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Stephanie Rogen: Charles, thank you so much for the opportunity to have this conversation. I've been a follower of your work with great appreciation for the depth and the thoughtfulness of everything that you've done at the Center for Curriculum Redesign. I'd like to start by inviting you to share a little bit of your story. How did you get into this work?
Charles Fadel: Well, thank you, Stephanie. It's a little bit unusual. I studied quantum physics and electrical engineering when I was in college, then came to the US to get an MBA. I then worked in semiconductors for 20 or years or so, always in business development or marketing roles. Then I transitioned to Cisco, where I did my transformation from technology, to education technology and education policy.
I realized my sense of purpose was better fulfilled by working on something as important as education rather than just “moving more bits faster” – which is really what I was doing in technology. The advantage is that my experience gave me a different way of looking at education where I'm not hung up on specific theories. And I don't want to debate things for 50 years: I employ a practical engineer's mindset that says, if we have 80% of the solution, we're going to start deploying and then learn more and refine it later.
It's a much more intense way of looking at the need to change education. Because if you look at the problems of the world, you can trace every single one of them back to a lack of education of some sort, whether it's lack of critical thinking or lack of ethics, etc.
We have a planet that's burning and people at each other's throats everywhere. And you realize, that's because education failed us decades ago. And now we see the results. We can no longer just wait and keep playing at the edges. We have to take the problem head-on and devise workable solutions, as soon as possible.
Stephanie: Thank you, I couldn't agree with you more. It's why I do the work that I do. I believe education is the context in which we can solve these problems and build better societies.
Today, we're going to talk about your new book. Education in the Age of AI – which feels like the ubiquitous topic in education circles and the workplace, everywhere – everyone's scrambling around this question of AI. What does it mean? What are the implications? Should we be scared?
I really appreciated your book. It is a refreshing way of looking at the question of AI. We are living in an age where people want simple and narrow approaches to difficult questions and we often miss what's most important as a result. I think you come at AI in this book in a way that forces us to think about the more important questions associated with it.
In education articles today, most of the AI discussions are about short term impacts in the classroom. Your book instead comes at both the what and the how of education in this new age of AI. There's a lot of theory, but it's also very practical. So thank you. I'm excited to have you share your thoughts.
Charles: One thing I didn't mention when I was talking about my past is that back in 1989, which dates me, I started an AI company that didn't succeed, because at the time we could only compute 3 layers of neurons. Now, thanks to Moore's law, we have one hundred million times more processing power and now we can compute 5,000 layers.
Stephanie: Can you say that again: 100 million times more processing power than we had in 1989?
Charles: That's what compounding and exponentials do. And so now we can solve all sorts of things like translation, handwriting, recognition, etc. because we have incredible computing power compared to what we had then.
Because of that technical background, when I look at AI, I'm capable of saying what is reality and what is hype. There's a lot of hype nowadays, but there's always been a lot of hype. Every time AI or any technology crosses a new threshold the hype is way ahead of the capability, and then it takes a decade or two of work, and eventually reality catches up. That's systematic. That's what you see everywhere in technology. And certainly in AI. So I describe all of that in the first chapter to explain why it (AI) is extremely important, and so we don't get caught in the overhype. That's why it's a little bit amusing to see a lot of people describing themselves as AI experts in education, just because they can write prompts on GPT-4. It takes a lot more than that to really know what you're talking about in AI.
"The disappointment about Covid is that everything snapped back to where it was right after it was over, so that was a wasted opportunity. Let's hope that AI forces things forward."
Stephanie: That's a helpful frame as we start to then think about the implications for education. You note that it's becoming painfully evident that the term 21st century skills may ironically refer to the fact that it will take a century, at the present rate, to integrate these skills systematically and coherently. Can you talk a little bit more about this insight, particularly in relation to the systemic patterns you're talking about with AI and computational thinking.
Charles: Even before AI, and regardless of AI, look at the effort that has been put in place since my first book, 21st Century Skills. At first I was happy to see that “21st century skills” had become a moniker used worldwide. That's great. That was a study done by Brookings about a decade ago. Then, a few years ago, we did another piece of research with Brookings, and found out that none of the major jurisdictions, not even Singapore, not even Finland, Australia, Canada, none of them had deployed any professional development and certainly no assessments of skills, character, and meta learning. In the US, in spite of the progress of 21st century skills, aka the 4 C's or SEL, none of this was being deployed systematically to prepare teachers, let alone assess students.
