India recently hosted the India AI Impact Summit! Anchored in the principles of People, Planet, and Progress, it envisions a future where AI advances humanity, fosters inclusive growth, and safeguards our shared planet. AI is here to stay! Some go as far as saying that it will take over the world by 2050. But we are not there yet. However we have to accept the indubitable fact that AI has transformed the job scenario. And to succeed children will have to be taught a whole new set of skills that are a far cry from what we are teaching them today.
Before I go further, I will just like share my own experience with AI. A few weeks back I did not know much about AI. I decided to take a short online course. After the course I tiptoed into this new world and lo and behold was left gobsmacked at the amazing power of this tool. Each day was a new discovery as I ventured into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more. Jobs like mine – translator/interpreter – have already vanished. Write a text and any of the AI assistants will translate it in seconds to another language. You can have a conversation with these assistants and they can be quite witty! You want to write a report, a proposal anything and AI will do it for you. It performs, analyses, and generates complex content. The catch is to use the correct prompts. That is what needs to be mastered. I can see how you can get drawn into this world.
In an article entitled Ten 21st-century skills every student needs, the World Economic Forum states: The gap between the skills people learn and the skills people need is becoming more obvious, as traditional learning falls short of equipping students with the knowledge they need to thrive. Today’s job candidates must be able to collaborate, communicate and solve problems – skills developed mainly through social and emotional learning (SEL). Combined with traditional skills, this social and emotional proficiency will equip students to succeed in the evolving digital economy.
So the new skills needed are : Learning and innovation skills: critical thinking and problem solving, communications and collaboration, creativity and innovation. Digital literacy skills: information literacy, media literacy, Information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy Career and life skills: flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural interaction, productivity and accountability.
At present children are stuck in the traditional curriculum created by the British with the aim of making obedient pen pushers. The new skills are the exact opposite as they want people to think out of the box. As I have often said, children do not have the time to wait for policies to be changed. By the time new policies are put in place a whole set of children would be out of school and propelled into the work world armed with useless skills.
We at Project Why cannot let this happen. It is time to act.
Now you cannot navigate the AI universe without two basic skills: computer knowledge and a command of English. So the first step we have taken is to have computer and English classes from class one itself! The children are loving it. A little girl shared very proudly that she now knew how to start and shut a computer. Her eyes lit up when she told me that. Give a few years and she will master both.
The bigger challenge was to work out way of incorporating these new set of skills into the present curriculum. How do you weave skills like critical thinking or creativity into the subjects being taught. My incredible team has worked out a way to do so from class I itself. We are at present training and getting the teaches onboard as they are the main stakeholders. Then we run a pilot and come April 1, we go all guns blazing.
We intend to handhold the little ones till class V but then we want to steer the children towards self learning and independent studies so that by class IX children can study independently. We also want to accustom the children to digital learning and make them comfortable with this approach. Thanks to the Adish and Asha Jain Foundation we have a state-of-the-art recording studio where we have already recorded lessons for classes IX and X and plan to do it for all classes. We want our children to be comfortable with taking online classes as that would enable them to increase their skill sets.
This may sound ambitious but needs to be done if we want our children to be ready for the ever-changing work scenario. There will be resistance I know from both teachers and kids as I am pulling them out of their comfort zone and throwing in the deep end of the pool. But them at Project Why we have never shied away from a challenge.
We are at crossroads but I know that we will overcome. Wish us luck!