothers recruited from all over the United Kingdom who have agreed to donate one hour a week of their time to tutor these kids via Skype. On average, he’s discovered, the granny cloud can increase test scores by 25 percent.
Taken together, this work reverses a bevy of educational practices. Instead of top-down instruction, SOLES are bottom up. Instead of making students learn on their own, this work is collaborative. Instead of a formal in-school setting for instruction, the Hole-in-the-Wall method relies on a playground-like environment. Most importantly, minimally invasive education doesn’t require teachers. Currently there’s a projected global shortage of 18 million teachers over the next decade. India needs another 1.2 million. America needs 2.3 million. Sub-Saharan Africa needs a miracle. As Peter Smith, the United Nations’ assistant director-general for education, explained recently, “This is the Darfur of children’s future in terms of literacy. We have to invent new solutions, or we are as good as writing off this generation.”
But Mitra discovered that solutions already exist. If what’s really needed are students with no special training, grandmothers with no special training, and a computer with an Internet connection for every fourth student, then the Darfur of literacy need not be feared. Clearly, both kids and grandmothers are plentiful. Wireless connectivity already exists for over 50 percent of the world and is rapidly extending to the rest. And affordable computers? Well, that’s exactly where the work of Nicholas Negroponte comes in.
One of the first people to recognize the educational potential of computers was Seymour Papert. Originally trained as a mathematician, Papert spent many years working with famed child psychologist Jean Piaget before moving to MIT, where he and Marvin Minsky cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Lab. From that perch, in 1970 Papert delivered a now-famous paper, “Teaching Children Thinking,” in which he argued that the best way for children to learn was not through “instruction,” but rather through “construction”—that is, learning through doing, especially when that doing involved a computer.
As this was five years before the Homebrew Computer Club had its first meeting, a lot of people laughed at Papert’s ideas. Computers were gigantic and expensive. How exactly were they going to get into the hands of children? But an architect named Nicholas Negroponte took him seriously. Now known as one of the founding fathers of the Information Age, the founder of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, and the cofounder of MIT’s Media Lab, Negroponte too felt that computers might be a way to bring a quality education to the 23 percent of the world’s children currently not in school.
To this end, in 1982 Papert and Negroponte brought Apple II computers to schoolchildren in Dakar, Senegal, confirming what Mitra had confirmed previously: that poverty-stricken rural children take to computers just as quickly as all other children. A few years later, at the Media Lab, the duo created the “School of the Future,” which moved computers into the classroom, and served as a test bed for ideas. In 1999 Negroponte took those ideas abroad and began setting up schools in Cambodia. Each student was provided with a laptop and an Internet connection. They also learned their first word in English: Google.
The experience was powerful. Negroponte left Cambodia with two firm beliefs. One, that children everywhere loved the Internet. Two, that the market wasn’t particularly interested in making low-cost computers, especially ones cheap enough for the developing world, where annual educational budgets could be as low as $20 per child. In 2005 he started working on a solution, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an initiative aimed at providing every child on the planet with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop.
While the computer’s fabled $100 price tag has yet to materialize (it’s roughly $180 today), OLPC has delivered laptops to three million children around the world. Because the initiative is based on a learning-by-doing education model, rote-memorization-based tests and other traditional measures of success do not apply. But there are metrics available. “[T]he most compelling piece of evidence that I have found that this program is working,” says Negroponte, “is that everywhere we go, truancy drops to zero. And we go into some place where it’s as high as thirty percent of the kids, and suddenly it’s zero.”
Truancy isn’t exclusive to the Third World. On average, only two-thirds of American public school students finish high school—the lowest graduation rate in the industrialized world. In some areas, the dropout rate is over 50 percent; in Native American communities, it’s higher than 80 percent. Many assumed that these students leave school because they’re unable to do the requisite work, but research conducted by the Gates Foundation found that this isn’t the case. “In a national survey of nearly 500 dropouts from around the country,” writes Tony Wagner, codirector of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group, in his book The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do About It, “about half of these people said they left school because their classes were boring and not relevant to their lives or career aspirations. A majority also said that schools did not motivate them to work hard. More than half dropped out with just two years or less remaining to earn a high school diploma, and 88 percent had passing grades at the time that they dropped out. Nearly three-quarters of the interviewees said they could have graduated if they wanted to.”
Whether OLPC will have these same effects in the United States is an open question (the North American version didn’t launch until 2008), but its global impact continues to grow. Uruguay has made OLPC the backbone of primary school education, and other countries are starting to follow suit. In April 2010, the organization partnered with the East African community to deliver fifteen million laptops to children in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi.
