Roadmap for Education Reform in the AI Era

Wu Chen/Text The explosion of generative intelligence (AI) has made education reform very urgent. Generative AI is a rapidly evolving superagent that reads all the structural knowledge of humans and can answer almost any question. When AI is rapidly being used in all aspects of learning, work, and life, traditional education must change.

Overall, there are at least five dimensions of education reform that need to be carefully considered:

The first dimension is the transition from the industrial age to the intelligent digital age. The education system from primary school to secondary school to university is a product of the industrial age, with standardized teaching and standardized examinations "manufacturing" qualified workers and white-collar workers to meet the needs of the industrial economy. The intelligent digital era has undergone fundamental changes, mainly reflected in two aspects: on the one hand, digitalization and intelligence have automated a large number of jobs, and machines have played a great role in replacement, in order to cope with changes, education needs to strengthen human characteristics, in addition to professional skills, the cultivation of a series of soft skills such as efficient learning ability, communication ability, collaboration ability, empathy and so on has become more important, on this basis, it is also necessary to cultivate curiosity, creativity, a global view of the tree and the forest and forward-looking thinking to see the end. All of this places entirely new demands on existing education; On the other hand, because of the explosion of artificial intelligence, the teaching of students according to their aptitude, which was originally only enjoyed by a few wealthy elites, can also be enjoyed by the general public, giving each child a personalized education, cultivating according to their abilities and interests, and is no longer an unattainable ideal.

The second dimension is the rethinking of "reading changes destiny". After World War II, the global economy grew rapidly, university education gradually became popular, and many families had the "first person to go to college", and graduating from college meant a well-paid job, and through education to complete the income and class jump, this is the story that has been happening in the past 40 years. After experiencing rapid economic development, many people have lived a prosperous life, but the concept of "reading to change destiny" has not been corrected in time. The proportion of university students is increasing, while good jobs are not so easy to create, and the depreciation of academic qualifications is serious. Further, we are moving from a stage where class mobility is relatively easy, talents are relatively scarce, and we can change our destiny through study and hard work to complete the class jump, to a stage where class mobility is more difficult, talent is abundant, and learning alone cannot change our fate, and the class is becoming more and more solidified.

The third dimension is parental choice. In the United States, it is a tiger father and a tiger mother, and in China, it is an educational involution, which highlights two problems behind it. First, more parents spontaneously or forcibly join the "arms race" in education, many times not to let their children have a broader space for development in the future, but to try to avoid their children falling behind and avoiding class fall; The second is that in the face of the disruption and change brought about by technology, the future is full of uncertainty, parents are confused and confused, and can only give their children's future development enough support through fractionalism or hard work to "climb the vine", hoping that the halo of famous schools will provide an umbrella for their children's future.

The fourth dimension is the pursuit of educational equity and inclusiveness. The examination system commonly used in East Asian countries, especially the college entrance examination system adopted for university admissions, is an important support behind fairness, and it is hoped that objective and fair criteria will be used for screening. The other kind of equity is the equity of access to education, the equity of teaching quality, the smoothing out of regional differences in education, and the reduction of differences in the quality of education caused by the gap between the rich and the poor. The development of artificial intelligence has made the latter equity more achievable, but it is a mortal threat to the standardized tests on which the former depends.

In the last dimension, we need to go beyond the education reform itself and think about the ultimate question of "why education" from a broader perspective and a longer time dimension. If education in the industrial age was about producing qualified workers and business managers, then education in the intelligent digital age requires an understanding of the possible changes in the future workplace and career development. For China, in the great transformation of the economy towards innovation-driven, more innovative talents will be needed in the future, who must dare to experiment, dare to take risks, dare to break through the framework, have imagination and action, and are not afraid of failure. This undoubtedly raises new questions for China's education reform.

Artificial intelligence, as a major general-purpose technology, will bring changes to the future workplace:

First of all, a lot of familiar jobs will be replaced by machines, and a whole lot of new jobs will emerge in the future. We cannot predict what new jobs and new forms of work will emerge in the future, which requires us to change our educational outlook on education for a certain job or a certain profession. Both parents and teachers need to make this change. Education is aimed at nurturing human resources who can adapt to the changing workplace of the future.

