April 2, 2025 • 35 mins
In this episode, we delve into the world of learning innovation with Graham Brown-Martin, author of 'Learning Reimagined'. Graham shares his journey from working on mainframe computers at the Open University to pioneering educational technology in the 1980s. We explore key topics such as the contrast between instructionism and constructionism, the evolution of the education system, the impact of neurodiversity, and the future of work in the age of automation. Graham's unique insights highlight the need for a systemic transformation in education and the crucial role of diverse thinking in driving innovation. Join us for an enlightening conversation on the transformative power of learning and technology.
00:00 Introduction to Inside Learning Podcast
00:15 Guest Introduction: Graham Brown-Martin
01:51 Early Career and Mainframe Computers
02:39 Educational Software and the Micros in School Scheme
05:12 The Shift from Instructionism to Constructionism
18:21 The Role of Neurodivergence in Innovation
23:46 The Future of Work and Education
34:15 Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Find Graham
https://www.grahambrownmartin.com
Find those Vimeo videos:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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The Inside Learning Podcast is broughtto you by the Learnovate Center.
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Learnovate research explores the powerof learning to unlock human potential.
Find out more about learnovate researchon the science of learning and the
future of work at learnovatecenter.org.
Today's guest takes us on ajourney in search of innovation
in the way we learn and teach.
His book asks the most vitalquestions about the purpose of
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education and the true role oftechnology in its transformation.
It captures a broad canvas of opinions formany of the world's foremost thinkers and
practitioners from the world of education,technology, and design, including the late
Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, SUTA Mitra,Andreas Schlicker, and many, many others.
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The book is now 10 years old, and Ithought we'd share the thoughts of
a pioneer in learning innovation,neurodiversity and regenerative economy.
We welcome the authorof Learning Reimagined.
Now revisited a decadelater, Graham Brown.
Martin, welcome to the show.
Oh, thank you very much.
, what an auspicious introduction.
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I do appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
We were talking for like 20 minutesand we went down so many rabbit
holes, like we better press recordat this stage, I went down rabbit
holes before I even joined you.
I was preparing all day.
Went down countless YouTube videos,the 30 short videos that you have on
Vimeo that are part of the book as well.
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And then you're a prolific author onMedium and many other outlets as well.
I thought would give a little bitbackground of that thing I mentioned
the Pioneer because you've been doingthis for decades at this stage , and
across today's show, I'd love to share.
What you first worked on and what youwere pioneering, and then how much has
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changed and how little has changed.
I thought that'd be agood way to set us up.
Gosh, I don't know howfar you want to go back.
Really.
I think it's interesting forme to remember that , I started
working on mainframe computerswhich I dunno how many of your
listeners will know mainframes.
These were enormous computers that were,take up whole, I mean like large rooms.
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So my first proper job wasat the Open University working
on a big mainframe computer.
Which was like the size of a bus really.
With these big dis packs, the size ofAmerican washing machines, which you'd
put your hand in and twist this thingin a 10 megabytes, which was huge.
Would come outta this.
Of course, this has got lesspower than a feature phone.
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I mean, not even your smartphone,I mean the old Noia feature phone.
So that's when this journey started.
And that actually it wasfrom that, that got me into.
Computing for education.
And I suppose initial ed tech with a,a scheme in the eighties called the
Micros in School scheme, which wasabout I think the UK government at
that time saw this, if you like, thethird industrial revolution coming
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along , where desktop computers and soon, and how the future would be, or part
of the future would be programming comprogramming computers and using computers.
And so they, they had this.
This program to put computersinto schools along , with
educational software.
And I started writing educationalsoftware on some of those very early
micro computers in the eighties and,that's how I got to know a company
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in Oxford called Research Machines.
I mean, there were the three companiesthat were supported by the government
at that point were in this scheme wereresearch machines or rm ACORN with
the BBC Micro and Sinclair with theSpectrum and all that kind of stuff.
So we were writing softwarefor those kinds of things.
And that was really interestingbecause, in one sense.
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I think the UK government got it right.
Which was, , it's a generatorgeneration of people who were
ready for that third prepared forthat third industrial revolution.
And actually, if you then see the effectsof that, you roll that into the nineties.
I., the uk would you believewas probably the leading
country in video game design.
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These sort of old games that we used toplay on our BBC like elite and so on.
This software engineeringcame out of the uk.