Helping fulfill Negroponte’s vision is OLPC’s recent switch from a $100 laptop to a $75 tablet. Of course, as Nokia is currently developing a $50 smart phone—which will most likely spread organically instead of requiring significant governmental investment—this does raise the question “Why bother?” But Negroponte feels that the smart phone is the wrong device to deliver an education, arguing that tablets provide what he calls “the book experience,” which he believes is fundamental to learning. Considering the Media Lab’s track record with machine-human interfaces, we’d be foolish not to consider his opinion. And even if smart phones do end up as tomorrow’s favorite platform, who cares, as long as every kid get access to an education?
Our current education system was forged in the heat of the industrial revolution, a fact that not only influenced what subjects were taught but also how they were taught. Standardization was the rule, conformity the desired outcome. Students of the same age were presented with the same material and assessed against the same scales of achievement. Schools were organized like factories: the day broken into evenly marked periods, bells signaling the beginning and the end of each period. Even teaching, as Sir Ken Robinson put it in his excellent book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, was subject to the division of labor: “Like an assembly line, students progressed from room to room to be taught by different teachers specializing in separate disciplines.”
In their defense, the transition from education as a rare treat reserved for the clergy and aristocracy to one where everyone was entitled to free schooling was nothing if not radical. But it has been over 150 years since then, and our education system has not kept up. Robinson himself has become one of the loudest voices calling for reform, arguing that today’s schools—with their emphasis on extreme conformity—are killing creativity and squelching talent. “As humans, we all have immense potential,” he says, “but most people pass through their entire lives with that potential untapped. Human culture, and school is a fundamental component of how we pass along that culture, is really a set of permissions. Permission to be different, permission to be creative. Our education systems rarely give people permission to be themselves. But if you can’t be yourself, it’s hard to know yourself, and if you don’t know yourself, how can you ever tap into your true potential?”
So if our current system isn’t doing the job it was designed to do, what exactly is it doing? This is not an easy question to answer for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that we no longer agree on what comprises success. In America, for example, after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, we now have the stated goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Most consider this a serious long shot, but even if we pull it off, does it really get us where we want to go?
Harvard’s Tony Wagner isn’t so sure:
So-called advanced math is perhaps the clearest example of the mismatch between what is being taught and tested in high school versus what’s needed for college and in life. It turns out that knowledge of algebra is required to pass state tests … because it is a near-universal requirement for college admissions. But why is that? If you are not a math major, you usually don’t have to take any advanced math in college, and most of what you need for other courses is knowledge of statistics, probability, and basic computational skills. This is even more evident after college. Graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were recently surveyed regarding the math that this very technically trained group used most frequently in their work. The assumption was that if any adults use higher-level math, it would be MIT grads. And while a few did, the overwhelming majority reported using nothing more than arithmetic, statistics, and probability.
Taken together, Wagner and Robinson are pointing out that we’re teaching the wrong stuff, but just as alarming is the fact that the stuff we’re teaching isn’t sticking. Two-fifths of all high school students need remedial courses upon entering college. In the state of Michigan, alone, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy estimates that remediation costs college and businesses about $600 million a year. A 2006 report on the subject by the think tank the Heritage Foundation observed: “If the other 49 states and the District of Columbia are anything like Michigan, the country spends tens of billions of dollars each year making up for public schools’ shortcomings.” A few years back, the National Governors Association interviewed 300 college professors about their freshman classes. The results: 70 percent said students couldn’t understand complex reading materials; 66 percent said students couldn’t think analytically; 62 percent said students wrote poorly; 59 percent said students don’t know how to do research; 55 percent said students couldn’t apply their knowledge. No surprise then that 50 percent of all students entering college do not graduate.
Even for those that do graduate, if the goal of college is to prepare students for the workforce, here too we are failing. In 2006, executives from four hundred major corporations were asked a simple question: “Are students graduating from school ready to work?” Their answer: “Not really.” And that’s right now. This year’s kindergarten class will be retiring around 2070 (provided that we don’t change the retirement age). So what will the world look like in 2070? What skills will our kids need to thrive then? No one has a clue.
What we do know is that the industrialized model of education, with its emphasis on the rote memorization of facts, is no longer necessary. Facts are what Google does best. But creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving—that’s a different story. These skills have been repeatedly stressed by everyone from corporate executives to education experts as the fundamentals required by today’s jobs. They have become the new version of the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic); the basics of what’s recently been dubbed “twenty-first-century learning.”
