The Lively Alert Fearless Curiosity of Children

Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as one of the "godfathers of AI," famously said, "The jobs that are going to survive AI for a long time are jobs where you have to be very adaptable and physically skilled, and plumbing is that kind of job."

People who write for a living, especially those who are creative writers, like novelists and screenwriters, are, rightfully, concerned that these new tools will take their jobs. And they aren't the only ones. The jobs of anyone who works with their mind is in jeopardy. 

Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC technicians, mechanics, chefs, and other "embodied" professions that require dexterity, spatial reasoning, and an ability to handle messy, unpredictable environments -- like crawling under the house to improvise a repair -- seem to be, at least in the near term, relatively safe from being replaced by AI.

I'm also going to include early childhood educators in the safe category. For one thing, our work is physical work. But more to the point, our work depends on relationships, judgment, empathy, and responding to unique (messy) human situations. These are not things AI will be able to do anytime soon. 

But that's not primarily what we're worrying about when it comes to AI. We're mostly worrying about how a world in which AI is appearing in every context is going to impact the cognitive development of today's children. For instance, I recently read an article in which the author made the case that children who are growing up today risk never learning to "think for themselves." It's a valid concern, but it echoes the concerns that educators have had about every technological development. 

Socrates, the most celebrated educator of us all, famously opposed to the introduction of the phonetic alphabet. That's right, literacy, the backbone of what we moderns call education, was going to make the minds of our youth feeble. From the perspective of today, this concern seems hilariously misguided, but he wasn't wrong. Being educated in Ancient Greece meant possessing the ability to memorize. For instance, an educated Athenian could recite the entirety of The Iliad and The Odyssey from memory. Today, we're so lazy of mind that if we're going to quote Homer, we have to look it up. That, to Socrates, was tragic.

But it wasn't just literacy. The printing press, according to no less an "educated" person than René Descarte, resulted in so much inferior work being published that it distracted the serious mind. Again, in his day, being educated meant being well versed in "the classics," whereas this democratization of mass printing meant that the young had access to all kinds of dubiousness. From the perspective of education as he understood it, he was, like Socrates, correct.

The Enlightenment itself, this explosion of science, reason, and art, was going to separate the young from their God. And again, they weren't wrong because religious instruction was the foundation of education in those days.

Locomotive travel was going to make us all batty. Novels were going to rot the minds of our youth. When pocket calculators were introduced educators clutched their pearls.

Indeed, every major (and even minor) human development has been met with valid worry about how it would impact the education of the young. It's too soon to know if AI is really going to be on par with literacy, the printing press, or The Enlightenment. The hypers are hyping, but I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in 2001, hyped the Segway as being "as significant as the PC." (The Segway?) My guess, however, is that AI will prove to be a transformative tool. And it will, without a doubt, change both our children and how we educate them.

But taking a step back to look at education in our modern world, it's not as if we've designed our current system to encourage children to think for themselves. I mean, there's a ton of test taking, a ton of right and wrong answers, and a ton of standardization. The goal for most kids is grades, graduation, and jobs, none of which require original thinking. Indeed, original thinkers, those who doubt, who argue, who refuse, who dance to the beat of a different drummer, are penalized by modern schooling. They're all too often failed, drugged, punished, and generally made to feel inadequate. So it's not just AI that discourages "thinking for themselves."

In other words, our schools are less about learning and more about jumping through hoops, which is exactly what AI is good at. No wonder children, like adults in the workplace, are eager to adopt this tool that will help them more easily achieve the highest goal of school, which is to graduate with high marks. Actual learning is obviously, at best, secondary.

It's also important to point out that in today's world, schooling is mostly about preparing children for the workforce. At least that's what standard schools and policymakers seem to think. They can't talk about education without referring to those "jobs of tomorrow." The whole purpose of our schools is to produce young adults with the proper degrees so that they can get the very jobs that AI is going to be doing. If I were a kid graduating right now, I'd be pissed if I'd kept my nose to the grindstone and my eye on the prize only to discover that I should have been in trade school all along.

My point is that AI, like the technologies that came before it, is exposing our flawed approach to "education" and it's freaking people out.

In play based preschools, our students are self-motivated learners. We need no tests or grades or carrots or sticks because the whole point is self-directed learning, asking and answering our own questions, and learning -- not with a job or degree in mind -- but for the sheer joy. This is something AI will never be able to do, but it can be a powerful tool in a world in which human curiosity is finally set free.

We have to decide what we want our schools, what we want education, what we want childhood, to be about. AI is obviously a threat to our current system, but what happens if we set our children to free to learn as humans were meant to learn?

"Education means only this," writes novelist Doris Lessing, "that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education."

What if that is what stood at the center of our understanding of education: that lively alert fearless curiosity of children?

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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