Is our curriculum fit for the future? Mervyn Benford appraises the impact of A1 and robots

“The End of Humanity”- Hawking’s Curriculum Challenge! by Mervyn Benford

“If Artificial Intelligence and robotisation reach levels predicted possible, it will be the end of humanity!” In 2017 so said no less than Stephen Hawking - a man of significant ability who had a lot of time to sit and reflect.

This journal has powerfully portrayed Neil Hawkes’ Values based Education (VbE) while also exposing Burt’s fraudulent conclusions on intelligence as entirely inherited (the claim later justifying 11+ selection.) Such worthy NAPE contributions come when human intellect itself is under attack from AI. In 2017 The Financial Times ran an article - “Technology toils to make our intellect obsolete.” The educational implications of that very reasonable observation need attention beyond the financial media! Perhaps we are too focussed on short-term issues but this threat is coming faster than we think. Teachers today face radical and rapid changes not only in their tools of trade but also in some fundamental values as to their purpose.

In my critique (2015) of half a century of national practice, provision and principles- (“What they don’t tell you about Education”- mervynbenford@gmail.com) I detailed the then growing threat of technology to human survival. I cited predictions of electronic brain enhancement as ultimately necessary to cope with the sheer speed and power of mid-century computers and related machines. I reported some office workers in Sweden having ricesized implants in their arms to switch lights and machines on while still on the way to work. I reported a BT consultant in 1988 predicting we would talk to our fridges. Today smart technology can tell us recipes available for what it knows is in the fridge.

2019 has seen an intense description from the personal security company Malwarebytes of what is now called Brain/Machine Interface (BMI) including the news that Elon Musk’s company, Neurolink’expects to be testing a system feeding thousands of electrical probes into the human brain in 2020. At a basic level the concept has already been tested on animals.

The author, Pieter Arntz, devotes considerable time to discussing the ethics of the concept - not least the potential for a brain fused into the Internet and the Cloud to be hacked! The notion of electronically enhanced humanity is taken seriously by academics and other highly qualified professional observers. How easy to persuade excited young minds and their ambitious parents that this is the future into which they are born! In 2009 New Scientist reported an international conference in Norway concluded that by 2045 computers would be so fast we would need to be electronically fused into them to use them. In 2011 a new Phantom v1610 Camera could shoot a staggering 1,000,000 frames per second. The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has unveiled a computer capable of handling 200,000 trillion calculations per second (200 petaflops). Laying claim to the title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit is eight times more powerful than ORNL’s previous supercomputer, Titan, which came online in 2012 with a capacity of 27 petaflops. Technology, which includes AI and robots, advance exponentially. Robots have long replaced thousands of workers in car assembly lines. Sensors implanted in the brain support paralysed limbs or ease deafness. A sensor in a blind man’s tongue enabled him to see.

How relevant are today’s patterns of teaching and learning?

In 2015 The Observer reported a European study arguing that by 2035 homo sapiens would be led by a narrow cadre at the top and the rest put out to grass to fend for themselves. In 2018 major companies such as PWC and DeLoitte disowned conventional academic outcomes when recruiting. They would use their own methods. Of course, they knew that in the future they would need only that few at the top - the very best - to create the algorithms to maintain such superior machine power. No-one would run a business today without calculating how much could be done without people. Technology, which includes AI and robots, advances exponentially. Robots have long replaced thousands of workers in car assembly lines. Sensors implanted in the brain support paralysed limbs or ease deafness. A sensor in a blind man’s tongue enabled him to see. But BMI is a huge leap forward in which the brain almost becomes a computer integrated into anyone’s power systems.

Surgeons already use robots for very intricate medical operations guaranteeing steady hands and accurate work. I endured key-hole surgery on an eye and the six-year, medical-trained anaesthetist told me what the modern drugs were- but that a computer would decide when and what I was given. Specialist nurses were being trained to provide the oversight that was all he now did- a professional career lost to smart algorithms for programmes to be used in any operating theatre in the world.