I mean that, that soon passedas we moved into this century.
But it was interesting because.
As things developed as we moved intothe third industrial revolution a
lot of lobbying that went on withgovernment was really from very large
corporations that, that weren't, thatweren't based in Europe, that were, you
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know, mainly US corporations that wereadvising government, I mean, here and,
and other places, and saying, well,actually, you don't really need to know
how to com program the computer so much.
Now you need to, to learn howto use office applications.
And, and those kinds of things.
And you know, and, and by and largethat was probably right, because
actually not everyone's gonnabe a computer programmer, right?
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We need to be able to usecomputers and, and, and so on.
But that was that sort oftransition that that happened.
And then there was a sort of resurgenceof this education and computers
and schools and everything else.
It's then started again.
I mean, in this century, I mean, just,just, I, I suppose probably the last,
over the last 10 years, this idea ofbeing makers rather than consumers.
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technology has been a big part of that.
So I've still seen thesecycles go round and round.
I jumped out of educational computing'cause I was inspired by a gentleman
called Seymour Papper who was oneof the revered learning theorists
and best known for the learningtheory of our constructionism.
Which is different from Instructionism.
So the sort of education that we havein schools today might be termed as
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instructionism, which is I'll tellyou how to do something and you do
it, and I'll tell you whether you'vedone it right and they'll test you.
And that kind of stuff is broadcast.
Medium PEPPER had a differentidea, which was that, that,
that we would use computers.
So in, in that otherinstruction is ideas, is idea.
Okay, well if education isinstruction, then we'll use
computers to do it more efficiently.
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Whereas he thought, actually no.
We could use computers todo something different.
We could use computers as atool of inquiry and creativity.
And project-based learning and so forth.
So a lot of those ideascame from Sumo Papa.
I'm sure we'll come back tothat later in this conversation.
'cause I think it's relevant to thetransition that we're now making as
we go from the, we're in the fourthindustrial revolution, aren't we?
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And how we then move into the fifth.
But I should point out thatI took , a sort of a detour.
On the way to this bit was that , inthe work that I'd been doing in the
late eighties and early ninetiesaround what we used to call multimedia
and CD rom and interactive CDROM and all those kind of things.
I had a company, I. Then Istarted when I was about 21.
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That developed a lot of thevery early technology around
audio and video compression.
A lot of the things we take forgranted now on our phones and all
that kind of business, we stillhave patents for that and so on.
But what I found was that was actually,although I was imagining it, that
technology to be used in education, likeencyclopedia with videos and all that kind
of stuff, which of course did happen.
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I got more traction in the musicindustry and the feature film
industry and the video game industry.
So for the nineties was really prettymuch me involved in the music industry
and just disrupting it a little bit andcreating record labels and so forth.
And here we are.
That work you did, you then haveseen it pay dividends . I mentioned
the 30 videos on Vimeo as well.
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I'll link to those in the show notes, butI wanted to jump on that thing, that idea
of instructionism versus constructionism
yes.
Yeah.
, I mean, the different learningtheories and different
approaches to, to, tolearning and education.
And I don't think it'snecessarily, either or.
It's having a balance, but , becauseof the way that we have to
some extent industrialized oureducation systems we've tended
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to lean towards instructionism.
Because actually, if you look at theway the assessment system works, we
the assessment system hasn't reallychanged in, in, in, in a very long time.
Has it really?
, if we look at what our children are doingat school, it's probably pretty much the
same thing as we were doing at school.
I'm reminded of , a time when my whenone of my teenage daughters, when they
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were a child, said to my mother, my latemother, when she was doing a project
, at school, she says, Nana, , what wasschool like when you were at school?
And she said, probably the same as you.
And this was interesting 'cause she,because actually absolutely right.
Really it was very much aboutthe inculcation of facts
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and procedures and then.
The test, which makes sure thatI've been able to, remember and
absorb those facts and proceduresfor long enough to pass a test.
And also that would be a performancemetric for the teacher to see how
good they were at inculcating thosefacts and procedures and that kind
of broadcast teacher at the front.
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Type mode , is a form of instructionismand it goes back actually to the church
and things like that when we had one,only one copy of a Bible and everyone
would then make their own copy byreciting it and writing it down and so on.
So , that's where that came from.
This kind of broad cast thing andinstructionism and that's how we test.
And so because we test that way, thingshaven't changed in all this time.
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We have this tyranny of measurement.
