What is going to be the future of learning?

I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind of sets the stage.

I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from?

And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from.

It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["The British Empire"]

Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships.

But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It's still with us today. It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine.

<aside> ☁️ In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school.

</aside>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU

The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: they must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head.

They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it? ["Schools as we know them are obsolete"]

So that's a pretty strong comment there. I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete. I'm not saying they're broken. It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.

What are the kind of jobs that we have today? Well, the clerks are the computers. They're there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand. They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.

Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?

Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not?

At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter -- oh, surely she is extra-intelligent." And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? (Laughter) What did the poor do wrong?

I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was. The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "What is this?" And I said, "Yeah, it's, I don't know." (Laughter) They said, "Why have you put it there?" I said, "Just like that." And they said, "Can we touch it?" I said, "If you wish to." And I went away.

About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, "Well that's impossible, because -- How is it possible? They don't know anything." My colleagues said, "No, it's a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse." So I said, "Yeah, that's possible." So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter)

I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. When they saw me, they said, "We want a faster processor and a better mouse." (Laughter) So I said, "How on Earth do you know all this?"