Ironically the CBI and other employers have long said that, despite escalating exam grades, schools still do not produce enough people who can think for themselves, make decisions, take responsibility, work together to solve problems. Technology’s mantra, already well exposed in Sat Nav and driver-less car concepts, in effect tells us we no longer need such brain skills. It can do it all- easier and better! Dr. James Martin, highly successful businessman and entrepreneur, recently deceased, who gave Oxford University’s Somerville College two science laboratories, also founded the Oxford Martin School in 2005 with the largest benefaction to the University of Oxford in its more than 900-year history. He has been described as “the man who predicted the future.” His Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1978 book “The Wired Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow” contained remarkably accurate descriptions of how computerisation, telecommunications and the rise of the internet would change the world. He wrote in the University summer journal about what scientists call “SINGULARITIES”- points of absolutely no return- an example being when black holes consume the last light cell in the universe. He spoke of quantum computers, and electronically enhanced human beings leading to a moment when, despite denial by experts, technology would finally take us over- believed around 2050! BMI takes us into that process already.

Yet he believed that “we can make any kind of world we want.” Current director of the Oxford Martin School, Professor Sir Charles Godfray, speaks of Martin’s essentially optimistic vision of the future but also of the importance of solution-oriented research in making it happen. Education and teachers have to be central to what is decided.

In 2018 Boeing revealed a plane whose technology - designed and tested by expert human intelligence - decided to exercise a will of its own, defying skilled human intervention and killing hundreds in the resulting crashes. A company in southern England in summer 2019 had to switch off all its machines as they had started, almost anarchically, “doing their own thing!” Not a day passes without evidence of what robots and algorithms can achieve. We seem to have little we can do about it but ultimately surrender. We will then become as vulnerable to the alleged infallible machine developing technical malfunctions.

In a BBC Horizon programme, viewers saw a robot watching another robot and copying its movements, learning as children do, adapting its memory accordingly - i.e. adapting its programme. Computers beat experts in international chess or international quizzes. They have been programmed with so many moves or facts they have just have more answers for even the most talented humans. Yet in 2018, another sophisticated international game, ‘GO,’ was won by a computer with a move never seen before by any experts - i.e. not programmed in, but thought for itself!

Might the machines one day draw conclusions to evidence they own and understand their own workings enough to devise a way to prevent being switched off? Today’s technology has the impressive ability for what we call ‘intuitive’ thought - like predicting the next word we are likely to need in a text message by understanding the context. Such intuitive behaviour already occurs in other ‘smart’ applications.

We need change in education urgently to avoid worstcase scenarios. Our children should not be left to chance but understand the very strange and fearsome nature of the world in which they are forecast, through technology’s benefits, to reach the 22nd. Century and beyond. The children are already born. A cosmologist, denying time as Einstein has exposed it, felt obliged to explain conventional scientific beliefs, including the five predicted levels of intelligence in the universe. Five were predicted. We were around three. Space visitors would be nearer four. The most advanced would reflect entirely robotic civilisations - already believed to exist!

Human Intelligence under Threat

My daughter has had four children. She read many ante-natal books. On a visit one was open at an article explaining nature would like the brain to be even bigger but, recognising the physical problem, arrests development in the last weeks of pregnancy! On birth the head is still proportionately bigger than the rest. Nature is screaming at us, “Now! Feed it!” We feed the body, give love and care, but the brain? We rightly recognise intelligence is not 100% inherited. It continues to learn from experience but confined to what it has built from day one!

“Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man!” is as true today as when the Jesuit priest reiterated earlier observations! It is sometimes scorned under the heavy priority in practice and provision given - with disproportionate resourcing, to later years. As long ago as 1931 the Hadow Report on primary education, stated categorically, “Recent experiments show clearly, contrary to earlier views, all the elementary mechanisms required for formal reasoning are present before the child is seven. Development consists primarily in an increase in the extent and variety of the subject matter to which these mental mechanisms can be applied, and in a development of the precision and elaboration with which they can operate.”

