How to teach the next generation in the era of AI

The writer is professor of business at Gresham College. His latest book is ‘What Should My Children Do? How to Flourish in the Age of AI’

It is said that, centuries ago, there were Jewish scholars so familiar with the Talmud — a central religious text, several million words long — that if you poked a pin through its 5,422 pages, they could tell you the precise word it went through on the other side.

The story may be apocryphal but the “art of memory” it supposedly relied upon — the ars memoria — is not. This was once a celebrated skill, mastered by great figures from the Roman senator Cicero (to remember vast speeches) to the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (to simultaneously dictate different writings to multiple secretaries).

Today, that skill has vanished. We no longer live in oral cultures, where information must be kept in our heads and shared face-to-face. Successive waves of new technologies — writing, books, the internet — have chipped away at our memories.

This disappearance is a chapter in a longer story, where technological progress makes once-critical skills redundant. Most of the time, we do not lament their passing. We might feel nostalgic for tallow-chandlering, for instance, or the setting of moveable type by hand, but we do not hold a vigil for them. So too with the art of memory.

However, in the age of AI, we need to think carefully about whether there are certain skills we must not let go of. This week, the OECD published their latest Pisa scores, capturing global trends in numeracy and literacy among young people. The overall story is awful: an almost two-decade-long decline in these basics has got significantly worse.

Technology often takes the blame for this trend. It is not a coincidence, observers note, that the fall begins in 2009 — around the time that young people’s lives started to fill with smartphones and social media. Now, many suspect, AI is making the situation harder.

Why bother learning to handle a hard calculation, or to sit with a difficult text attempting to comprehend, absorb and analyse it, if AI can handle any questions we have with ease?

And here, we must draw a red line: if we do not confront this decline in literacy and numeracy, it will be a disaster. It is bad in itself. But in preparing the next generation for the age of AI, the loss of these basic skills is catastrophic.

To begin with, literacy and numeracy are not only “basic” in the sense that they are simple, but also because they are the building blocks for all more advanced capabilities — creativity, judgment, reasoning, problem-solving, whatever they might be.

It is impossible to predict the future of work — what jobs will exist, which advanced skills will be in demand. But whatever the latter turn out to be, they will build upon these basics. If the next generation is to flourish, they must have these foundations in place.

And there is another reason to worry about falling literacy and numeracy: AI capabilities are uneven and likely to remain that way. Yes, these systems are magnificent at certain tasks. But at others they are either confidently wrong or simply make things up. If humans are to tell the difference, we must keep our understanding of the fundamentals razor-sharp. It is not enough to use AI — we have to use it critically.

But all is not lost. In England, the OECD data shows that literacy and numeracy have held steady, despite the bleak global trends. The school system there has achieved this by focusing relentlessly on the basics. In contrast, its neighbouring systems in Scotland and Wales, where devolved governments have fallen prey over the past decade to shallow and faddish educational thinking, have fallen far behind.

And there is a sad irony in this Scottish and Welsh disaster: by explicitly trying to prepare young people for the future, they have become distracted by woolly ideas like “21st century learning” and “future-oriented approaches”, letting the very things required for the coming generations to flourish in the age of AI — numeracy and literacy — fall into disrepair.

What about the worry that the use of AI undermines basic skills? Fortunately, we have been here before. When the electronic calculator arrived in schools and exam halls in the 1980s, the fear was the same, yet over time we still found a way to flourish — dividing mathematics education in two, teaching with a calculator in one, teaching without a calculator in the other, and then testing both.

It is time to return to this proven approach again. We must take everything we teach, not just mathematics, and divide it up, teaching people to use AI but also to cope without it — and assessing both. This is a small, but essential, step to prepare the next generation.