And this goes back to sort of industrialprocesses, and we can trace this back to
like the original management consultant,if you like, Frederick Taylor who,
got his measuring stick out , andtransformed craft production into mass
production, industrialization, thiswas the first industrial revolution
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and second industrial revolution.
I mean, and, and I say that in asort of sneering way, but actually.
In many ways.
It created a lot of progress.
, the fact of, , we look around ourhome and our things , and the sort
of mass manufacturing and so forth.
I mean, , it has improvedpeople's lives in a great deal.
That idea of measuring things andbeing able to create processes.
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And rules , and data to drive thoseprocesses to improve manufacturing.
And we had a education systemdesigned to support that.
And it got us to here.
I think
Where we're going is it's probablynot gonna get as much further unless
we make some course corrections.
This is where I like the Venn diagramsof all your experiences and, , the
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innovation part because , I havethe book there, the Winslow Taylor.
There's a book called The One BestWay Frederick Winslow Taylor.
And so it's the story of him andhow he created the One Best Way.
And I thought, as I said, I did a lot ofresearch on you and listened to podcasts
and YouTube videos, et cetera, and
what I like about what yourmessage is that you can't
just fix one part of the system.
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So there's the education systemand the idea that you've created
almost everybody the same.
And because the metrics are the sameand deviation is not often rewarded.
Yes.
I had this experience with my sonrecently, so , he was kind of.
I want to go off the beaten track a littlebit with my essays and stuff like that.
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And , we're lucky enough tobe able to give him grinds.
So we give him grinds and then he getsrewarded by some teachers for actually
going off the beaten track and given adifferent answer from everybody else.
So sometimes at works, but then I thoughtfast forward to him being in a consultancy
or working for an organization.
And people don't really wantpeople to go off the beaten track.
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They want people to execute and exploitthe current advantage, not find a new one.
In most organizations, yes, that'swhat most organizations need.
So that's the second part.
And then there's what'srewarded in society.
So one of the things, Ithink the way you put it was.
That the highly valued jobs,are not highly valuable.
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So being a nurse, being aneducator, are highly valued,
yet they're not highly valuable.
You don't get paid a lotfor in those jobs, and that,
that system needs to change.
It's systemic.
The entire change is systemic.
I think you've summarized alot of my thinking actually.
Which is enormously useful.
I'm glad that, that's recorded.
'cause I might use that.
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But no, that's absolutely right.
A lot of people have come to meand sort of said, okay, look, if we
fix education, we can fix society.
And, it's a wonderful notionand I wish it was true.
But I don't think that'show it works, unfortunately.
And I think that thesethings are interlocking.
Smarter people than mehave written about this.
You could go back to Marksactually, if you wanted to.
The sort of super structure and base.
And I'm not doing this from akind of a socialist perspective
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or anything like that.
It's just how societies work.
We have a base, which is the economy,and then the superstructures, which
support that, whether it's mass media,religion education , and so forth.
And they maintain the base.
, and the thing is, if you'vebenefited from the status quo, the
base being a status quo, you'vegot no motivation to change it.
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And so things get locked in there.
But over time, of course,if those things shift.
Those structures will come , tostabilize the status quo.
We see that all the time as soon as apolitical leader or even a business leader
, or anybody is threatening the status quo.
I. You'll find a lot of organizationsand structures and everything else
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coming around to, to defend it.
Sometimes for good reasons,sometimes perhaps not.
Sometimes it's maintainingself-interest and so forth.
And it's interesting that youmentioned your son who will.
Go down his own direction, o ofpassions of interest and so on.
And I think this is really interesting andalso an indicator for the future because
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we've lived in an education system ina society, and when you do a test and
, examination, there's one right answer.
Do you know what I mean?
Now.
Okay.
Two plus two is four.
Yes, I get it.
But we're not talking about that, are we?
We we're talking aboutinterpretations of things.
We're talking about how do werespond to challenges, how to respond
to problems and, and, and so on.
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And actually, if we look at natureand biodiversity, the reason why there
is such biodiversity is so that ifthere is a, an environmental shock.
There's enough difference between thewith, you know, the different sort of,
you know, with, let's say it's flora andfauna to respond to that in some way.
Okay.
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So it's not, they're not allresponding in the same way.
, if we had a monoculture, if we didn'thave diversity , in the natural world
and then there was a threat, then thechances are that it wouldn't survive.