Secondly, "man plus machine" is the future, and the future competition will be carried out in two dimensions. One is whether they will make good use of machines and the latest technology, and people who will not make good use of machines will be easily eliminated; The second is whether they will work in a team and whether they know how to call resources, and people who work alone are easy to be eliminated. This also requires a series of reforms in education. Don't be afraid of new technology, but embrace it with all your might; It is not simply about pursuing scores, but about creating more environments to create team competition, and cultivate and shape individual collaboration and communication skills in team competition, so that leaders can stand out.

Recently, there have been a series of books that have been thinking about education reform from different dimensions, including the new book "Brave New Words" by Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, "Children in the County: The Ecology of Education in China" by Professor Lin Xiaoying of Peking University, "Innovation" by Liang Jianzhang, Chairman of Ctrip, "Fierce to the End: Raising Children in a Competitive Environment" by American sociologist Hillary Friedman, and "I Tutor on the Upper East Side" by Bryce Grossberg, Ph.D. in Psychology. The Parenting Wars of New York's Wealthy Class from the Perspective of a Doctor of Psychology, "One Man Company: High-Tech Workers in the Wave of Unemployment" by Carrie Lane, a professor at California State University's School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Fulton, and, of course, Yale University economist Fabrizio Zilibotti's 2019 analysis of educational economics, Love, Money, Children: The Economics of Parenting. Based on the views of these books and in-depth communication with corresponding experts, this paper attempts to make a comprehensive review of education reform in the AI era.

The ideal of teaching students according to their aptitude

The development of artificial intelligence has made personalization-based services imaginative, whether it is customized medical care or customized education. Khan Academy participated in the beta test of GPT-4 in 2023 and launched an artificial intelligence teaching assistant called Khan-migo based on it, which has taken a big step forward in personalized learning and greatly promoted the inclusive education brought by artificial intelligence.

The basic idea of personalized learning is that students can learn at their own pace, and in the process, they can receive targeted tutoring, consolidate basic knowledge, and master more in the areas they are interested in and good at. The ideal state is to change the state of "mass production" of education in the industrial age.

This kind of personalized learning was originally only available to wealthy families, who could afford to pay a lot of money to tutor their children. Grossberg, the author of "My Tutor on the Upper East Side," joined a private school in New York as a counselor after graduating from Harvard, and was once a tutor for wealthy New Yorkers, helping middle school students read and understand classic literature like "The Odyssey" and helping them improve their writing skills. Of course, if these children have problems in science, they can also find college professors to tutor them.

Before the advent of GPT (GenerativePre-Trained), personalized learning was difficult to achieve on a large scale because a teacher could not give the same personal attention to thirty or forty students in a class, nor could they make them learn in the classroom at different speeds. Khanmigo makes personalized tutoring possible at a cost of only $44 a year, which is about 300 yuan, which is much cheaper than extracurricular tutoring classes.

Secondly, as a machine, it is online 24/7, meticulous, careful, not tired, and patient, which is something that humans cannot do. Thanks to the most detailed pedagogical training (knowledge of all educational methods and best practices), it can develop interactive teaching programs according to the student's grade level and learning level.

After the advent of ChatGPT, the first reaction of many teachers was to worry about children using AI to cheat, such as letting AI write essays directly without thinking for themselves. As a deeply customized AI teaching assistant, Khanmigo's goal is to make himself a good partner who accompanies and supervises students' learning, which is significantly different from ordinary GPT in two aspects:

First, it does not give answers directly, but rather finds solutions with students step by step in language interactions (and in the future, voice interactions). It also keeps a record of all the interactions, allowing the teacher to check how the students are using the tools and how the students are improving their writing skills, as opposed to letting the machine write for the students.

Second, Khanmigo tries to stimulate students' interest when teaching as a co-ordination. For example, it can simulate historical celebrities, let children have a dialogue with George Washington, the founding father of the United States, or the famous scientist Albert Einstein, and help children understand the development of historical events, the thinking of historical figures, and so on in the process of interaction.

