[Opinion] Education, critical thinking and AI investment
Back in May 2023, I worked with a group of specialists in the education sector to map the landscape of education from multiple perspectives. We used these Wardley maps to identify strategic areas for investment, both to benefit society and to support market opportunities. As with the 17 other industries I've mapped, when we aggregated the individual maps, we found modest overlap between societal and market benefit (summary table attached). In short, you make a choice - do I focus on society or the market?
From a societal perspective, the highest priorities for investment were lifelong learning and critical thinking. From a commercial standpoint, the focus was on AI adoption and digital transformation.
At this point, I really want to say how happy I am that UK Gov has announced a massive £187 million investment into teaching critical thinking at schools. Except, it hasn't. We've decided to pile that into AI training & adoption, with US tech vendors. It's not only the wrong thing to do, it increases our dependency on those same players when I thought we were supposed to be taking sovereignty seriously?
As for critical thinking, it has been relegated to a curriculum review with no clear budget or implementation plan - yet. Of course, all will be forgiven if they announce some £400 million investment into teaching critical thinking but I'm not holding my breath.
It's sad. This could have been a landmark moment on par with UK Gov's adoption of open source AI (including training data) back in 2023 ... oh wait, we got that one wrong as well. We could have shown a real commitment to equipping future generations with the tools to question, to reason, to challenge. Skills like critical thinking are vital, especially in a time of rampant misinformation, machine generated bias, questionable values embedded through training data and increasingly opaque digital systems.
Alas, we're not investing in future generations to think but instead shaping them into more compliant & useful economic units. We run the danger of teaching kids to trust the machine before they learn to question it.
I do like the Chinese approach of banning AI services during exam times - but do we really understand the impact of using such services on the mind. As Einstein once said, "Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think." Instead, it seems we're training minds to feed the machine. At this rate, the Eloi will be fluent in prompt engineering, digitally skilled, and none the wiser.
The real question is: who gets to be the Morlocks?
Originally published on LinkedIn.