Now the same is true of businessesand organizations and corporations.
I mind you to think of, say andI'm not picking any one particular
one, but I'm gonna say Blackberry.
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Now, when Blackberry, of course,they were hyper successful, weren't
they right at the beginning andthen all of a sudden they weren't.
And if you looked at the organizationwhen it collapsed it, everyone
in the board was of, was from anaccounting and finance background.
And I don't have a problemwith accountants and financing.
What I'm saying is that they allcame from the same sort of background.
They weren't.
They weren't particularlydiverse in their thinking.
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And of course they were then adapted,you know, it's like groupthink.
This sort, the sort of,i i idea groupthink.
So when a threat came from outside,and in this case it was the iPhone
and touchscreens and all that kindastuff, they didn't know how to respond.
They just, okay, we'vegot a real keyboard.
We, there's no way they could beat us.
the rest is history, right?
And it collapsed.
And that's because therewasn't enough diversity and
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different ways of approaching achallenge in order to respond.
They were, it was a monocultureand I think that's problematic.
So if we have an education systemwhich outputs a monoculture , or we
have society or organizations thatdon't have that sort of diversity in
them, then I think innovation stalls.
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, and I suppose quite timely actually,given the kind of things that are
happening in the world right now.
But I've got a record and I continueto go on record and saying is
that diversity drives innovation.
So I think that back to your topoint with your son, I think,
, congratulations to you in supportinghis passion and his ability because
he's directing his own learning.
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I think that's a good thing, and I thinkthere's not enough opportunities within
our existing education systems to do that.
And I say that to someone who wasexpelled from school at 15 because
that was a self-directed learner.
I think I did most of my learning whenI was playing hooky and going into
London and spending time in the sciencemuseum and stealing books from foils.
But I genuinely believe that'swhy you have the success you've
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had in a different field.
And , I told my son this, I waslike, going, look, if at the very
least you treat school as a way thatanything in life works is, which
is you have to be disciplined to.
Complete what you say you willcomplete by a certain date.
I said that is in everysingle thing sport.
That's in music, that's in everything.
If you wanted to go those ways,at the very least, learn that
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as a template to do things.
That's, but then I told 'em the story.
I dunno if you noticed the story.
Le Petti, chaperone Rouge is.
The little Red Hat Riding Hood.
And the story is really don'tdeviate from the path because it's
dangerous, especially for little girls.
That's what the story isactually to do, to warn children.
And a lot of those, a lot of those nurseryrhymes were, or those children's stories
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were to warn children from deviation.
And I thought about that.
And then to your point about Blackberry.
, in my workshops, I tell the storyof the Irish Potato famine that we
were reliant on one type of potato.
That was one of the big problems.
While there's like 150 species,we had won the Lumper Potato.
And that businesses not only relyon only certain types of people that
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succeed within, inside the organization,but they actively, and inactively
actually often they don't know.
They, ostracize.
Different thinkers or different thinkersleave because they don't feel welcome or
they're actually in some cases gaslit or
a, it is like an innovation immune system.
Yeah.
And, and, and I, and I get it to apoint, but to your point with the
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speed of change of innovation todayand the cycles of change so quick that
you actually don't have time to adapt.
So there's another element in nature,which is pre adaptation where there's
some DNA in a species that's readyin case the environment changes.
And that's the way I see.
Neurodivergence different thinkerswithin inside an organization.
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So the organization almost needs to,if they want to call it, tolerate
them for the change in the systemand then they come into their
I think the neurodivergencething is interesting.
I'm myself neurodivergent.
I'm autistic with a DHD but a latediagnosis, I only got a formal
diagnosis five years ago, so I'vestill been leaning into that and
understanding more about it and so on.
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But, and then looking at mylife in the sort of rear view
mirror and just like, oh, okay.
Oh, now I get what was going onthere and all that kind of business.
Now the thing about Neurodivergenceis it's , not a recent phenomenon.
I mean, neurodivergent people are humans.
Humans have always been neurodivergentand to a, to a greater or lesser degree.
And, but we have this arbitrary normal,which came out of industrialization.
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The arbitrary normal, the thingthat we call neuro typic and
everything else is the result ofthe first industrial revolution.
, what you're doing is you're taking agroup of people, many, many of us
who were used to being outside,being hunter gatherers, if you wanna
go back far enough and so forth.