I realized that this was taking way too long, and as the rate of degradation of human conditions was increasing worldwide - pandemics, wars, global warming, etc. I figured we needed to find a way to accelerate all this and I got this renewed intensity.
What AI does is it adds yet another disruptor, yet another accelerant that needs to be taken into account. The disappointment about Covid is that everything snapped back to where it was right after it was over, so that was a wasted opportunity. Let's hope that AI forces things forward.
"Now we've moved to this capable AI phase. Capable AI with language models can solve a lot of different things. It's much broader in its context, because the data sets are immense. They're not narrow, like a game of Go or chess. So they transfer a lot more from an education perspective, but they're not intelligent by any stretch"
Stephanie: One of the things that I appreciate about your book as someone who doesn't really understand AI in any meaningful way, is that it's a helpful entry point in understanding the different sorts of capability levels of AI from narrow intelligence to super intelligence.
I think these distinctions are ones that maybe others like me are not deeply knowledgeable about. What should educators understand about AI that isn't in the mainstream conversation right now?
Charles: Well, the mainstream conversation is about generalized intelligence, AGI, meaning human-like capability. We're far from that. Or superintelligence which is actually significantly more than human capabilities, more like all of humans combined. So the latter is literally at this point still the realm of science fiction.
What we have seen with experiments of the Deep Mind and other places winning at Go and Stratego is this ability for narrow AI that is incredibly capable at winning a game or folding proteins or discovering new drugs. Those were very, very specific data sets that AI could do wonders with. Now we've moved to this capable AI phase. Capable AI with language models can solve a lot of different things. It's much broader in its context, because the data sets are immense. They're not narrow, like a game of Go or chess. So they transfer a lot more from an education perspective, but they're not intelligent by any stretch. These are giant statistical engines. and they respond in ways that we anthropomorphize deeply. But they are still giant statistical engines.
Stephanie: So in terms of thinking about the what of education - what we educate about and how – what are the implications from your perspective?
Charles: First, if you don't know what the future holds for you, you don't know which jobs are going to be impacted, you don't know how it's going to impact life, the first insurance policy you would develop is to become more versatile. So being more versatile means that you want to learn about modern disciplines as well as the traditional ones. For example, you would want to learn about technology and engineering; I really mean engineering at large, not just computer science. You'd want to learn about social sciences, like sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, to know how to deal with yourself and others. We want to learn about entrepreneurship. because that is the job of the future.
Now of course, a lot of independent schools already offer courses like that. But the point we're making is that everybody should be taking these courses, they should not be just an option, which brings us to ask what do we do with the traditional disciplines? We have to make more careful choices about what matters and we have to modernize. For instance, why do we need to study trigonometric functions rather than studying more data science or computational mathematics?
Someone has to make these choices. We're stuck in the past, not bringing in new disciplines, not modernizing existing disciplines, because the university entrance requirements do not value modernized or modern disciplines. And that's the problem we're all facing. We need to solve that and change the university entrance requirements so they value more than traditional disciplines.
Stephanie: That's a common refrain I hear, independent school leaders and trustees will say, well, until higher ed changes, we've have to do what we have to do. What is the counter or response to that statement, because that feels defeatist to me. It doesn't drive change either from the bottom up or from the top down.
Charles: You're right, because it requires a bit of finesse to address this – right now we're in a situation where we have to do both. We have to teach what should be taught as well as pass the SAT, or whatever for the university entrance. There are plenty of ways to satisfy both.
We can decide how we deal with time and how we deal with the branches and topics of every discipline. We can do things such as teaching a foreign language a lot more efficiently with technology [such as] Duo Lingo, [travel for] deep immersion, and move on quickly, save time and space for the other things we need to teach.
We could decide to teach all the right things, and then just reserve a trimester for cramming about the SATs, freeing up the rest of the time. There are plenty of creative ways we can deal with the blockage so that our kids who are going to become the leaders of the future do not get taught only what matters for the SATs, but what matters for life and work and to help the planet.
If independent schools don't do it, if they do not create the leaders for tomorrow who will?
Stephanie: I think that's a really interesting question. And it goes to what is the value of the independent school, and how in some ways they model and lead the way for all schools. There is that opportunity for independent schools, because they do have the flexibility and the agency to do that. They are not as restricted.
Charles: They have it, but they abdicate it to the SAT mindset, they do not think hard enough about how they can satisfy the SAT and do more. That's where boards should be paying a lot more attention.
