The Next Steps
43 Obsolescence?
In September 2022, we held in Nantes a small workshop with visitors during an university 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 re-examine 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 which 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”. A topic in column 1 just meant that this particular person reckoned this topic 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. They had described to us the difficulties they were having with automatic translation tools being used quite systematically and with no added value by the pupils. Some teachers noticed that their pupils weren’t convinced about the usefulness of learning languages. So, they had to deal with motivation issues.
Some of the arguments that were returned by both groups were:
- Pupils keep using AI which, in their eyes, is so much better than what they could do even with a lot of hard work;
- The speed of technological development gave them the impression that by the time they have finished school, the technology would have come up with a convenient solution. Like us, they are worried by the speed and 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As indicated above, these arguments aren’t here to suggest that learning languages is obsolete.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 public believes the skills are unnecessary, it will be increasingly difficult to teach them these skills.
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 how 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 pupils and their families?
1 Many websites list the jobs that will disappear by 2030. Some of these are intellectual and even artistic. Architects, for example, should worry a little: AI can play a big part in their profession. 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.