But of course, the education act thatcame into power in the UK was about taking
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these unruly people from the countryside,from the agricultural world, from of
cottage industries and so forth, andthen putting them through a process.
Of training them to preparethem for the first and the
second industrial revolution.
And that required a certain level ofconsistency in the output of those, of
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those schools and colleges and so on.
And also, there were practical issues.
We in those days, noteveryone had access to a library.
We didn't actually have, pocketcalculators and all that kind of stuff.
So mental arithmetic andbeing able to remember.
Large parts of books and all thatwas very valuable at that point,
particularly when, the Britishhad its empire and all that kind
of stuff , and so it just sort ofreplicated that , whole thing out there.
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But those education systems,certainly the education systems of
the 20th century, what it valuedwas efficiency and consistency.
What you wanted was a workforce,whether it was in the shops, in
the offices or the factory ever,that, that would generally sit
still for up to eight hours a day.
Not ask too many questions, performthe role, often repetitive tasks,
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because remember by that time, FrederickTaylor and then McKinsey and all
these different, consultancies havehad their way in terms of creating
processes and rules and data-drivenand all that kind of business.
And so what we really hadwas human robots and not
everybody was good at that.
Do you what I mean?
And so this is where we got the ideaof neurodivergence and I'm talking
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about genetic neurodivergence here.
I'm not talking about acquiredneurodivergence like MPD or
PTSD , or those kind of things,which is a consequence of
environmental or chemical trauma.
I'm just talking about your sortof autism and A DHD and dyslexia
and all these kind things.
These are all valuable traits.
Incredibly valuable traits.
If you look back at history and you lookback at, at how we survived as a species
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and how we fed ourselves and so on.
These were incredibly valuable traits,but in a situation where we want
to put you on the sort of a conveyorbelt so that the output would be a,
consistent and efficient workforce,neurodivergent people to a greater risk
degree would fall out of that system.
You know what I mean?
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And I was one of those people.
And there are others.
So this idea then , as we go througha sort of a shift in society, a
shift in the world, , and I thinkwhy it's opposite to this conversation
is 'cause we are in this fourthindustrial revolution at the moment.
And we're still seeing it.
I think a lot of people have got almostlike daily shock by the kind of amazing
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things and also the frightening things.
It's the AI and robots and so on can do.
, but this is a logicalconclusion of industrialization.
This is what happens, you know?
And I think it's a good thing.
I think we should accelerate it if we can.
No, we can do it safely.
It's, which is the idea that if wedefine everything by a detailed job
description, if we have processes andrules and then data and, it's done
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by that, then we can automate it.
Which means that by the end of thefourth industrial revolution, and we're
just at the beginning of it now, butit's probably got another 10 years to
go we would've been able to automateeverything that's governed by repetitive
tasks, process rules and data-drivenstuff, and all that kind of business.
And it's like that stuff will go.
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And the interesting thing about thisis that in the past, if we look
at the sort of the second and thirdindustrial revolutions, we saw
technological unemployment, but itwas tended to be blue collar workers.
The working classes and so forth andrightly or wrongly, and I think wrongly,
we didn't pay enough attention to that.
That's why we ended up getting whatguy standing from the London School of
Economics called the Precariat, whereyou moved, , manufacturing, say , from
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different parts of the country.
To where it was cheap.
'cause profit use, profit,incentive and everything else.
And that's absolutely fine.
You move the jobs but then you haveto retrain, you have to kind of.
Retrain people, lifelonglearning, all that kinda stuff.
But that, that didn't happen.
Of course, it's successivegovernments and it doesn't matter
which party we're talking about.
They all, they were all asbad as each other in a way.
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And in different parts of theworld didn't pay any attention.
And so, you know, that ended up,I mean, we are seeing it now.
I mean, in, you know, last summer in, in,in, in the uk, in London, you know, riots
but people blaming, you know, there's,there's, suddenly there's, there's.
People have less money.
'cause apparently we've got moremillionaires and billionaires than
ever, but money's a finite resource.
So where do they thinkthat money came from?
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It certainly didn't come from the poorpeople that you're burning in hotels.
Do you know what I mean?
But that's the way sort of society works.
But anyway, the point , is that weare moving through this in one sense,
amazing time in history where whatwe've called work is being automated.
So then we have to think, okay, well, butwe still have an education system that's
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having that output and it's still going.
It's like this machine that we can't stop.