Very frequently, unfortunately, I find boards very concerned about their own kids. And I mean, not even the other kids in school, their own kids as board members over the broader wellbeing of the school at large. I see a lot of board members resigning the moment their kids are out of the school as if all of a sudden the school doesn’t matter. They were there just for their own kids. That's not giving to the system. They should be there for the long run. They should be there to shape the strategy of the school. Not just short term for their kids’ success. Sorry to be so blunt but that's what I've noticed many, many times.
Stephanie: Yes, and that's an area of great interest for GLP, we spend a lot of time working with boards to help them understand what the governance mindset looks like, and how they can really elevate themselves to focus on the future, because, of course, they are the ceiling for talent in the system.
Talk to us then a little bit about what boards might focus on if we are to build a board and compose it to really steward the future for the institution and for future generations of learners. What would you define as their agenda? What questions should they be grappling with directly?
Charles: Well, I would simply say, if the goal of the school is to shape leaders for the future, that is a much broader and more encompassing goal than the role of the school is to create the workers of the future, which is also a much broader, more encompassing goal than the goal to get people accepted into the college of one’s choice.
So it's really expanding the conversation beyond simply university entrance, beyond work, all the way into impact on society. And that's where of course independent schools have the latitude to do a lot more, if they choose to exercise it, and it's a shame that they often do not.
Stephanie: That's right. And that's where vision is incredibly important, and understanding what outcomes for your learners and your students matter most.
One of the things that you talk about a lot in your earlier work and now in this age of AI is wisdom; the concept of wisdom as an enduring goal of education. I love that because educators don't talk about wisdom very often unless they're thinking about it in terms of the teachers themselves. Cultivating wisdom in everybody is a beautiful and enduring goal for schools. Can you define wisdom from your perspective, and talk about how it can be practically cultivated?
Charles: Absolutely. With the popular image of wisdom, you immediately imagine some old sage on a mountain. And there are elements of that that are actually correct in the sense that time spent in life matters, meaning you acquire more experiences, and you have more experiences to draw from.
But it's not just that. If you first look at the research on wisdom, and that's our Chapter 3 in the book, you realize very quickly that you can really decompose the elements of wisdom in terms of depth and breadth of knowledge, character attributes, metacognitive attributes, etc. So you see, it matches the framework that we've already created.
The key thing, of course, is to keep in mind that in the end, [wisdom] is acting in moderation. And, even moderation itself has to be weighed in the balance in situations where you need to go beyond moderation. It's being really intentional to say, okay, this is a situation that requires me to do this. Mindfulness, it's not just the practice of meditation, it's really being mindful, metacognitive, meta-emotive. That's what wisdom is about. Basically, the golden mean– nothing in excess, and weighing the various possibilities at all times, knowing that sometimes one side is much, much more correct than the other side. It doesn't mean everything is 50-50. It means being discerning. It's about discernment. If I was to capture it in one word that would be discernment.
Stephanie: Yes, and discernment is a beautiful word, and it's not a new concept. And as a matter of fact, we can look back into the ages to understand that discernment has been central to a lot of thought. Practically speaking though, we get into a school and we've got people worried about math, etc. What should schools do to cultivate wisdom and these meta levels of emotional thought, cognitive thought and reflection, and learning how to learn? What should schools be emphasizing and building? And simultaneously, what should they be letting go of because they can't do everything? Can you speak practically about that?
Charles: First of all, when we talk about these competencies, skills, character, meta learning abilities, whether it's curiosity or critical thinking, what we're really talking about is embedding them in the disciplines (subjects). It's not an extra layer.
So, for instance, when you teach fractions you can teach critical thinking at the same time. There's plenty of research about how pedagogically you can do both simultaneously. If you ask the questions, you've forced critical thinking to happen, not just the procedural way of solving functions. So that's the first response. That's how you do it very practically embedding the two, it does not require more time, it requires spending different time on how you're teaching fractions.
Second, no matter what, in every discipline there's been fat accumulated for decades, if not centuries. Unfortunately, the SAT and others do not recognize that. So we have to follow standards that have been developed by different states and eventually bump into SATs. We have, as a Center (for Curriculum Redesign), made choices about what matters more in a number of disciplines starting with math, world history, world literature, etc. We can provide guidance so that schools can do more of the right things in their choice of texts, in their choice of focus on historical events, in their focus on various math branches and topics; and eventually, if they have things that have not been covered, cover them in the cram session as described earlier. This is where we just catch up to what is unnecessary for life and work nowadays, but still required by the SAT or our state standards. That's how you deal with it very practically.