Overall, AI teaching assistants are experts in various subject areas and can provide personalized, adaptive learning exercises based on students' individual needs and abilities. It also better assesses students and recommends what to learn next based on their current level of knowledge.

Interestingly, in practice the teacher benefits more. Salman Khan specifically proposed in "Brave New Words" that he hopes that AI teaching assistants will help teachers complete the "value chain jump". AI teaching assistants can help with grading assignments, reading papers, and more, and that's what teachers love about it. Helping teachers customize lesson plans and make suggestions for scenario-based teaching is also a strong point for AI teaching assistants.

Equity in education

Pull back to the Chinese reality. The gap between the rich and the poor and the gap between urban and rural areas make it rare for people in big cities to see the true face of rural China. Professor Lin Xiaoying used meticulous fieldwork to describe the education ecology of counties in China in "Children in the County". While the people of the metropolis lament why there has not been much progress in basic education over the years, and the burden on children has not been reduced or even heavier, the county town needs to face another cruel reality: the problems covered by the left-behind children, the withdrawal of villages and schools, and the elite school tournament. The county and village schools are the focus of Professor Lin's observations. The Department of Education, schools and teachers, parents and children make up the stakeholders of education in the county.

"Children in the County" is a book that analyzes the "disadvantaged groups" in China's education system, and the children in the county and village are left over after several sieves. The promotion rate is the most important indicator of "top-down", which means that at every stage of basic education, the baton of fractionalism has been giving a signal of strengthening, primary school has become a preparatory department for junior high school, junior high school has become a preparatory department for entering a good high school, and high school has become a preparatory department for winning "985" and "211". Layers of selection have led to an increasingly serious situation of pinching, and to achieve good grades is to screen out students with good grades, and as for the students who are eliminated in the process, little attention is paid to them. The book focuses on "the children of the county and village schools", and the students of these grassroots ordinary schools are all "crooked melons and cracked dates" that have been picked up, but this also forces many grassroots educators into a "desperate situation", making them rethink the relationship between teaching for test scores and cultivating a sound personality. The focus of education is to leave children with "unforgettable educational experiences".

The school should create a small environment, which should be different from the society, and be a relatively equal and average environment, which is why schools (both Chinese and foreign) are now required to wear school uniforms. Of course, schools with a large proportion of low- and middle-income families need to pay more attention to family differences when organizing school activities, and "why not eat minced meat" is a frequent problem. What one class is accustomed to may be stressful and embarrassed by another.

Similar situations have been seen in textbooks, such as asking children to count the number of balloons that have been fluorosed on pictures, but children may have never read picture books. Let the children find the subway route from A to B in the big city on the map, but the children who have never left the county town have no idea what the subway is, and even the teacher may not have the experience of taking the subway; There are also math problems with exchange rates, and the dollar and yen make them dizzy. Restoring the familiar context of children, or laying the groundwork when teaching, so that children can gradually understand and become familiar with the context that is commonplace in big cities, is the focus of teaching in county villages.

These cases have reminded us time and again that the huge gap between urban and rural perceptions still exists. Can technology bridge this gap? Cognitive upgrading is the most urgent task for these children. In an era of abundant information and videos, what children in the county lack most is the recommendation of high-quality information and videos that allow them to understand the excitement of the outside world. Professor Lin Xiaoying suggested that the first step that college students who go to rural areas to teach is to recommend some good apps, high-quality public accounts and video accounts to their children, because high-quality content will be infectious.

Education reform needs to be tailored to local conditions, and the same is true for education. The above game of chess often ignores the great diversity of rural counties. There are still many teachers who hope to educate children according to local conditions in the existing "one acre and three points of land", give them some space, and tolerate some exceptions, maybe it will be better.