And we also have governments here,but everywhere who are still locked
into this economic thinking of thesecond really industrial revolution.
First and second, noteven really the third.
To be honest, which is we work thismany hours a day and we take this
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salary and all that kinda stuff.
And it worked from the sortof 1950s and everything else.
Do you know what I mean?
Where everyone couldafford a house and so on.
But we're now what we're seeingis greater inequality because of
the, what I mentioned earlier.
So my point is.
What happens next?
What happens in the fifthindustrial revolution when all
these jobs have been automated?
Well, the jobs of the futures, I've oftensaid are the ones that machines can't do.
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And the things that machines aren'tgood at are things like intuition,
empathy social interaction complexproblem solving, creativity, imagination.
And these things are uniquely human.
And these are the sort of things that wewere trying to eek out of, back to the
thing about your son going off on his ownpath being, we didn't want creativity
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, on the factory production line.
We didn't want someone to go,oh, I wonder what the red wire
does, rather than the blue one.
We didn't really want creativeaccounting, but if we did, we
didn't want anyone to talk about it.
Do you know what I mean?
And all that kinda stuff.
I mean it very much like that.
But now of course when we look at thefuture of employment, it's like, well.
What we actually need is these peoplethat have these human capacities,
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creative innovators, writers, artists,teachers, counselors, nurses, doctors.
It's not that they won't work with ai.
It is just that.
It's, I think the fifth industrialrevolution could be amazing.
I mean, this is a kind of, it'snot competing with machines, which
is what we're doing at the moment.
It's about actually collaboration withmachines, doing the, we are doing the
stuff that humans are really good at andmachines frankly would never be good at.
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And the machines are mean, are verygood at things that, much better at
some things, we don't really like allthat process and data driven stuff.
Not really just, some people mightdo, but I'm talking about , on
mass, so it could be really good.
But the problem really isthis I think you had , a guest
on one of your shows which talksabout the economic singularity.
And I think it's economicsingularity , is a problem, is
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a potential problem because ithas two kind of potential outputs.
The economic singularity is when the jobsthat have been replaced, the jobs that
are actually being be, that are availableto humans are not economically valued.
We don't pay.
And, what I mean?
There's a mix up.
What we've done is we've.
Industrialize things so muchand with AI and everything else.
(26:42):
And then the wealth as I was mentioningearlier, has been concentrated to
an ever smaller number of people.
We're hearing the term oligarchy beingthrown around a lot at the moment.
But it's a real thing, isn't it?
It's a real thing.
, that's not even a political point.
It's just this is what's happened.
It's like, 400 years of liberalism,which John Locker course was about.
Know, wrestling power away fromthe monarchy and giving it to the
(27:04):
people in the term of free markets.
It turned into his grave, wouldn't he?
We just go, oh my gosh, it's great.
New monarchies.
Do you know what I mean?
And it's like, okay, well what do we do?
Because it's like, I think we are holdingourselves back from an amazing future.
If we don't change the economic model andthe way that we value things, and there's
all kinds of different ways of doing this.
(27:25):
I mean, from wealth redistributionto different kinds of I, I
don't like the term universal basicincome because of the word basic.
'cause I think that's just nonsense.
I think it's like, but they're all, itis a choice about how we do these things.
But to your point that you'remaking about my point is that.
(27:46):
You could only, I'm talkingabout formal education.
I'm talking about, the schools anduniversities like that can only really
be transformed in response to an economicmodel, which is of course the kind of what
I call, what I tell the base, the sortof a, the status quo and everything else.
The problem is that we're in thiskind of stalemate situation where
there's a small number of people inthe world that have all the money.
(28:10):
And we've got these massiveinequalities and everything else.
And actually to get past this, youhave to redistribute that money.
So one kind of possibility of aneconomic singularity is a dystopian,
the precariat at internet scaleglobally, I mean, significant.
(28:31):
Global civil disobedienceviolence perhaps.
And , it could be, yeah, your worstkind of hunger gains type scenario.
It could be that, or itcould be radical abundance.
We could get to the point where we'veautomated things so efficiently that
the, that we could all have, andI be it, by all I mean everybody
on the planet have what they need.
(28:54):
To live.
We could have done that with theamount of money that was spent
on Covid, that , the world spentaround a $19 trillion, I believe, in
supporting the status quo during covid.
