The New York Times recently published a pretty amazing article by Benedict Carey and John Markoff on using robots to teach children. The technology has advanced to the point where South Korea is “hiring” hundreds of robots as aids in teaching English. [Cue dystopian society montage.]
I, for one, welcome our robot teacher overlords. I wrote a first draft of this post from Argentina, where I was vacationing — and struggling to communicate with the non-english speaking locals — for two weeks. Though my high school Spanish came back to me in bits and pieces, the language classes I was offered in school were a complete joke and I would be eager to see them reinvented.
Seth Godin recently posted about two kinds of teachers. One kind is essential: teachers who show you how “to see, learn to lead and learn to solve interesting problems.” In a previously quoted speech, Margaret Edson describes the importance of classroom teaching:
There are those who say that classroom teaching is doomed and that by the time one of you addresses the class of 2033, there will be a museum of classroom teaching.
Ever since the invention of wedge-shaped writing on a clay tablet, classroom teaching has been obsolete. It’s been comical. Why don’t we just write the assignments and algorithms on a clay tablet, hang it up on the wall, and let the students come who will to teach themselves from our documents?
Why, since the creation of writing with a pen on a piece of paper, do we still bother to have schools? Why, since the invention of movable metal type, don’t we all just go to the library? Why do we have to have class? Why do we need teachers? Why, since the advent of the microchip, don’t we all stay home in our pajamas and hit send?
Technology is nipping at the heels of classroom teaching, but I perceive no threat. How could something false replace something true? How could a substitute, a proxy, step in for something real and alive? How could the virtual nudge out the actual?
What Edson is really asking is: how could learning information from textbooks (on paper or on screen) replace learning from a living, breathing human being who teaches you how to think?
The question is slanted because, as Godin notes, the two types of learning are apples and oranges. The scientists in the NY Times article even concede that they’re not trying to replace Edson’s brand of teachers. And even if they did want to try, I don’t see how any technology, from the most primitive to the most advanced, could ever be capable of replacing classroom teaching. But I don’t think classroom teaching needs to include the type of learning Godin defines as “technique, facts and procedures.”
The Spanish words that I’m still able to recall are not the result of what Edson describes as “a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event;” they’re what I hammered into my brain the night before each test with flashcards. The teachers served simply as pop-quiz facilitators, graders, and delinquent classmate babysitters. Edson fetishizes teachers, but I often wished that I could study on my own (in lieu of having a great teacher) because I could have taught myself double the vocabulary in half the time or finished early and taken the remaindered time to meander in my top ideas.
I quit Spanish because I had the opportunity to study outside of my high school for a semester and I came back with strengthened convictions and no patience for my time being wasted in class. At that time I was frustrated, but if I had sustained my Spanish education for 30 minutes a day over the course of several years, I’m sure that I would remember much more. With a bit of will power I could probably do it on my own, and I could definitely keep it up with the assistance of great teacher, but I think that somewhere in between these two options a robot teacher could’ve really helped me.
At a higher level where language branches into culture, dialect, and even philosophy, great human teachers would be reintroduced. But with consistently bad basic language teachers throughout my high school education why not just opt for efficiency? A well-designed language teaching robot could be ruthlessly efficient, mimic your body language to make you comfortable and focused, respond to basic questions—even sensing when you’re confused based on your facial expression, teach multiple kinds of pronunciation with audio, and grade tests in split-seconds. Instead of a one-to-one laptop program* we need a one-to-one robot teacher program!
I highly recommend the full article, titled Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot, as well as the accompanying timeline and infographic (a cropped thumbnail of which is shown above). Top notch reporting from the NY Times.
* which may actually be causing lower test scores—no surprise there…unlike single-serving robots, laptops are too multi-capable, with distractingly weak habit fields
