What We Need To Teach

Tim Lovatt, Head of Digital Learning, UWC South East Asia

Through this article, Lovatt emphasizes the importance of nurturing distinctly human skills in schools to prepare students for an AI-driven future, rather than being distracted by the hype and uncertainty surrounding artificial intelligence.

Sometimes I see my own filter bubble clearly and 2025 is one of those times. All I see online is news about AI; people and schools doing awesome (and sometimes a little unnerving) things in the AI space. It is plastered all over the news. A Google news search yesterday for “Sam Altman” gave me 30 pages of news on how Sam thinks Elon Musk must be very unhappy and variations on that theme. Is the tech-bro just a new kind of celebrity that we can politely ignore?

“You have a building full of people who are almost certainly already doing most of this work. This is not the huge shift it might seem at first glance. Small tweaks to a unit, piece of work or assessment can make a big difference”

Or maybe this is something to be paying close attention to. Musk’s ethical track record with buying up tech companies isn’t exactly stellar. If Musk does manage to buy OpenAI, will it go the same way as twitter and start handing out gravitas to the highest bidder? As schools try to see through this miasma of celebrity feuding, what should we be paying attention to and what should we be encouraging our students to pay attention to? Because nobody seems to know if AI progress is even a good thing or a bad thing!

In his book “Scary Smart”, Mo Gawdat writes that AI could lead us to a world where “AI has relieved us of our mundane responsibilities and allowed us the time, safety and freedom to just enjoy being in nature, doing what humans do best - connecting and contemplating.” This is echoed by AI pioneer Kai Fu Lee in AI 2041 where he describes the world we could live in as a world of “plentitude,” where “nothing is scarce and everything is free.” But then at the total opposite end of the spectrum, nobel prize winner and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton is quoted as saying, of the advent of AGI, “We’re toast. This is the actual end of history.”

Even the experts are diametrically opposed in their outlooks. What is a school to do?

The answer to this is simple. We do what we do best. We nurture skills in our students that help them thrive, no matter what. How do we do that when AI is getting better and better and allegedly coming for 83 million jobs whilst pulling 69 million more out of its digital hat? We do it through innately human skills.

Human skills We Need to Thrive

There is a growing body of research into what skills will remain (at least for the foreseeable future and probably way beyond), “un-ai-able”. Not a term that rolls off the tongue, so I’m going to call these human skills. The terminology used in the research varies a bit, but it is all pointing in the same direction. The International Institute for Analytics says these skills are “contextual awareness,” “conflict resolution” and “critical thinking.” All things that bring out our humanity in marvelous ways. The Institute of Managers and Leaders in Australia say “connection,” “emotional intelligence,” “original thinking” and “adaptability”. I’m less convinced by some of these, but I see what they’re trying to say. The World Economic Forum say “creativity,” “leadership” and “learning”. I could go on. It’s a messy, overlapping field (probably why humans are good at it and machines suck). You know what’s good at messy overlapping things? Our old friend from maths, the Venn diagram. So here is my first draft of a framework of human skills.

Curiosity

Machines aren’t curious. They don’t WANT to know more stuff. They follow their programming and are trained on enormous amounts of stuff, but humans seek knowledge. My three-year-old desperately wants to explore the stickiest mess she can find. Humans see a problem or an opportunity and want to go out there and investigate. We are born with this curiosity and we can nurture it in schools. Sure, we could use machines to feed our curiosity and help us solve those problems, but it is humans that must be curious initially.

Critical Thinking

I used HeyGen the other day for an introduction to a presentation I gave to some mandarin speakers and it freaked me out. It’s so real. Deepfakes abound and we need our students to be able to pick apart the real from the imitation without blanketing distrust on everything. Without some level of trust, institutions collapse, so critical thinking in both directions is key.

Connection

Remember when you used to go to a restaurant and actually be served by a human? Now, it seems like the role of the wait staff, in Singapore at least, is to grunt and gesture towards a QR code where you have the pleasure of ordering without interacting with another human. If we approach life and business like this, OF COURSE AI IS GOING TO TAKE OUR JOBS! Wise up, people. We need to be nurturing our connection, with each other, our culture and our context.

The Role of School Leaders

If you are reading this and you are a school leader or administrator, know this. You have a building full of people who are almost certainly already doing most of this work. This is not the huge shift it might seem at first glance. Small tweaks to a unit, piece of work or assessment can make a big difference. Your job, as the inclusive education pioneer Shelley Moore says, is to “make it easier to do it than to not do it.” How? In the most boring but effective of ways. Structures. Tweak your unit plan template. Publicize the model, build professional learning around it, tweak your Approaches to Learning to reflect these things, identify all the successes that are already happening and celebrate them, build PL communities to support this work… Structures!

So, the next time you and your colleagues are reviewing your curriculum or re-writing an assessment, think of the human skills that our kids will need in the future. Think of how a small change in structure can nurture kids of tomorrow. Think of how we can make little tweaks to certain assessments or tasks to bring out the best, most human qualities in us all. And, for the most part, ignore the bickering of the tech-bros.

Artificial Intelligence