On the whole, there is a strong tendency in today's education to "respond to regulatory requirements", on the one hand, it has to deal with various inspections, and on the other hand, classroom education also presents a certain kind of performance in response to inspections. What is lacking is "customer first", that is, truly putting the needs of children's education and growth first, and because of the objective existence of wealth and poverty, class and geographical disparities, such needs must be diverse, and adapting measures to local conditions has therefore become the key.

"Children in the County" is an important reminder of the current situation of education in China, reminding everyone to seriously think about how to "overtake in the corner" in education!

Can reading still change fate?

The rural-urban disparity in education and the gap between rich and poor are both present in China and abroad, and the two books highlight the urban-rural disparities in education in the United States and the United Kingdom:

One is J.D. Vance's autobiography, "The Sorrow of a Redneck," which describes his growing up in the Rust Belt in Ohio, USA. Thanks to the relocation of manufacturing and the hollowing out of industries caused by globalization, the 1980s and 1990s when Vance grew up were precisely the era of the sinking of the American Rust Belt, and education bore the brunt. Industrial relocation, economic collapse, family ruin, children's education problems, few people in Vance's high school can actually graduate, young unwed mothers and drug abuse and other social problems are rampant. Vance was one of the lucky few, and it wasn't until he graduated from high school and enlisted in the army that he really realized how isolated the town was (the army taught him what credit cards and installments were). After being discharged from the military, he was sponsored by the GI Act (Military Placement Act) to attend Ohio State University, and after graduation, he was admitted to Yale Law School, where he was the only poor child in his class.

It is worth mentioning that with the funding of Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel, Vance was successfully elected to the U.S. Senate of Ohio with the support of Trump's basic "red neck" (the white industrial working class who did not go to college), completing his life counterattack. In this year's U.S. presidential election, Vance is likely to be Trump's partner, and if Trump is re-elected, Vance may have the opportunity to rewrite the rules of American politics, and a poor country boy will win the White House.

Another book, in her autobiography Thereisnothingforyouhere, in which Hill, an American expert on Russian affairs, describes her experience growing up in the Rust Belt (the mining region of northern England) in the 1970s, highlighting the gap between Britain's metropolises and declining industrial areas, not only in terms of economics but also in terms of information. For example, when applying to schools, Hill, who grew up in an industrial area, has no way of knowing which schools are famous and how to apply (the Internet is not yet widespread). If it weren't for the fact that she was good at foreign language and participated in an exchange study trip to Germany, she would not have known the outside world at all, and she would not have realized that she was at the bottom of the British social class.

Vance and Hill are examples of how they changed their lives through their studies, and they were both "the first to go to college" in their families, and this change was inseparable from their own efforts and rare opportunities. But the current situation is completely different from that of the 1970s and 1990s. It can be said that the current perception of how to choose a career in the future and how to plan in the workplace may be completely wrong.

First of all, we are still used to asking our children "what do you want to be when you grow up" when we are young, as if there will still be a career in the future that can be used throughout the career. Still asking such questions is actually "misleading people's children". This misleading will be further deepened if our higher education is still limited to allowing children to choose a major and give them an expectation of a specific job. Mobility in the workplace has increased dramatically over the past decade, and artificial intelligence has exacerbated this trend, where it will be the norm for a person to change ten jobs in their career, where the ability to learn for life and adapt to change becomes crucial.

Second, the advice on career development is a lie. Whether in the United States or China, there was a generation that believed that if you went to a good university, got a graduate degree, and worked hard, you could steadily advance in the workplace. At the moment, if you still hold such an idea, you will find that it is your turn when the company lays off employees.

Also, advocating that the CompanyofOne, everyone is an entrepreneur and should shape their own personal IP, is actually a fool. Ryan has a very detailed reflection in "One Man Company". The concept of a one-person company believes that in a changing workplace, changing jobs is a great time to create a personal brand, start your own business, or start a freelance job. Job seekers are also taught that the secret to getting good opportunities in the workplace is to polish their personal brand. The reality is that employers don't care. Getting opportunities in the workplace depends on the circle, establishing a good network, and getting the internal recommendation of people within the company when a good position appears.

The above three points may be contrary to the common success science in the market, because success science is only applicable to the top successful people, and for ordinary people, it is necessary to rethink how to adapt to the future market.

