While part of the education world has been panicking since the launch of ChatGPT-like conversational robots, the leader of the PISA international comparison tests of school performance delivers to the Duty his defense and his illustration of a school of the XXIe century.
At the time of the interview, in mid-March, Andreas Schleicher had just returned from kyiv, the capital of Ukraine invaded by Russia. The Ukrainian school system is also suffering the blows and repercussions of the war. According to a recent report by the country’s Ministry of Education, more than 2,600 schools were damaged and more than 400 completely destroyed, which directly affected millions of people, students, teachers or parents.
“It is no longer just a question for Ukraine of rebuilding the school network better, but of doing it differently”, explained Mr. Schleicher, contacted in Paris, at the headquarters of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD ), of which he directs the section on education. The 2014 invasion of Crimea and the current war halted Russia’s process of joining the international body, but strengthened cooperation with Ukraine, which is also not a member.
“Ukrainians use new technologies a lot. The country has adapted with the pandemic, and even now a third of schools have completely switched online and another third are offering hybrid training. The digital world is really very real there. Humans and technology have to work together to make the system work. »
The rule exacerbated during the pandemic applies to the whole world, and for the so-called developed countries in particular, including those grouped within the consultative assembly of the OECD. Mr. Schleicher’s section has developed the famous Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to measure and compare the performance of education systems.
We must prepare young people for their own future, not for our past. […] Education has become a very conservative force. We can see this clearly with the resistance around technology.
He himself was trained in mathematics and physics in Germany. He is known for his passionate defense of a radical transformation of the school to adapt it to a world in great mutation. He concentrated his ideas in the essay World Classtranslated and published in Quebec in 2019 under the title Which school for tomorrow? Building a school system for the 21ste century (PUQ).
Chatbot conversation
The recent public appearance of chatbots (or chatbots, à la ChatGPT) has triggered a wave of panic in some schools and faculties, the more prosaic teachers seeing it as another means of plagiarism and the most alarmist, a new extension of the field of new economy companies. Mr. Schleicher was neither surprised nor panicked by the new breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI), the progress of which he has been following for years.
“My reaction is simple: if, as a teacher, you only pass on prefabricated knowledge to your students, you must indeed be worried about ChatGPT,” he says. If, on the contrary, you teach them to think, to be creative, then there is nothing to fear, because a chatbot is not intelligent, has no conscience. It is just an incredible amplifier of knowledge available online. In a way, I am therefore very happy with the public debate triggered by this robot which forces us to question ourselves about the nature and the meaning of education in such a way as to make learning even more interesting and the teacher always more human and inspiring. »
Virtual reality equipment can, for example, very well and better explain how to carry out an experiment in chemistry or physics. The teacher, for his part, should accompany the learner in his quest for knowledge, a much more demanding task, according to the essential idea that “education must remain a relational affair rather than a transactional one”.
Conserve the future
A famous formula from the philosopher Hannah Arendt repeats that education must remain conservative since it must teach young people the world they inherit, in order to prepare them to renew it in turn. Andreas Schleicher, on the contrary, thinks that education must look to the future.
“That’s the crucial point,” he says. We must prepare young people for their own future, not for our past. Most pedagogical practices are unfortunately designed on the past of adults. We teach young people to follow in our footsteps instead of giving them the means to explore new territories. Education has become a very conservative force. We can see this clearly with the resistance around technology. »
So what now? Very concretely, what could AI be used for in pedagogy?
Mr. Schleicher explains that the basic formations (the three Rs, as we say in English, reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic) remain fundamental while requiring major adaptations.
Reading has always been about extracting knowledge and absorbing it, sometimes with the help of a tool like a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Literacy now turns into the curation of ambiguous messages. Google and more and more chatbots provide thousands of pieces of data that you have to learn to discriminate. Reading made extracting knowledge: it must now be constructed.
“The school still teaches literacy as in the 19e century, when we must gear up for the 21ste century, says the director. In our last PISA tests, less than half of the students were able to distinguish a fact from an opinion in a text. Twenty years ago, you couldn’t care less. Today, the inability to distinguish the nature of propositions turns someone into a slave to an algorithm. »
Another example, then, concerning learning to write. Young Chinese must master 4000 ideograms and learn to transcribe them with art according to a very demanding calligraphy. The principal says that in Shanghai, he saw a class using digital tools that sent individualized feedback in real time to students’ mobile phones.
Respond to the big shock
In this example, evaluation and learning therefore progressed as a rope in a completely integrated way, whereas too often they are distinguished by conceiving them as the two extremities of the pedagogical process.
“Personally, I think the big mistake in education over the past 300 years is to have separated learning from assessment too much,” says Schleicher. Students are asked to accumulate vague knowledge for years and then, one day, they are tested in a very short period to assess what they know and what they forget after the exam. Technology can help bring learning and assessment together. It’s one of its great strengths, and it’s also the reason why people love video games. »
The OECD Education Director puts it bluntly: the great digitalization now underway, with AI, introduces a fundamental break, first and foremost for the sake of accelerating the speed of change. In history, he explains, when education and technology collided, the former always prevailed, but the balance of power could now be reversed.
“Humanity has always had plenty of time to adapt to changes. The shock of agriculture was absorbed over long slow periods and the industrial revolution over decades. In the 19the and at the XXe century, a person could learn a trade and practice it as such all his life. This is no longer the case. Today, we must constantly reinvent ourselves and adapt. Humans have always had the intelligence and ingenuity to master technologies. Today, on the other hand, we have to wonder how many of us will be downgraded by this transformation. Some will benefit from it, for sure, but the answer as to the benefits of technology for humanity is not yet clear. »