Twenty-first-century learning has dozens of moving parts, but at the center of them is a simple idea. “Over and over again,” says Wagner, “in hundreds of interviews with business leaders and college professors, they stressed the ability to ask the right questions.” As Ellen Kumata, managing partner of the Fortune 200 consultancy Cambria Consulting, explains:
When I talk to my clients, the challenge is this: How do you do things that haven’t been done before, where you have to rethink or think anew, or break set in a fundamental way. It’s not incremental improvement anymore. That just won’t cut it. The markets are changing too fast, the environments are changing too fast … You have to spend the time to ask the next question. There is something about understanding what the right questions are, and there is something about asking the nonlinear, counterintuitive question. These are the ones that take you to the next level.
If educational abundance is our goal, these facts leave us with serious quality and quantity concerns. For quality, what kind of learning system teaches kids to ask the right questions? That system needs to be able to teach the three R’s (because, yes, even in this digital age, these basics are still critical) and the twenty-first-century skills kids need to succeed. The quantity issue is equally important. We’re already short millions of teachers. Forget about infrastructure. Schools in America are falling apart; schools in Africa don’t even exist. So even if we do figure out what to teach our children, how to do this at scale remains equally perplexing.
But overshadowing both of these is a third problem. The twenty-first century is a media-rich environment. Between the Internet, video games, and those five hundred channels of cable, the competition for our children’s attention has become ruthless. If boredom is the number one cause of truancy, then our new education system needs to be effective, scalable, and wildly entertaining. In fact, wildly entertaining might not be enough. If we really want to prepare our children for the future, then learning needs to become addictive.
About ten years ago, Dr. James Gee sat down to play Pajama Sam for the first time. Gee is a linguist at Arizona State University. His early work examined syntactic theory, his more recent research delves into discursive analysis. Pajama Sam falls into neither of those categories. It’s a problem-solving video game aimed at young children. But Gee had a six-year-old son, and he wanted to help him develop better problem-solving skills.
The game surprised Gee. The problems, as it turned out, were a little harder than expected. More stunning was how well the game held his son’s attention. This piqued Gee’s curiosity. He started to wonder about adult video games, so he picked up a copy of The New Adventures of the Time Machine—mostly because he liked the H. G. Wells reference in the title. “When I sat down to play, it wasn’t anything like I expected,” he recalls. “I had this idea that video games were relaxing, like television is relaxing. Time Machine was hard, long, and complex. All of my normal ways of thinking didn’t apply. I had to relearn how to learn. I couldn’t believe people would pay fifty bucks to be this frustrated.”
But then it clicked: lots of young people were paying lots of money to engage in activities this frustrating. “As an educator, I realized this was the same problem our schools face: how do you get students to learn things that are long, hard, and complex?” Gee became intrigued by the implications. He also became intrigued by the games. Gee may be the only linguist in the world whose recent academic research includes the phrase: “The Legend of Zelda: The Windwalker,” but that research has helped turn upside down much of what people believed about video games.
For example, the idea that games are a waste of time holds up only if you consider serious, deep learning a waste of time. “Take young kids playing Pokémon,” says Gee. “Pokémon is a game for five-year-olds, but it requires a lot of reading to play. And the text isn’t written for five-year-olds, it’s written at about a twelfth-grade level. In the beginning, Mom has to play with her child, reading the text aloud. This is great, of course, because this is just how kids learn to read—by reading aloud with their parents. But then something funny happens. The kid realizes that Mom might be good at reading, but she’s not very good at playing. So the kid starts reading, just so he can kick Mom out of the game and play with his friends.”
This is just the beginning. Studies have shown that games outperform textbooks in helping students learn fact-based subjects such as geography, history, physics, and anatomy, while also improving visual coordination, cognitive speed, and manual dexterity. For example, surgeons and pilots trained on video games perform better than those who were not. But the real advantage is an ability to do what today’s schools cannot: teach twenty-first-century skills. World-building games like SimCity and RollerCoaster Tycoon develop planning skills and strategic thinking. Interactive games are great teachers of collaborative skills; customizable games do the same for creativity and innovation. “Some educators compare game play to the scientific method,” a recent Christian Science Monitor article on the subject reported. “Players encounter a phenomenon that doesn’t make sense, observe problems, form hypotheses, and test them while being mindful of cause and effect.” Considering all of this, many experts have come to the obvious conclusion: we need to find ways to make learning a lot more like video games and a lot less like school.