Now some sort of cigarette packetmathematics here, $19 trillion would
allow you to provide every singlehuman being on the planet with food.
(29:18):
Water, shelter, high quality education,high quality healthcare for life.
Now, imagine what the worldwould be like if you did that.
If everyone has everything that theyneed, people, that are getting their
knickers in a twist of immigration.
(29:41):
It's like, do you mean all these, thethings that we, that we seem to fight
about and get upset about and everythingelse would disappear, wouldn't they?
To a great extent.
I'm sure someone would be upsetabout something, maybe a football
match or something, but not the kindof things that we're seeing now.
And these are choices that we makeand it's like I think we are at this.
(30:01):
Just amazing time.
, we look, we are in spittingdistance of going, okay.
, this is what our G seven or whatevernumber they're calling it at the
moment should be talking aboutsaying, let's look at, look, we've
got this amazing technology globally.
We, we've arrived here.
This is, we should all congratulateourselves for getting to
this point , in the world.
We don't actually have to doall the kind of stuff that,
(30:22):
that we had to do to get here.
How can we now redesign society radically?
Be through abundance so that,that we can have a, what people
were talking about during covid, agenuine people and planet recovery.
It is possible, but I thinkthat back to the sort of
education and so on, it's like.
(30:46):
It, we know that, people alwayssay, what are the jobs of the future?
What are the jobs of the future?
But , we know they're theones that machines can't do.
Therefore, we know there are, withthe capacities that I just talked
about, the problem, , the fly in theointment, as I said, is that, but
how are they gonna, we're gonna needthose people doing those jobs, but
are they all gonna be on minimum wage?
It's a bit like social care workers.
(31:07):
The people that look after the elderly.
These are classified as unskilled labor.
I just don't see how is that unskilledlabor be working in a care home.
Caring for the elderly is not unskilled.
And yet the reason why it's classifiedlike that is because of private
equity owning all the care homes andtrying to do, do you know what I mean?
(31:29):
Again, I'm not, I'm really nottrying to make this political.
It's the sort of nature of thiskind of late stage capitalism
that we're in at the moment.
And I'm not sayingcapitalism is a bad thing.
I'm just saying this version is perhapsnot optimal for a happy society.
You know what I mean?
So I think that, I think we.
We are on the cusp of being able to makeradical transformations, but we have to
(31:51):
have joined up thinking, it was like,it was nice to have been invited onto Sky
News and talk to Beth Rigby after the UKgovernment made this announcement about
the AI action plan and everything else.
Fantastic.
Great.
I'm down for it, but there's no joinedup thinking between the sort of different
aspects of society, including education.
With work and so on.
(32:12):
And
yes, AI automation, it's all supernew, but it's not really, we've
had these conversations before.
we had the conversations when we shutdown manufacturing, when we shut down
mining and all those kind of things.
All these things.
Maybe they should have been,maybe that was a good idea.
But we didn't plan for that.
(32:33):
And it doesn't seem to me that.
Globally, actually, I'm not blamingone particular government or the other.
There is that sort of sense of going,okay, we could go here, we could do
this, but we then have to, we have to doeverything structurally to get us there,
The big worry I would there'sa quote by Alexander Soni,
(32:54):
well fed horses don't rampage.
And I always think that it'snot well fed, only nourishment,
but actually purpose, and thatwould be the big kind of concern.
We won't go down
Yeah.
But, but I mean, I justhave a quick on on that one.
I mean, I, I absolutely Right.
I mean, struggle, stimulus,all that kind of business.
I mean, of course.
I mean, I, I don't think I'm suggestingcommunism or any of those kind of
things that kind of like, , but I think
(33:17):
at the moment we are programmed from avery young age as profit, as purpose.
Economic success as purpose.
, that's make believe.
That's just a construct.
It's, the purpose , of ateacher or a nurse or the sort of
human things is to nurture eachother to be able to go further.
(33:37):
Maybe our destiny is in the stars.
Maybe going to Mars or maybe it is,but it is, it is it for all of us.
You know what I mean?
I, I, I think, I don't thinkwe lose purpose just by
having what we need to live.
Absolutely.
man.
And one of the most beautifuldefinitions I think of education
is the root of the word,Educe, which means to draw out.
(34:00):
And I always thinkabout that to draw out.
Your unique abilities to draw, your uniquereason why you're on this planet, you
like you individually, and , I thinkthat's at the heart of all the work
you do and what this podcast is about.
