Introducing RIDE⋮AI
RIDE⋮AI - Revolutionising Interest-Driven Education through AI
How will AI affect education? Will its effects be positive or negative? Both or neither? Should we welcome it or fear it? Should we embrace it or reject it? How can we ensure that children and lifelong learners make the most of what it makes possible? How can we ensure that children are not overwhelmed by it, discouraged by it, demotivated by it? These are important questions for us all.
RIDE⋮AI is EDSIL's composite response to these questions, challenges and opportunities. We believe that by riding the AI wave we can generate an education system that benefits every child in ways that have until now been no more than dreams.
We believe that AI can deliver a personal education designed to meet the unique dispositions, abilities, interests and ambitions of each child in a way that is simply impossible in a classroom environment where teachers are responsible for anything between 10 and 100 students.
EDSIL's view is that AI promises incalculable benefits to education because it will make personalised, interest-driven learning feasible and practical for the first time in human history. It will allow every student, irrespective of their background, ability, culture, wealth or privilege, to enjoy the benefits of one-to-one, differentiated, specific, tailored learning based upon and designed to satisfy their unique combination of interests and abilities.
Interest-driven education (IDE) starts with each individual child. It begins by discovering what they are interested in, what their natural abilities are, and how they can be developed in ways that build upon them while also introducing each child to new possibilities through exploration.
As AI affects the world of work more and more, what will happen to the traditional, conventional motivational chain that has driven education:
work now to qualify later;
qualify later to get into a good university;
use your university qualification to get a good job;
make the good job the source of your healthy, wealthy, successful life.
If AI substantially changes the world of work, either by "taking our jobs" or forcing us to change our view of work and careers by embracing multiple changes in a working-lifetime, then the central basis upon which education has tried to motivate children will weaken and perhaps disappear altogether.
Why should I learn if there are no jobs to aim for?
Why should I learn if AI can do everything much better than I could ever do?
Even if I have some interest and ambition, how do I know that by the time I qualify AI will not be able to do that as well, so any job I aimed for will have disappeared?
If AI can do everything, why should I learn anything?
RIDE⋮AI is EDSIL's integrated comprehensive response: make every child's interests the core of education; discover and amplify what they love doing; embrace the principle that the best work pays us well for something we would gladly do for nothing. So if we discover what we love doing, use that as the motivational basis for everything we learn, then there is every chance that we will find a path that leads to a life spent being paid to do what we would gladly do for nothing. This is the EDSIL dream; RIDE⋮AI describes our way of implementing it: Revolutionising Interest-Driven Education through AI.