"And that's what an education is meant to do. It's meant to give you a distillation and the faster way to give you the distillation is via a teacher using the right, engaging inquiry strategies. Simultaneously, we also know that motivation is much more peaked when you're doing something that matters to your identity, your agency, your purpose, and that is very well reflected in a project, however, it is time inefficient."
Stephanie: So if you were to redesign, say, a high school education, speak very practically about modern disciplines that you want to see integrated.
Charles: The first one is technology and engineering, because right now we offer computer science but we don't offer biotech. We don't offer clean tech. We don't offer nanotech. We don't offer branches of engineering, [such as] civil, mechanical, manufacturing, electrical. We just offer computer science. Well, I'm an electrical engineer, and I can tell you I was never thrilled by computer science or by mathematics. But I understand their value. I can function with them, but I was interested in the hardware side, and that's what attracted me to engineering.
So imagine, if you don't have the latitude during those teenage years, or even middle school years to deal with anything but computer science. You may not like STEM too much. So you may not end up as an engineer. If you have the latitude to explore more, you'll have better latitude to make a choice that is in the direction of STEM. So, if you don't get to practice the E of STEM and the T is only limited to knowing how to use technology, then how are you supposed to do more than M and S?
Stephanie: That raises an interesting question for me. Because what you're really talking about is integration of the practical applications of some of the theories and the disciplines themselves, and engineering is a context in which to apply them, correct?
Charles: Yes, that is very astute. We learn physics, we learn math, they don't have much context, at least science gives context. But why only the natural world? Why not also the human made-world as well? Why not biotech rather than just microbiology?
Stephanie: So how do we build the adult talent we need to actually design learning experiences in this way – where the theoretical can be applied in practical contexts, and young people can get wider exposure to the possibilities?
Charles: I would say that independent schools are already well equipped for that. Physics teachers are perfectly able to teach clean tech, with the right curriculum. Same for chemistry teachers with nanotech, same for biology teachers with biotech, same for science teachers at large with some of these engineering disciplines. It's a question of curriculum. They already have a solid enough base. Obviously, they have to learn a few more things, the same way that you need to learn computer science to teach computer science.
They already have teachers that should be able to adapt. It's a bit like taking a Latin teacher and having them teach linguistics. They don't have to teach just Latin.
Stephanie: But they have to want to. And sometimes our hiring is focused more on either a master's or a terminal degree in a discipline, and that becomes the focal point. The practical application is not always the context in which someone feels prepared to teach. Learning design becomes its own area of growth for adults who are educating kids.
Charles: Yes, but it also is a matter of strategy and decision of the head of school during hiring: “If you are not interested in going into the practical aspects of what you've been teaching, thank you but we're not renewing your contract”. It's a strategy that can be followed, there will be mismatches. That's perfectly okay. Schools that want to keep on teaching Latin rather than teaching linguistics, fine. “This particular school has decided otherwise, so your services are to be used for teaching linguistics, and if you do not wish to do so, we recommend you find employment elsewhere”.
Stephanie: Yes, and what you're saying resonates so deeply with me, because our focus is, of course, in helping boards and leaders come together to make strategic choices about what they do, and to understand their choices– the primacy of their choices, must be focused on the learning experience. I think that boards and school leaders have long thought that their job is to figure out how to raise more money or how to build the endowment, or what new building they should create, when what they should really be talking about is, what are the choices that we make inside the curriculum. What are the choices we make about the talent that delivers that? And how do we resource toward those ends? And that's a very different conversation.
Charles: Absolutely. They have to be responsible for this strategy of which buildings and everything else are a part. But they're not the goal. The goal is not the building, the goal is the strategy.
Second, what happens when they do that is that they abdicate the responsibility of these [strategy] decisions to deans or department heads - very much like in a university. And so you have a bunch of haphazard implementations of all sorts of things, because there's no cohesive strategy. And this abdication of responsibility creates fiefdoms which are later on very, very hard to dismantle, because the department head will say - “Who are you to interfere with what I want to teach, or my teachers want to teach”. Sorry it's not really your decision, it is the decision of the school, and so you have to be part of the strategy and the design, not a block to progress.
"I've been really shocked about how slow things are in education. Not just slow, but mired into all mindsets. Everybody is debating my theory versus your theory as dogma, without having the open mindedness to recognize that I see something in his theory that makes sense and I can see why they're thinking this way. And that I know what they're saying is partially right and I am also partially right."