Hadow was describing what decades later we would hear as Gardner’s multiple-intelligences. Each individual has a unique blend of all the intelligences that empowers but does not restrict them. Gardner offers the same hope that James Martin saw in the face of technology. Multiple Intelligence Theory first presented in his book, “Frames of Mind” (1983), quickly became a classical model by which to understand and teach many aspects of human intelligence, learning style, personality and behaviour - in education and in industry. He initially developed

his ideas as a contribution to psychology, but they were soon embraced by education, teaching and training communities, for whom the appeal was immediate and irresistible. Values education has a vital place in such concepts of life and learning. Human intellect is becoming the battleground for today’s society. The consistent argument for the absolute priority of early years of education has been the clear benefits in terms of conventional learning outcomes but it is now becoming vital to the very nature and purpose of the brain and the nature of society. Education is acutely significant in resolving the contest in favour of human freedom of thought. We feared Orwell’s police state taking over our liberties and technology is on that wavelength already. There is hope, nevertheless!

In 2019 a BBC programme about a major philanthropist using practical construction to aid individuals and communities in need of betterment in their lives reported a child who in 2014 had been born with just 2% of a brain. “We placed him in the tiniest wheelchair that you’ve ever seen and I couldn’t believe that Noah, with two per cent of his brain, was rotating himself backwards!”The remarkable volunteer DIY/SOS team, with every project attracting dozens of local volunteers, constructed a new sensory playroom for him. Five years later his brain had developed from two per cent to 80 per cent. At college over fifty years ago I was told not even Einstein used more than 45% of the brain we all have evolved. “Readers, you could all be twice as clever as Einstein!” And likewise, every baby born today! We need not surrender to artificial intellect and BMI. Arntz’ article concedes that the brain still currently relays information through neuron communication more powerfully than the fastest machines. In 2012 IBM began work on ‘man-chips’ designed to replicate the behaviour of human synapses- in other words thought and learning. They are not entirely there…. yet! The human brain, though, also has fallibilities. IBM supposes its eventual versions of the same neurons will be infallible. Infallible? We must still aspire to think for ourselves, make our own decisions, take proper responsibility. The brain has five channels of learning- or sensesopen to stimulus in the real world, and some before birth. For months the brain in the womb has used touch and hearing. Words and sounds shape the technology we are still born with - language! Differential experience of language shapes early intellectual clout. Chief Ofsted inspector, Amanda Spielman, has reported increasing numbers of youngsters lacking basic hygiene and language skills by the age of four. She warned nursery staff about disadvantaged children. “These children arrive at school without the words they need to communicate properly. Just imagine the disadvantage they face, right from the start.” Related media reports note how screens are increasingly replacing everyday interactive conversation - and five-year-old brains can be very adept in screen skills. What have they lost meanwhile for want of use?

Until three or later, brain power is a literal lottery where the failure, disadvantage, impoverishment bite that permanently divide society unless exceptional opportunity comes and is taken. We are each born with the phonic power to tune into wherever we are born. Within three years we have surrendered over half in attuning to where we were actually born. This is a well-documented example of the wisdom of ages at work- “Use it or Lose it!” These early years are vital for building evolved intellectual power and then not surrendering it by failing to use it.

In December 1998 a Birmingham research group asked parents to read just five minutes every day to their children from nine months old. At that age they could have read the telephone directory! The effort to understand was believed the driver of the learning. It would bring a language increment on entry to school over and above general expectations and indeed this they found. However, these children were better at every kind of school activity. General gain across the entire field of cognition was being demonstrated - an increment in brain power itself.

As Head of a village primary school I developed a working relationship with the editor of the Oxford Times. One day he gave me a book called “The Prodigy” and asked me to review it. William Sidis was born in 1898 to parents of Russian background, both academics, who emigrated to America. They were

determined to make a genius of him. They did - but he led an ultimately sad life and I would wish more sensitive stimulus than giving a baby Greek myths to digest! Yet at three he could read them in the original Greek! He invented three new languages, a new system of mathematics and passed tests including university entrance far earlier than normal.

