In the face of these objectively fearsome threats, the school system can and indeed must react to remain at the center of humanity’s educational mission.
The educational institution is instrumental in ensuring equal opportunities for students of various socioeconomic backgrounds, males and females, with different abilities.
However, the school must build a synergistic relationship with the other elements of the educational community: the family, businesses, the media system and other players.
Attali declares that “the set of children raised at home will not form a society”: in fact, without a physical school, the risk is to raise generations of narcissists, loners and unable to weave balanced relationships with adults and peers, bonds that require empathy, sharing, pluralism, respect, altruism.
The role of teachers today threatened by the possibility of AI’s overreach with its omniscience taking away their authority and credibility, will actually be a key role to the extent that they can lead the younger generation to regain control and develop critical sense in the AI ecosystem, even to prevent its psychological damage.
The use of teaching assistants with AI and in virtual reality will be able to enable teachers to range across different subject areas, including meeting the new demands for skills that continually emerge from a rapidly changing professional world.
The introduction of technologies such as simulations and playful applications will be able to make the coursework more engaging and attractive. The teacher will be able to guide students to produce their own course content, using digital platforms that, by enabling a flipped classroom logic, offer students the opportunity to acquire advanced skills in different disciplines, and to co-construct their knowledge in alliance with the teacher, through the use of the shared technological tool.
Today’s school, if it is to survive, must also evolve by contemplating hybrid forms of learning, between school, home, business, social and sports environments in leisure time. It should be noted that the mass schooling of the 21st century is not without its flaws or limitations: in Italy, for example, there is still a high dropout rate, a strong mismatch between education and relative employment, and a low rate of university enrollment.
Jacques Attali summarizes the role of different educational entities: the family transmits the mother tongue, history and family values, the Church the faith and sacred scripture, businesses the professional skills, and schools what is needed to occupy a place in society.
Therefore, there is a need to develop an extended school model that can contemplate different educational experiences, in-presence and distance, natural or with technological supports, also adapting to the needs of the developmental age and school levels, from kindergarten to university, and to lifelong learning. In this model, parents and extracurricular workers themselves must also increase their educational role with the help of technological supports. All this will also entail massive investment: Attali proposes allocating 10 percent of nations’ GDP to education in 2050, while currently only Saudi Arabia reaches 8 percent, Norway 6.6 percent, the United States 6.1 percent, France 5.2 percent, Italy 3.9 percent, and Russia 3.4 percent.
In all this, it is important not to forget that personally possessing knowledge remains a fundamental motivation for human beings: despite generative tools and automatic translations, being able to express oneself in writing and vocally in one’s own and foreign languages remains an irreplaceable experience.
The human faculty of memory is also perceived by the individual as a necessity, even in the presence of endless databases, because it is essential for him to know where to find and how to connect information.
Creativity itself is not a solitary activity, but requires interaction and collaboration with others.
Italiano