It is evident that education is lagging behind the needs of the workplace and occupation. Taking the United States as an example, there are still many people who are studying for a doctorate, especially a doctorate in liberal arts, looking forward to graduating with a doctorate like the previous generation, getting a teaching position in a good university, and then relying on more than ten years of hard work to get a tenured teaching position, and do academic work with peace of mind. The actual situation is that 30 percent of the teachers in American universities are adjunct professors, and only 30 percent can get tenure in the university.

Wise Parental Choice

In "One Thrill to the End", we see the various efforts of middle-class and upper-middle-class families to "climb the vine with chickens", because they are worried that their children will "sink", and the safest way to ensure that they do not sink is to go to a prestigious school. The challenge for these parents is to help their children plan a trajectory of certainty in the face of an uncertain future, which also means giving up the resilience to deal with uncertainty in the future. "I'm a Tutor on the Upper East Side" reveals the education outlook of the wealthy 1%. Tiger parents are more prevalent and radical among the affluent. Parents take care of their children's time clearly, and there is nothing left. It gives people the illusion that they are educating children with familiar project management methods, and doing everything possible to help children squeeze into Ivy League schools, in addition to showing off to the outside world, it is also a kind of self-satisfaction in the pursuit of investment returns. But the negative consequences of this arrangement are obvious: on the one hand, there is no longer uncertainty in the children's lives, and they do not have the opportunity to cope with the uncertain future on their own; On the other hand, children's circles are actually very small, and they enjoy too much peak experience when they are young, but they will lose their curiosity and fighting spirit in the future.

Does education promote class mobility, or does it educate and solidify classes? "Love, Money, Children" makes a brief combing of education in different countries, and examines the "chicken baby" index of each country in two dimensions: equality and social mobility. In a country that is more egalitarian and socially less mobile (competitive), such as Sweden, parents will educate their children more detached and free, giving them more room to grow freely; In a country that is more egalitarian but socially mobile, such as Switzerland, parents will still have a strong incentive to help their children get better opportunities; In a country that is unequal but also socially mobile, parents have a stronger "tiger nature", and both China and the United States are typical cases.

An inescapable reality is the monopoly of the upper classes over the interpretation of the signals conveyed by education, especially in the United States. "I Tutor on the Upper East Side" reveals the same volume of elite education in the United States. Why Volume? Because places in prestigious schools are scarce, they have unparalleled advantages to grow up with elite children, and have a powerful alumni network to better secure a child's future. The volume of elite education in the United States is reflected in two aspects:

First of all, special emphasis is placed on cultivating the rules of survival of the upper class. In middle school, I went to gnaw on the original version of the difficult "Homeric Epic" in order to convey a strong learning ability: in any field, whether you like it or not, you can come out on top.

Second, they will constantly make and revise the rules for admission to prestigious schools for the benefit of their own class. George W. Bush, despite his mediocre grades, could still rely on his ancestors to attend Yale Law School, because in the 1950s, admission to elite American schools was not so high. As more and more people, including rising minorities and overseas student groups, begin to attack the "climbing vine", the admissions rules need to be revised. Sports students, especially the unpopular but expensive competition categories, have become a stepping stone for the wealthy class.

Even if the path is ultimately blocked, a large donation can still buy them admission to the Ivy League. Trump's son-in-law, Mr. Kushner, was admitted to Harvard after his father donated $2 million. Behind the "volume" is still a fear of uncertainty about the future. Society is facing great disruption, especially the rapid iteration brought about by technology, and even forward-looking parents cannot guarantee that the children they have planned will be able to adapt to the future environment.

Start cultivating the habit of lifelong learning from now on

How to cope with the uncertainty of the future? Kevin Kelly believes that the main skills you need to master when you graduate from high school now are to know your best learning methods, optimize your personalized learning style, and understand what works when you learn different subjects. Graduating children need to have this superpower that optimizes lifelong learning, because in the future, a person will need to keep learning new things throughout their lives.