At 11 years old when he entered Harvard - he wrote: “It is possible to construct figures of the 4th dimension with 120 sides called hecatonicosihedrigons or with 600 sides called hexacosihedrigons.” He was indeed a product of parental genetic intelligence and, with an IQ rated over 300 almost twice that of Hawking and Einstein whose MENSA IQ scores were 160 (regarded as the level of genius). His father had justified the heavy stimulus input by age 11 citing an old saying “As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.” Thus was innate ability hugely augmented within his everyday life experience by his environment. Today we hear of children as young as 12 reaching levels comparable with Einstein and Hawking. They are telling us my college tutors were right. We have far more brain power already evolved and surely more than capable of keeping up with the machines. Born with it we must not lose it through inaction. We have far more brain power already evolved and surely more than capable of keeping up with the machines. Born with it we must not lose it through inaction.

Yehudi Menuhin, world violin maestro, argued three as the time to start if the essential vibrato technique were ever to be thoroughly mastered. The Jesuits sensed the power of the new brain - the Israeli Kibbutz system likewise. Child soldiers in Africa serve local dictators well since they develop the physical and technical skills without the handicap of mature moral and social values.

Curriculum for such a Future

The 1977 Green Paper “Education in Schools.” Section 1:19 set some aims for “curriculum: In 1985 Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary of State for Education, told the Council of Local Education Authorities that primary education was too narrowly concentrated on what we now call core subjects. It needed greater breadth and balance. That the same demands have to be made by today’s teachers is shameful.

Green Paper aims:

a To help children develop lively, enquiring minds, able to question and argue rationally, and apply themselves to tasks;

b To instil in children respect for moral values, other people and oneself, with tolerance of other races, religions and ways of life;

c To help them understand the world in which they live and the inter-dependence of nations;

d To help them use language effectively and imaginatively - reading, writing and speaking;

e To help them appreciate how the nation earns and maintains its standard of living and properly esteem the essential role of industry and commerce in this process;

f To provide a basis of mathematical, scientific and technical knowledge enabling boys and girls to acquire the essential skills needed in a fastchanging world of work;

g To teach children about human achievement and aspirations in the arts and sciences, in religion and in the search for a more just social order;

h To encourage and foster the development of children whose social and environmental disadvantages cripple their capacity to learn, if needed, with additional resources available.

Values education encompassing attitude and skills embraces all those aims. George Bernard Shaw had some challenging things to say about children, their rights and their education. His prescription reflects curriculum tied to appropriate life and living. Detached judgement would report that we are seriously failing most of these worthy ambitions as democracy flounders, jobs reduce, education narrows and social parameters broaden detrimentally to society well-being.

Shaw’s “Dramatic Works XX1- Misalliance,” (1924) speaks of ‘Parents and Children’ that includes:

“Now let us ask what are a child’s rights and the rights of society over the child. The latter clearly extend to requiring itself to qualify to live in society without wasting other people’s time; that is, it must know the rules of the road, be able to read placards and proclamations, fill voting papers, compose and send letters and telegrams, purchase food, clothing and railway tickets for itself, count money and give and take change, and, generally, know how many beans make five.

It must know some law, were it only a simple set of commandments, some political economics, agriculture enough to shut the gates of fields with cattle in them and not to trample on growing crops, sanitation enough not to defile its haunts, and religion enough to know why it is allowed its rights and why it must respect the rights of others. And the rest of its education must consist of anything else it can pick up; for beyond this society cannot go with any certainty, and indeed can only do this far apologetically and provisionally, as doing the best it can in very uncertain ground.”

Not actually too different from the Green Paper and in 2019 matters are becoming just so uncertain. We need urgent change in preparing children for future life and living. Ofsted’s concern for a broader curriculum is that opportunity to examine and prepare cogently and coherently and it will need more Hawkes VbE than DfE.

Initially inspectors reported on something called Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education but the more narrow concentration on STEM subjects argues less time and priority being spent on such values surely central to best prospects for life and living. Few signs have yet emerged of that broad, balanced and relevant curriculum inspectors were initially expected to evaluate.