There are many different ways to do this. Jeremiah McCall, a history teacher at the Cincinnati County Day School, makes his students compare the battle depictions in Rome: Total War against the historical evidence. Lee Sheldon, meanwhile, a professor at the University of Indiana, has thrown out the traditional grading systems, where one bad grade can slide students backward. “This is demotivating,” said Carnegie Mellon University professor of entertainment technology Jesse Schell in a recent talk on the subject. “A game designer would never put it in a game because people hate that.” Instead Sheldon has implemented an “experience points” game-based design. Students begin the semester as a level zero avatar (equivalent to an F), and strive toward a level 12 (an A). This means that anything you do in the class produces forward motion, and students always know exactly where they stand—two conditions that serve to motivate.
Taking things even further are new schools like Quest2Learn. Founded by Katie Salen, a former associate professor of design and technology at Parsons the New School for Design, Q2L is a New York public school with a curriculum based on game design and digital culture. What does that look like in real life? Popular Science explains it this way: “In one sample curriculum, students create a graphic novel based on the epic Babylonian poem ‘Gilgamesh,’ record their understanding of ancient Mesopotamian culture through geography and anthropology journals, and play the strategic board game Settlers of Catan.”
There are plenty of other examples as well, with many more to come. At the earlier mentioned X PRIZE Visioneering meeting, US Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Scott Pearson of the Department of Education headed up a conversation on the use of incentive prizes to spark a brand-new generation of “effective, engaging and viral” educational games to be released on the net. A few months later, President Obama said, “I’m calling for investments in educational technology that will help create … educational software as compelling as the best video game.” This revolution is upon us. Soon we’re going to be able to create gamed-based learning that is so deep, immersive, and totally addictive that we’re going to look back on the hundred-year hegemony of the industrial model and wonder why it ever hung around for so long.
In 2006 Salman Khan was a successful hedge fund analyst living in Boston, with younger cousins living in New Orleans whom he’d agreed to help in school. Khan began tutoring them remotely by making simple digital videos. Usually no more than ten minutes long, these self-narrated videos consisted of an animated digital chalkboard on which he would draw equations, chemical reactions, and the like. Kahn taught the basic subjects covered in school. Because he saw no reason not to make the tutorials public, he began posting them on YouTube. Surprisingly, his cousins preferred Khan on YouTube to him tutoring them in person.
“Once you get over the backhand nature of that,” Khan told audiences at TED 2011, “there’s actually something profound. They were saying they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin … [F]rom their point of view, this makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where they can pause and repeat their cousin. If they have to review something they learned a couple of weeks ago or a couple of years ago, they don’t have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin, they can just watch those videos. If they’re bored, they can skip ahead. They can watch on their own time and at their own pace.”
The tutorials struck a nerve. Very quickly, the Khan Academy, as it is now known, became an underground Internet sensation. By 2009, over fifty thousand people a month were watching the videos. A year later, the number had risen to two hundred thousand a month. A year after that, it had grown to a million. As of summer 2011, the Khan Academy was pulling in over two million visitors a month—exponential growth driven almost entirely by word of mouth.
As users have grown, so have the subjects covered. The academy now has 2,200 videos on topics ranging from molecular biology, to American history, to quadratic equations. They are adding three lessons a day—roughly 1,000 a year—and have plans to open up the site and begin crowdsourcing content. “Our vision is a free virtual school,” says President and COO Shantanu Sinha. “We want to get enough content up that anyone in the world can start at one plus one equals two and go all the way through quantum mechanics. We also want to translate the site into the ten most common languages [Google is now driving this effort] and then crowdsource further translation into hundreds of languages. We think, at that level, the site is scalable into billions of visitors a month.”
And for those who prefer their education in a physical setting, the Khan Academy has recently partnered with the Los Altos School District in Northern California. Together they are taking an approach that inverts the two-hundred-year-old schoolhouse model. Instead of teachers using classroom time to deliver lectures, students are assigned to watch Khan Academy videos as homework, so that class time can be spent solving problems (also provided by Khan) and getting points along the way (ten correct answers earns them a merit badge). This lets teachers personalize education, trading their sage-on-a-stage role for that of a coach. Students now work at their own pace and advance to the next topic only once they have thoroughly learned the last. “This is called mastery-based learning,” says Sinha, “and there’s research going back to the seventies that shows it produces greater student engagement and better results.”