Stephanie: I want to talk about this notion of abdication. This is something that is also very important to us, particularly as we engage with boards and help them think about what their role is in governance. One of the common things I hear from trustees is, “I'm not an educator. I can't opine on that”. You know, I'm a finance person, or whatever. Our response is that you do have to think about the big existential questions related to education in order to govern. Do you want to say anything about that, because I think that that is another defeatist approach to the work.
Charles: First of all, they sell themselves short because yes, they're a finance person, but guess what? Because they're a finance person they've experienced what was necessary for them to learn in math, for instance. What is actually used in finance, and because they work in corporations or large organizations, they also have an idea of what's necessary for the real world – such as the competencies we've talked about– skills and character. So yes, they already have a reasonably educated opinion of what matters. They also typically have experience designing strategies in their organizations. And so why is it that they don't use that experience to help the school rather than just their corporation?
The second facet is that there are experts who can tell them what should be done. Just read the book, and you'll see all sorts of things that you could be doing which you can justify with a lot of logic about how the jobs are going to be, how the work already is. It's not rocket science. We're not asking them to decide what's in the curriculum. We're asking them to decide what are the broad directions of education for their school.
Stephanie: I so appreciate that and it's very reinforcing of the aspirations we have for conveying what we think governance needs to do for the future, and how it has to evolve and change in response to these big questions.
I have a question I would love to ask you from your professional and personal expertise as we round out this conversation. Change has been so fast, or it feels fast, certainly to many people. If you think back 5 to 10 years ago, what has surprised you most about change that you didn't anticipate or predict relative to where we are now?
Charles: Coming from the technology world where change is truly intense, I mean from the microchip, the semiconductor world where the capabilities of a chip double every 18 months exponentially, I've been really shocked about how slow things are in education. Not just slow, but mired into all mindsets. Everybody is debating my theory versus your theory as dogma, without having the open mindedness to recognize that I see something in his theory that makes sense and I can see why they're thinking this way. And that I know what they're saying is partially right and I am also partially right.
So, for example, constructivism versus didacticism. Should it all be project based? Or, should it all be teacher-as-a-sage, and all the variations in between. It puzzles me that people don't have the common sense to say, okay we cannot have kids rediscover every single discipline from Mesopotamia onward. We have to condense it and accelerate it. And that's what an education is meant to do. It's meant to give you a distillation and the faster way to give you the distillation is via a teacher using the right, engaging inquiry strategies. Simultaneously, we also know that motivation is much more peaked when you're doing something that matters to your identity, your agency, your purpose, and that is very well reflected in a project, however, it is time inefficient.
So what is the right blend of both rather than debating endlessly one or the other. It's really a blend. You can imagine every single course having a project component to it which would be, let's say, 30% of the time – McKinsey has shown that this is the right locus of time spent on projects versus the didacticism. If you combine speed and efficiency of delivery with motivation, engagement and purpose of the student, that's one of the many, many things that seem obvious to me, coming from outside of education 20 years ago. Why are they so dogmatic?
Stephanie: Yet the uptake has been very, very slow. Any hypotheses as to why?
Charles: The uptake is really related to university entrance requirements and without changing those we're bumping against the ceiling. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, independent schools have a way to go beyond that in different ways. But to really change 100% of the system we would need to open that aperture a lot more widely. And it's a complicated story depending on the country. Some countries are very top down with a baccalaureate of some sort, and there the change has to occur at the qualification authority level, whereas in countries as decentralized as in the US, you have a myriad of different players and opinions, and the change is much, much more diffused. But even in a system like this, you have some organizations that have a lot of power and do not realize it like NACAC (National Association for College Admission Counseling).
Stephanie: Charles, thank you. I would really encourage trustees and school leaders to read your book, to explore your website, the Center for Curriculum, Redesign and to see the resources, the research, and explore the various rabbit holes that can take them down. There's so much to learn here, and I think we all have to be continuously learning. Thank you for helping create pathways for that learning. Thank you so much for this conversation today.
Charles: Well, thank you, Stephanie. I would like to add that we do work with very specific independent schools that have decided to make that change. So if one of your listeners decides that they are really serious about moving significantly ahead, they can always contact us.
Stephanie: Wonderful. That's a wonderful resource and offer, and we're excited to share this with our listeners and our readers. So thank you so much.
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