Opportunities from technology Technology can be so frightening in its embrace we should suppose the aim ultimately is to make human intellect redundant. By changing patterns and obligations historically associated with the need to work to survive, technology has the potential, controlled by the very few corporate companies and individuals with the means to generate the power, to enslave humanity as Hawking feared. Neil Hawkes’s values - standards of personal attitude and behaviour, of conscience and morality, culture, social awareness, integrity have long in principle been part of required learning. They were once related to religious education but modern society has disowned the concept of Faith as hitherto presented. VbE values are far more than now neglected inspection judgements. They are survival tools for humanity rooted in intellectual independence in a future in which profession, career, job will be very different from hitherto.

The VbE curriculum can unleash immense human enterprise and creativity suppressed by that need to work. A man might have worked long days in a mine or a shipyard, of course today in an office or supermarket, and then gone home, where, after a meal he retired to attend to his racing pigeons, weed the vegetable plot or continue constructing a ship in a bottle.

Human beings have shown immense, innate enterprise across the centuries. In a Swabian Jura region, archaeology has found carved mammoth bone figurines from Ice Age populations clearly showing imagination at work as they pondered what may lie beyond their known world. Professor Alice Roberts, in TV programmes tracing the history of humanity, has shown how we reached out our intellectual grasp to power beyond our everyday world.

This is the opportunity of the increasingly workless society- a society wherein already ‘living income’ is replacing the concept of ‘living wage’ as pressure on job supply continues beyond present short-term circumstances. No-one starting a business today would not first determine how much could be done without people. Self-sustaining families, self-sustaining communities and human-scale public services will best rationalise future everyday lives. Who will be paying to support this new society?

There have long been political arguments and evidence claiming that those creating personal and national wealth serve their own interests by responsible concern for human well-being - if only to provide customers! Those intellectual values employers argue schools have neglected remain drivers of human survival- not least as so much of everyday existence will be heavily programmed.

Future generations need that brain power to recognise the risks, develop an accurate critique of what is going on around them and manage their lives accordingly. They need to find newly creative ways to exist - in those essentially caring, empathetic ways best prescription, religious or otherwise, has always envisaged. The model of self-sustaining families and communities already exists- inspectors reporting on small schools, currently mainly in rural areas, consistently praise just such virtues. They have excellent credibility for academic stimulation. They can be still more significantly enhanced.

In Sweden pre-school education in large urban estates is often organised in just such small centres local to where the children live. Parents and teachers know each other - even on Christian name terms. They are aware of overall aims and able to support - exactly the UK rural school model. Management and leadership, however, extend over several such sites - much as rural clusters and federations here have worked. Sweden has an international reputation for being a caring society, willing to pay taxes to secure effective, quality public services. Such commitment starts early. Swedish pre-school children almost always have well differentiated systems for managing waste.

For over a century the human educational challenge has gathered pace tied to securing work. We need to return to some of the deeper concepts of humanity living together equitably in common purpose. As technology does make much in life easier and better we need to anticipate the drift to addiction now much seen in eyes on screens. Ease is a similarly attractive thing and challenges the notion of discipline that has been essential to good human organisation since the earliest times. Teachers, parents, communities today need to avoid such surrender to the appeal of modernity and work to re-shape old qualities of life and living for continued survival.

NAPE has proudly and purposefully promoted the life and work of a founding father of effective education, former Her Majesty’s Inspector, Christian Schiller. The annual Schiller Lecture is always a compelling event and worth attending whenever possible. At a conference in North Aston in Oxfordshire in the late 1970s Schiller spoke of the centrality for children of today. Each day was its own challenge. Tomorrow and the future were less important. It is his only claim that has ever left me uneasy. He lived in a time when life was relatively unchanging. Change came but at a very comfortable speed. Expectations were very similar across the generations. Yet even in the late 1970s the pace had begun to quicken - notably through technology and not least encouraging ease and pleasure.

