It’s hard to predict the future of education. In 1910, to commemorate the World’s Fair, the French artist Jean-Marc Côté produced a series of colourful prints depicting the year 2000. In one of them, a teacher is feeding textbooks into a machine, where the knowledge is transmuted into information delivered directly into the heads of students. A few years later, Thomas Edison predicted that books would soon be obsolete in schools, replaced by row upon row of students sitting passively in their chairs, receiving instruction from motion pictures.
Obviously, these visions of the future were widely off the mark in terms of actual academic and technological progress (not to mention demonstrating a misconception that education is merely a process of stuffing information into the heads of students). More recent projections about the future of education have fared little better: In 2015, at the UN summit on sustainable development, world leaders vowed to provide “free, equitable, and quality” primary education for all children, by 2030. In fact, between 2015 and 2023, primary education completion rates only increased by three percent, from 84 to 87%.
We like to tell ourselves that the story of human progress is one of continuous improvement, where technological innovation and socioeconomic advances march hand-in-hand. But the truth, of course, is that human development is messy. With just over five years to go before the end of the sustainable development goal (SDG) period, it’s worth reflecting on how technology is helping us to advance access to education, where gaps remain, and what more can be done.
When Sola Mahfouz was 11, her family pulled her out of school in Afghanistan after a group of men threatened her safety if she continued studying. Eager to learn, nonetheless, she began to secretly teach herself using digital learning platforms like Khan Academy. Sola later passed a college entry test, travelled to the US to study and is now a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University.
