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• 1 2023-01-04T08:02:48+00:00 Obsolescence? 1 A provocative section for Next steps plain 2023-01-04T08:02:48+00:00 In September 2022 we held in Nantes a small workshop with visitors during an open day. After explaining to these visitors (young adults) how AI was having an impact on the job market, and certain professions weren't too sure about their future¹, we asked them to reexamine the school curriculum and to draw two columns. In column one, they were to put those topics which in their view, were no longer going to be necessary in the curriculum. In column two, those who would need more learning time, or new topics that should be introduced into the curriculum.
  Let us stress three points: (1) this was just a prospective workshop and has no scientific merit: the findings were purely speculative, (2) we did not speak about education before the workshop, only about jobs, and the participants were not education specialists, (3) there are a number of better documented position papers about what the skills of the 21st century should be.
  
  Therefore the findings were to be interpreted as: "this is what the general public could think". In other terms, the fact that a topic was in column 1 just meant that the impression of the (this) public was that this was obsolete.
  
  Typically, (foreign) language was invariably put in column 1. This was surprising but did confirm what we had noticed in another workshop with language teachers. These were explaining to us the difficulties they were having with automatic translation tools used quite systematically and with no added value by the pupils. Some of them were also starting to notice that their pupils weren't convinced about the usefulness of learning languages. So they had also to deal with motivation issues.
  
  Some of the arguments that were returned by both groups were:
  • Pupils keep using an AI which -in their eyes- is so much better than what they could do, even with a lot of hard work.
  • The ‘you can travel and discover new worlds and cultures’ argument didn't work because of Covid restrictions.
  • The actual speed of development of technology gave them the impression that by the time they will have finished school, the technology would have come up with a convenient solution. Like us, they are worried by the speed of the progress of technology.
  As indicated above, these arguments aren't here to suggest that learning languages is obsolete. But it does suggest that if the general public believes the skills are unnecessary, it will be increasingly difficult to teach them.

  A similar question for information retrieval

  As D. Russell puts it²: ‘The bigger question is this: In a world where we can do an online search for nearly any topic, what does it mean to be a literate and skilled user of information?’
  Yet there are many courses available to best use search engines and a number of people suggest that knowing to (re)search is an essential skill today.

  What are the solutions?

  In the case of language learning (but this could become the case for many skills and topics) teachers and education boards will have to examine the impact of AI before the problems occur. What were the reasons for teaching this topic in 2000? Are these reasons valid today? Have new reasons emerged? And once the reasons are identified, how best to share them with the pupils and their families?
  
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  ¹ There are dozens of websites listing the jobs that will disappear by 2030. Some of these jobs are very intellectual and even artistic. Architects, for example, can worry a little: AI can play a big part here. This link is not representative but has some great images of futuristic Ai designed buildings: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/ai-architecture-manas-bhatia/index.html.
  ² Russell, D., What Do You Need to Know to Use a Search Engine? Why We Still Need to Teach Research Skills, AI Magazine, 36(4), 2015