Today, 2019, I am sure Schiller would recognise the awesome speed of technology reaching our children and the radical changes in their prospects for everyday life and living. I believe he would welcome urgent review of how we best integrate and conserve the very wise observations he had to make about educating children. Neil Hawkes’ values-basededucation would well encompass most.

Mervyn Benford is the former head of a rural primary school in Oxfordshire. He moved from the headship to be adviser to small schools and now he is a writer and education consultant.

A New Editor

After 26 issues as editor it’s time for me say goodbye, this is my final issue. I welcome my successor, Robert Morgan, most warmly and wish him and the journal every success in the future.

...a complete range of over 50 titles are available

The National Association is delighted to make I-Spy books available to all schools. The books are invaluable in enhancing and illuminating learning out of school.

Key Features

• The complete range of over 50 titles are available • Priced at just £2.00 per book - 20% cheaper than list price (Min order quantity 10 per title)

• Orders need to be paid for in advance by credit or debit card • Please note that the minimum order quantity is 10 per title to enjoy this special rate. • Teacher Guides available on-line to assist in activity planning with project ideas, curriculum advice and higher level thinking - these guides will be made available progressively. • Special I-Spy notebooks at 5 for £1 on qualifying orders, whilst stocks last. • Post and Packing free on orders more than £30 • Next day order fulfilment received before 12pm

Post and Packing free on orders totalling more than £30.00. Next day delivery if orders received before 12 pm.

National Association for Primary Education

Widely recognised as a leader in its field (and economically priced) Christopher Jarman’s scheme for the teaching of handwriting matching the Primary Framework for Literacy DEVELOPING HANDWRITING SKILLS Teachers Resource Book with full set of 12 workbooks and copybooks for under fives upwards The resource Book contains 150 pages on the history of handwriting, things to do and interesting facts about the subject. There are 51 photocopiable copy pages. Widely recognised as a leader in its field (and economically priced) Christopher Jarman’s scheme for the teaching of handwriting matching the Primary Framework for Literacy DEVELOPING HANDWRITING SKILLS Teachers Resource Book with full set of 12 workbooks and copybooks for under fives upwards The resource Book contains 150 pages on the history of handwriting, things to do and interesting facts about the subject. There are 51 photocopiable copy pages. Widely recognised as a leader in its field (and economically priced). Christopher Jarman’s scheme for the teaching of handwriting matching the Primary Framework for Literacy. DEVELOPING HANDWRITING SKILLS Teachers Resource Book with full set of 12 workbooks and copybooks for under fives upwards. The Resource Book contains 150 pages on the history of handwriting, things to do and interesting facts about the subject. There are 51 photocopiable copy pages.

The complete set costs £65.00 (£55.00 for NAPE members) and includes: 1. A Resource book for teachers –available separately at £30.00 each 2. Six copy books –available separately at £4.00 each 3. Six photocopiable work books –available separately at £3.00 each All prices include post and packing For a sale or return pack contact: NAPE at 01604 647646 or FREEPOST NAPE MID 24319 Moulton, Northampton NN3 7BR 3. Six photocopiable work books –available separately at £3.00 each The complete set costs £65.00 (£55.00 for NAPE members) and includes: 1. A Resource book for teachers –available separately at £30.00 each 2. Six copy books –available separately at £4.00 each 3. Six photocopiable work books –available separately at £3.00 each All prices include post and packing For a sale or return pack contact: NAPE at 01604 647646 or FREEPOST NAPE MID 24319 Moulton, Northampton NN3 7BR 3. Six photocopiable work books –available separately at £3.00 each The complete set costs £80 (£72.00 for NAPE members) and includes: 1. A Resource book for teachers - available separately at £30.00 each 2. Six copy books - available separately at £4.50 each 3. Six photocopiable work books - available separately at £4.00 each P&P on all orders £5.00 for orders up to £50 and £8.00 for larger orders. For a sale or return pack contact: NAPE at 01604 647646 or FREEPOST NAPE MID 24319 Moulton Northampton NN3 7BR Email nationaloffice@nape.org.uk

Email nationaloffice@nape.org.uk Email nationaloffice@nape.org.uk