Something radical has to happen in education, Sir Demis Hassabis said at the Royal Society of Arts, where the Google DeepMind co-founder received the society’s Albert Medal. He proposes a swap, in which rote learning leaves the classroom for AI tools and class time goes to human, project-based work. He calls the idea inverting the classroom, and his case starts with a complaint about how school works.
School systems cater to the middle, he says, teaching to the average student. That leaves students at both ends with less than they need, because talented students get too little push and students who fall behind get too little help. He treats that as the problem radical change has to solve.
His second claim looks ahead, to the next generation. He wants children trained to use AI tools comfortably from the start, so that they grow up native with AI. Skipping that training, he says, would be like skipping computer and internet training in the 1990s. Both claims point him toward the same swap.
Hassabis gives one reason for handing rote learning to AI tools outside class. It is, he says, exactly what the tools are good for.
The tools would also personalise the work. If a student finds algebra hard, the tool knows and sends that student more algebra questions. The same goes for any topic where a student needs a bit more help, so practice follows each student’s own difficulty instead of the middle of the class. The example is aimed at students who fall behind, the group his opening complaint says gets too little help.
That leaves the classroom free, and Hassabis himself asks what fills it then. His answer is a style of teaching more like Montessori, built around projects, and the word he stresses is human.
The skills he names for that class time are creativity, entrepreneurialism, working as a team, leading teams and being part of a team. Three of the five concern teams.
He offers the whole proposal tentatively, in phrases such as “potentially invert the classroom,” skills which “might be important” and work which “might be amazing and fun.”
