Education and the Fourth Graham Brown-Martin

Industrial Revolution

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the
old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this
interregnum a great variety of morbid
symptoms appear.

Antonio Gramsci

circa 1930
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Artificial Intelligence. Automation. Self-driving
cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements.
Virtual Reality. Augmented Reality. Gene Editing

New opportunities

Exciting possibilities

Significant challenges
Existential
Challenges

climate change
population growth
antibiotic resistance
technological risk
The Future
of Work
New employment opportunities
vs technological unemployment

Income security & social agency

Universal Basic Income

3
Creative endeavours
inc. creative writing, entrepreneurship, and scientific
discovery

Social interactions
robots do not have the kinds of emotional intelligence
that humans have

Physical dexterity & mobility

millennia of experience hiking mountains, swimming
lakes, and dancingpractice gives humans
extraordinary agility and physical dexterity

Three areas where humans beat

machines that are key to job creation

The illiterate of the 21st century
will not be those who cannot read
and write, but those who cannot
learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

5
balance direct instruction with constructivist
learning
trust teachers as designers of curriculum
de-silo with project-based learning by making
value small data (personalised learning)
reclaim assessment (its a conversation not a
spreadsheet)

Five areas where we can make immediate

improvements in education practice
4
Projects
Passion
Peers
Play

The four Ps of practice*

*source - Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten, 2017
3
Creative
Critical
Computational

Three frameworks for thinking*

*and make combinations, e.g. creative + critical = design thinking, critical + computational = scientific thinking
2
Low floors
High ceilings
(wide walls / closed start but open-ended / hard fun)

Two ways for technology to

support learning by making*
*source - Seymour Papert, Mindstorms, 1980
1 Personalisation

keep the person in
personalisation

One way to give learners more choice

and control over the learning process
Do away with curriculum. Do away
with segregation by age. And do
away with the idea that there
should be uniformity of all schools
and of what people learn.

Seymour Papert, Artificial Intelligence Pioneer &

Educator
San Francisco Chronicle, interview, February 1997

If you were to reinvent the system, what three key changes would you make?
Education and the Fourth Graham Brown-Martin

Industrial Revolution