The Fourth Education Revolution
Will Artificial Intelligence Liberate or Infantilise Humanity
Sir Anthony Seldon, the prominent political biographer and leading educationalist, addresses one of the high-stakes issues that will determine our future: the role of artificial intelligence and its impact on the world of education.
AI will be an altogether new way of spreading education across the world, especially to those hundreds of millions who currently have limited access to it. As schools across the world have been shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and many education systems have been forced to migrate, at least temporarily, to online platforms, the debate about how to deliver knowledge has never been more relevant.
Britain and the US have an excellent education system in their schools and universities—excellent, but tailored to the 20th century. The mass teaching methods of the third revolution era have failed to conquer enduring problems of inequity and unfairness. Will the fourth AI revolution be able to remedy these problems?
This book, presented in an updated second edition, is a call to educators everywhere to open their eyes to what is coming. If we do so, then the future will be shaped by us in the interests of humanity as a whole—but if we don’t, then it will be imposed by others.
Sir Anthony Seldon is the Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University and the former head of one of the UK’s leading independent schools. He is regarded as one of the most authoritative high-profile commentators on education, and his views are frequently sought by the government and political parties. A champion of digital learning and of bridging the divide between state and independent sectors, he is also a pre-eminent political writer and contemporary historian, having written seminal biographies of five recent Prime Ministers.