And better results are exactly what Los Altos is seeing. In the first twelve weeks of the project, students doubled their scores on exams. “It’s like a game,” John Martinez, a thirteen-year-old from Los Altos, told Fast Company. “It’s kind of an addiction—you want a ton of badges.” And it’s because of responses like this that Bill Gates, after Khan’s TED talk, told attendees they “just got a glimpse of the future of education.”
Gates is partially right. For some, the Khan Academy really is the future of education, but it’s not the only future available. Of the lessons to be learned from industrial education, foremost among them is the fact that not every student is the same. There are those who enjoy the head-on collision with knowledge that is a Khan video; others prefer it presented tangentially, which is how information usually arrives in video games. Whatever the case, digitally delivered content means that it’s no longer one size fits all. Students are now able to learn what they want, how they want, and when they want. And with the exponential expansion of IT technologies such as Negroponte’s tablets and Nokia’s smart phones, personalized learning will soon be available to just about anyone who wants it, no matter where in the world he or she lives.
But for digitally delivered universal education to be truly effective, we also need to change the way progress is measured. “We can’t get deeper learning until we change the tests,” says Gee, “because the tests drive the system.” Here too video games offer a solution. “A video game is just an assessment,” continues Gee. “All you do is get assessed, every moment, as you try to solve problems. And if you don’t solve a problem, the game says you failed, try again. And you do. Why? Because games take testing, the most ludicrous, painful part of school, and make it fun.” Even better is the data-capturing ability of video games, which can collect fine-grain feedback about student progress moment by moment, literally measuring growth every step of the way. As this technology develops, games will be able to record massive amounts of data about every aspect of each student’s development—a far superior metric for progress than the one-size-fits-all testing method we currently favor.
We should not assume that all of these developments mean an end to teachers. Study after study show that students perform better when coached by someone who cares about their progress. This means that in places where teachers are in short supply, we’ll need to expand the reach of Mitra’s granny cloud. Even more potential exists for peer-to-peer tutoring networks; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is currently beta testing one model. Most critically, since these newer models of education turn teachers into coaches, we’ll need to expand our research into ways to make these coaches more effective. Right now the majority of education research is based around classroom management techniques that are no longer necessary with digital delivery. Instead there is a great need for new data about how to make the best use of the one-on-one attention that is now becoming possible.
Lastly, for those who prefer their instruction machine based, with the increasing development of artificial intelligence, an always-available, always-on AI tutor will soon be in the offing. Early versions of such systems, such as Apangea Learning’s math tutor, has raised scores a staggering amount. For example, the Bill Arnold Middle School in Grand Prairie, Texas, used Apangea Math to help at-risk students prepare for their final exams, increasing pass rates from 20 percent to 91 percent. But such systems merely scratch the surface. In his novel The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, author Neal Stephenson gives readers a glimpse of what AI experts call a “lifelong learning companion”: an agent that tracks learning over the course of one’s lifetime, both insuring a mastery-level education and making exquisitely personalized recommendations about what exactly a student should learn next.
“The mobility and ubiquity of future AI tutors will enable one teacher per adult or child learner, anywhere and anytime,” explains Singularity University cochair for AI and Robotics Neil Jacobstein. “Learning will become real time, embedded into the fabric of everyday life and available on demand as needed. Children will still gather together with each other and with human teachers to collaborate in teams and learn social skills, but, fundamentally, the paradigm for education will shift dramatically.”
The benefits to this shift are profound. Recent research into the relationship between health and education found that better-educated people live longer and healthier lives. They have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to become obese and develop diabetes. We also know that there’s a direct correlation between a well-educated population and a stable, free society: the more well educated the population, the more durable its democracy. But these advances pale before what’s possible if we start educating the women of tomorrow alongside the men.
Right now, of the 130 million children who are not in school, two-thirds of them are girls. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), providing these girls with an education is “the key to health and nutrition; to overall improvements in the standard of living; to better agricultural and environmental practices; to higher gross national product; and to greater involvement and gender balance in decision making at all levels of society.” In short, educating girls is the greatest poverty-reduction strategy around.
And if educating girls can have this much impact, imagine what educating everyone can do. With the convergence of infinite computing, artificial intelligence, ubiquitous broadband coverage, and low-cost tablets, we can provide a nearly free and personalized education to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This is an incredible force for abundance. Imagine billions of newly invigorated minds, thrilled by the voyage of discovery, using their newly gained knowledge and skills to improve their lives.