In “Education” with a capital E, we all seem to take for granted we know what that word means. But do we? In reality we use that word to stand for a variety of practices and goals, which we often combine into one thing, as if it was just “understood” what we are referring to.
But as civilizations change, economies change, technology changes, sociology changes, so does the definition and content of “Education”.
Today it is very doubtful that “Education” has kept pace with all those changes, one indication of which being the recent panic over instantly creating learning from home tools during the Covid pandemic. Suddenly we could no longer muddle through with inadequate MO and yesterday’s technologies.
Are we then better prepared to take on the challenges to our conventional education methods posed by Large Learning Models, Chatbots, and Generative Pretrained Transformers?
(ChatGPT is one in that set of tools, there are others, and there will be more such, and advancement in their capability will be fast paced, if unpredictable. As always, advances in technology will be partly circumscribed by funding availability, and the business models created or evolving.
In Hugely Scaled Education, aggregating funding across entire states, and nationally, has proved problematic at the very best, as bleeding edge innovation requires a great deal of risk to “get the reward”. Risk taking is pretty much exactly what bureaucracies are created to avoid, so how can that built-in strong leaning towards stasis/ status quo be overcome?
That’s a very good question! Bucky Fuller said we should “route around” the existing structures by creating something better which would somehow be adopted because it was obviously superior. If only that was always true,.
But what exists can be very hard to route around, and resetting the current funding structures to support innovations and implementations of large scale changes which involve risk, can prove too difficult. We can look to the current state of “mass education” to see how much of “the way it was always done” is still with us today.
What to do?