ChatGPT and the likes remind us that many of things that are easiest to teach are now also easy to digitise and automate, and that too often we educate students for our past, rather than for their future. At the OECD, we have been tracking how well systems like ChatGPT fare on tasks from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the global yardstick of educational success that over 80 countries use to assess the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds.
This comparison shows rapid advances in the capabilities of artificial intelligence when compared with humans. In March 2022, ChatGPT could answer 28% of a set of PISA mathematics tasks, in March 2023 GPT answered 46% of the tasks successfully. In science, the corresponding percentages were 65% and 85%.
So, in a world with artificial intelligence, education is no longer just about teaching students, it is also about helping them to develop a reliable compass and the tools needed to navigate with confidence through an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world. Education needs to shift from teaching learners to reproduce the established wisdom of our times to questioning and extending it.
My academic background is in science, and one of the things that makes my heart sink these days when I watch science classes is to see how we teach science like religion. We make students believe in some scientific theory, then we give them lots of exercises to practice that and at the end, we test whether they have learned the right answers.
