Education should train children to learn to learn; if they understand that they can learn anything if they apply themselves long enough, they would be AI’s masters
Even as bright minds in Indian information technology debate whether India should focus on creating applications using existing artificial intelligence (AI) models or spend time and energy developing foundational models and carrying out fundamental research, there is one area of indisputable consensus.
India must prioritise AI applications in two different areas of educational technology: a) to provide one-to-one tutoring in every Indian language, in every subject, particularly for primary classes, and b) to assess individual student progress in multi-student classrooms.
Why AI for education?
Why prioritise primary education, when AI could revolutionise healthcare and new drug discovery, coordinate robots on the shop floor, convert fleets of unmanned drones into weapons of unstoppable destruction, and control the flux of plasma in which nuclear fusion takes place?
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Indeed, AI has varied and exciting uses and promises to unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency in existing businesses, as well as entirely new lines of economic activity. Why should India focus on primary education first and foremost?
Some, but not all, of the ways in which AI would raise productivity and efficiency would be to reduce the manpower required to carry out some tasks. For example, a programmer can write a lot more code using AI than one would be able to, in the absence of AI.
Machine over man
If the overall demand for coding does not go up enough to keep all existing programmers coding away, some would lose their jobs. Autonomous robots and co-working robots on the shop floor would make some workers redundant.
Machine translation and vocalisation would reduce the demand for translators and voice-over/dubbing artistes. The image engines of popular AI models can take away work from illustrators.
If AI can train robotic hands to cut fabric as per the design fed into a machine, and robotic sewing machines take over stitching the cloth to cut into garments, swathes of jobs currently classified as labour-intensive would disappear. Polishing low-value diamonds could devolve into AI-controlled machines. AI excels at pattern recognition, and routine reading of X-ray scans can easily be outsourced to machines.
Riding storm of disruption
In other words, AI holds the potential to radically restructure the world of work. How can Indians ride this storm of disruption, and still come out on top?
This calls for enough numbers of school-leavers to emerge as young people capable of critical thinking and creativity. It would be ideal if every young adult comes out of school capable of thinking up, identifying and seizing on new possibilities created by AI. But that is neither feasible nor necessary. The new businesses thought up by the creative subgroup would generate jobs for the rest.
How do schools train young minds into creative dynamos? The challenge is far less daunting than it might appear to be.
Every child today is a legitimate heir to the entirety of human achievement in knowledge, knowhow, and aesthetics, and the universe of needs and wants of other humans, including the needs and wants of the non-humans who depend on humans.
How effectively our education system enables our children to appreciate, claim and own this legacy is the key question.
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Educated and unemployable
Right now, the Indian education system badly fails our young, despite our leaders’ high-pitched slogans on India’s demographic dividend.
Most of the vaunted young cohorts cannot divide, multiply, add or subtract, leave alone differentiate and integrate. Children emerge from school functionally literate, barely, with a very small proportion prepared for training in higher-order thinking.
People so ill-trained in the rudiments of human cognition end up as victims of technological change. They are the ones exhorted to make pakoras and get skilled.
Transient skills
This whole business of redefining the purpose of formal education, whether at school or in tertiary education, as equipping students with assorted skills is little short of high treason.
Skills are transient. What is a desirable skill one day, say typing and shorthand, turns into a quaint relic the next day – Dragon Naturally Speaking or some such speech recognition software taking over note-taking and text synthesis.
Education is meant to train the child to learn to learn, a lifelong skill. If, in addition to learning to learn, children learn that they can learn anything, provided they apply themselves long enough and hard enough to learning it, they would be AI’s masters, not victims.
Mastery model
This is the mastery model of education: in the early years of school, children should master their subjects, and should not move up a grade till they have learned everything they are supposed to learn at their level thoroughly.
Once they understand addition thoroughly, they will find subtraction and multiplication a breeze. If they understand multiplication, division is an easy next step.
If they learn to multiply a sum of two different numbers with the sum of two other numbers, they would never be wonderstruck as to where that 2ab comes from when (a+b) is multiplied by itself.
Making mastery model work
To make the mastery model work, you need quality teachers, and the ability to assess the progress made by individual members of the same class. We should train high-quality teachers, not only to teach but also to assess learning.
In this country of great distances and diversity, it would be a task that would leave Bhageeratha gasping that he would much rather tame one more river than take on the teachers’ unions, the underfunded, underfurnished, understaffed schools, missing school governance, a culture of valorising certificates rather than knowledge, and a student population, sizeable segments of which are first-generation learners.
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(For the sake of those who can list the 12 labours of Hercules, and are ready to instruct the present author on how to spell Mowgli’s panther-friend’s name, but have not heard of Bhageeratha, allow me to explain the reference to this personification of undaunted perseverance: he had to bring Ganga down from the heavens to where the charred remains of his forefathers lay, so as to redeem their souls; and to perform this task, he had to persuade Ganga to leave her heavenly abode, persuade Shiva to break the impact of her crushing fall from heaven to earth by absorbing her in his matted coiffure, persuade him to release her from his locks, persuade Ganga to follow his chariot as it raced ahead of the river to the site of his ancestors’ remains, persuade the sage Jahnu, whose place of penance the river flooded and who, thereupon, drank her up, to let her go, bestowing on Ganga, in the process, the name Jahnavi, meaning the daughter of Jahnu, as Jahnu released the river through his ear, and finally submerge the remains of his ancestors. Bhageeratha’s effort, in Indian tradition, is the equivalent of the West’s Herculean task.)
This is where AI-enabled edutech can make a difference. And there is no bigger priority than materialising the demographic dividend, instead of reaping a demographic disaster.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
