“You don’t need to understand it. You just need to remember it.”
This was how my GCSE maths teacher replied when I asked how a formula actually worked. He was right, of course - in the narrowest sense.
I memorised the formula, passed the exam (just) and moved on. Today I cannot remember which formula it was and, if you asked me to use it, I would not know where to start.
Now I am a teacher myself and I have seen this bargain being struck at various times throughout my career, even in my own classroom.
It’s not always a satisfying moment but, given the demands of standardised assessments and a full curriculum, the “you just need to remember it” argument is a powerful one.
However, in the age of AI, this is not only a sub-optimal approach to learning. It is redundant.
Explore versus exploit
There’s a concept from game theory called the explore-exploit trade-off. The choice is simple: do you exploit what you already know - following established approaches for reliable but limited gains? Or do you explore - trying new approaches that might fail but could lead to a breakthrough?
For decades, education has implicitly favoured exploitation. Memorise the formula. Follow the method. Optimise for the exam. The pay-off? Reliable results.
I learned about the explore-exploit trade-off while at university. In my first couple of assignments, I was ticking the boxes, following well-worn paths of argument. But my markedly average approach was getting only markedly average results.
I happened to be studying a module on game theory, which is where I learned about explore versus exploit. I saw that I had been exploiting, completing safe work that didn’t really do anything exciting. I decided to change my approach.
So, with each new assignment, I would go to the professor and ask what they thought the answer to the posed question was. Then I would set about answering against this expectation.
This forced me to explore and find something new or different. Soon my grades improved and I found I was enjoying the process a lot more, too.
Talk is worth more
But in the age of AI, this option of whether to explore or exploit is no more because AI is the ultimate exploitation engine.
It can trawl through reams of data in seconds or less and find solutions that, on the surface at least, tick all the boxes. But really, if we use this version of the established path, we will always lose.
However, there is, at least in its current form, one area where AI cannot replace humans, and that should be key to our approach when countering AI’s potential to undermine all that we do.
It is in talk where we can make our difference, because talk is how humans explore.
And at just the right time, there are moves to bring this into the heart of education.
Oracy has been highlighted as a key area of focus in the recent Department for Education curriculum and assessment review. Oracy is not new, but the work of Neil Mercer and others in the field is coming to the fore with ever more clarity, which makes perfect sense.
Even at the highest levels, learning is, in fact, a conversation.
It can be a conversation with oneself over how to work through a problem or it can be a literature review of a PhD thesis where the conversation is opened up to the late and the great in a whole field of academic literature.
It is the in action. The thesis (what we already know) is posed, an antithesis (a counter point) is posited and then somewhere between the two we find synthesis (newly established understanding).
Without this dialogic approach to learning, we will forever be stuck in that initial thesis moment.
As we move into the future, AI will always be able to find the thesis quicker and more reliably than we can.
Oracy skills, though, will not only help learners to perform better in class, they will also help them to perform in a way that AI, at present, cannot. Opportunities for classroom discussion, student presentation, teamwork on academic problems, these will all foster a culture of oracy.
Understand, not ‘just remember’
This is a balancing act because, at least for the moment, standardised assessments and their results still matter hugely in the development of learners.
But in a world where a computer can provide a standard university assignment in seconds, educators teaching across the age ranges must come together to make the change.
We must recognise that there is no time for short-term, safe exploitation - we must take risks and look beyond what has come before. And maybe this means that understanding will be more important than “just remembering”.
Alex Hebbes is head of primary and ECT induction lead at the British School of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
