Future of Education

According to Thomas Frey, the senior futurist (fancy title) at the DaVinci Institute think tank, the largest internet company of 2030 will be an online school that we haven’t heard of yet (see WEF article). Aha!? Anticipating the boom in artificial intelligence research, Frey predicts that an education-based company will harvest AI breakthroughs for radically changing the way we learn (and thus take over the internet). By 2030, students will be allegedly learning from bot teachers 10 times faster than today. So the future of education shall be about being more efficient. What do you think?

We are convinced “efficiency” alone is no answer. While we share with Frey that “nobody has quite cracked the code for the future of education,” for now we claim “knowledge you cannot Google” is and will be at the heart of any responsible education. As long as bots cannot enter into a meaningful relationship with us, they will never replace meaningful learning that takes place in collective sense-making. And, even more important, speed and efficiency alone are useless if we don’t take care of our direction: are we learning the right things? Do we follow what actually matters deeply to us and our communities?

STRIDE puts these questions first for its CoLead program. While we don’t want to become the largest internet or education company – 2030 will hopefully see an open-source knowledge society free from oligopolist tendencies – we put all our efforts into helping to shift education at large.