Education that can't be Automated

Abstract

Human beings have always made tools. There's a natural world we inherit just by being alive, and an artificial world we make. We get the word art from artificial. As makers, we form tools from natural materials available to us and these worlds (natural and artificial) act back on us to shape the human world. We're born human but becoming fully human isn't automatic. It's work. We're the most cognitively flexible of all species and cope with the widest variety of environments. We survive by changing behaviour to fit the situation in which we find ourselves. A concern in this essay is with education that's based on essential human experiences that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can't replicate because of how it's made.

This essay isn't anti-AI. Its purpose is to describe a framework of essential learning children require for their humanity to flourish. Like all tools over time, we must situate AI wisely into this essential framework. That wisdom accumulates in learning environments in which children have what they need emotionally, cognitively, imaginatively, and relationally. With a framework woven from strands of four types of literacy (emotional, cognitive, imaginative, and relational) children can also weave AI's capacities into their learning as they're rooted and grow into their well situated, personal, relational knowledge.