In most advanced economies of the West, there is a broad and urgent need, amounting almost to a sense of panic, to revaluate and reform education as the advancing tide of robotics gets ever closer.
Quite why it has taken grip so strongly now, after years of warning that globalisation, the internet, automation and artificial intelligence would change everything, is hard to explain. Such trends, like global warming, seem to need a critical mass of revelatory instances to occur to prompt policy makers to stick their heads above the parapet.
Perhaps it’s because AI is so frightening, and because, for the first time, it is threatening white collar and professional jobs, that the middle class has decided to buck up its response.
We have reported before on how one of the most conservative didactic and traditional approaches to teaching and learning – found in the US High School system – is under pressure to change.
Colleges and industry have complained repeatedly that the students being churned out could not cope in work or higher education and that they lacked the capacity to think for themselves or apply any learning skills to new challenges.