Even a high school student should know how best to learn a language, how best to learn a new skill, and how best to learn a new field. The core skill of the future is to know how to learn most effectively and find the most effective way to learn for different subjects. This requires constant testing and experimentation, through practice and practice, experiencing failures and learning from them. It's a set of systems engineering that requires the help of teachers and AI teaching assistants like Khanmigo to figure out a series of questions, such as how long do you need to sleep between memory cycles? How often do you need to review? How often do you need to review something?

On how to foster a culture of innovation? Kelly believes that three things need to be done: there needs to be more acceptance of failure, there is a need to question authority more, and there needs to be a diversity of perspectives. It's not just about tolerating failure, but seeing it as a means to move forward, to move forward in failure, to do better in failure, and to allow students to overcome the stigma that comes with failure. This is especially true for Chinese students. Lin Xiaoying also observed the importance of frustration education. Children who pass the single-plank bridge on the exam are likely to develop the "crispy college student" phenomenon, that is, they lack resilience, have no experience to deal with failure, and may be discouraged and give up if they encounter failure, whether in the study or job search stage.

"One Thrill to the End" sorts out five points of cultural capital that can be gained through education, which is worth the attention of any parent who wants their child to succeed. The five points are: internalizing the importance of winning, learning to overcome failure, learning to complete tasks in a limited time, learning to succeed in a high-pressure environment, and being comfortable accepting the evaluation of others in public. In addition to embracing failure, the remaining four pieces of advice are all mental literacy necessary for children to succeed in the real world.

In "A New Vocabulary of Bravery", Salman Khan argues that successful people in the future need three basic skills: the first is the 3R ability that Gates particularly emphasized, the ability to read comprehension, writing and arithmetic (Reading, WRitingandARithmatic), without which it is difficult to cope with various complex situations, let alone make informed decisions; The second is also a cliché, that is, T-shaped talents, people who have a deep understanding of a specific field and a wide range of skills; The third is strong communication, collaboration and empathy. In other words, in the era of AI, what humans need to consolidate is the most basic cognitive ability, the most important learning ability, and the most effective ability to deal with others.

Liang Jianzhang and Lin Xiaoying share the same view. In his new book, Innovationism, Liang Jianzhang argues that basic education is still important, and that it is necessary to learn both instrumental and theoretical knowledge. Lin Xiaoying believes that in order to cultivate people's ability to touch and bypass different from machines (that is, the ability to have an epiphany), it is necessary to strengthen basic education, so that children can store enough basic knowledge in the basic learning stage, so that they can interact with new knowledge in the future and produce associative cognition.

In "Innovationism", Liang Jianzhang believes that innovation activities must be completed by human beings. Innovation requires four steps: asking questions; determine the search space and evaluation functions; search and inspire; Test and determine. The machine is good at the last two steps, and the first two steps still need to rely on human thinking. Asking questions and determining what qualifies for solutions remains the domain of human beings, and the ability to develop this requires a broad perspective and a complex and diverse living environment.

On top of this, Salman Khan stressed the need to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit from an early age. He further defines entrepreneurship: "Entrepreneurship is actually a form of creativity that knows how to integrate resources to create value. ”

In an era where AI can become an expert in any single field, people's creativity will be reflected in two ways: one is to have a clear understanding of themselves and know how to change. Salman Khan sees this more specifically as a personal vision, being able to look at all aspects of his work, identify problems that need to be solved, know where to focus his research, and understand the elements that need to be integrated to solve the problem. The second is a return to the pre-Industrial Revolution artisan experience, where you can work with a small group of people with diverse backgrounds in engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and design, and together they will be able to manage large numbers of artificial intelligence and bring all of those elements together to do great things.

Educational reform is a systematic project. What kind of talent will be needed in the future? What unique capabilities need to be cultivated in the era of "man plus machine"? What kind of inclusive teaching can AI bring? How can social mobility be promoted while balancing educational equity? Easier said than done, let's drive change together.

(The author is a famous financial writer, former editor-in-chief of The Economist Business Review, and founder of Morning Reading Bureau)