I'm gonna ask Graham where peoplecan find you because you, I mentioned
your prolific writer, et cetera.
Where's the best place for people to
(34:21):
probably best thing to go to graham brownmartin.com and that should take you to
different places, and if it doesn't,there's also a contact thing on there.
You can just hit me up and Ialways like getting emails and
messages, so I'll always reply.
Brilliant.
Well, it was an absolutepleasure talking to you.
As I said, went way over and we,and by the way, we did 20 minutes
off air before we even started,but it's an absolute pleasure.
(34:42):
Thank you so much.
It was Pleasure was mine.
Thanks, William Gray and BrownMartin, thank you for joining us.
Take care.
Bye bye.
Thanks for joining us on Inside Learning.
Inside Learning is brought to you by theLearn of eight Center in Trinity College.
Dublin.
Learn of eight is funded byEnterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland.
Visit learn of eight center.org to findout more about our research on the science
(35:03):
of learning and the future of work.
The Inside Learning Podcast is broughtto you by the Learnovate Center.
(00:04):
Learnovate research explores the powerof learning to unlock human potential.
Find out more about learnovate researchon the science of learning and the
future of work at learnovatecenter.org.
Today's guest takes us on ajourney in search of innovation
in the way we learn and teach.
His book asks the most vitalquestions about the purpose of
(00:24):
education and the true role oftechnology in its transformation.
It captures a broad canvas of opinions formany of the world's foremost thinkers and
practitioners from the world of education,technology, and design, including the late
Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, SUTA Mitra,Andreas Schlicker, and many, many others.
(00:45):
The book is now 10 years old, and Ithought we'd share the thoughts of
a pioneer in learning innovation,neurodiversity and regenerative economy.
We welcome the authorof Learning Reimagined.
Now revisited a decadelater, Graham Brown.
Martin, welcome to the show.
Oh, thank you very much.
, what an auspicious introduction.
(01:06):
I do appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
We were talking for like 20 minutesand we went down so many rabbit
holes, like we better press recordat this stage, I went down rabbit
holes before I even joined you.
I was preparing all day.
Went down countless YouTube videos,the 30 short videos that you have on
Vimeo that are part of the book as well.
(01:26):
And then you're a prolific author onMedium and many other outlets as well.
I thought would give a little bitbackground of that thing I mentioned
the Pioneer because you've been doingthis for decades at this stage , and
across today's show, I'd love to share.
What you first worked on and what youwere pioneering, and then how much has
(01:47):
changed and how little has changed.
I thought that'd be agood way to set us up.
Gosh, I don't know howfar you want to go back.
Really.
I think it's interesting forme to remember that , I started
working on mainframe computerswhich I dunno how many of your
listeners will know mainframes.
These were enormous computers that were,take up whole, I mean like large rooms.
(02:07):
So my first proper job wasat the Open University working
on a big mainframe computer.
Which was like the size of a bus really.
With these big dis packs, the size ofAmerican washing machines, which you'd
put your hand in and twist this thingin a 10 megabytes, which was huge.
Would come outta this.
Of course, this has got lesspower than a feature phone.
(02:28):
I mean, not even your smartphone,I mean the old Noia feature phone.
So that's when this journey started.
And that actually it wasfrom that, that got me into.
Computing for education.
And I suppose initial ed tech with a,a scheme in the eighties called the
Micros in School scheme, which wasabout I think the UK government at
that time saw this, if you like, thethird industrial revolution coming
(02:52):
along , where desktop computers and soon, and how the future would be, or part
of the future would be programming comprogramming computers and using computers.
And so they, they had this.
This program to put computersinto schools along , with
educational software.
And I started writing educationalsoftware on some of those very early
micro computers in the eighties and,that's how I got to know a company
(03:17):
in Oxford called Research Machines.
I mean, there were the three companiesthat were supported by the government
at that point were in this scheme wereresearch machines or rm ACORN with
the BBC Micro and Sinclair with theSpectrum and all that kind of stuff.
So we were writing softwarefor those kinds of things.
And that was really interestingbecause, in one sense.
(03:39):
I think the UK government got it right.
Which was, , it's a generatorgeneration of people who were
ready for that third prepared forthat third industrial revolution.
And actually, if you then see the effectsof that, you roll that into the nineties.
I., the uk would you believewas probably the leading
country in video game design.
(04:00):
These sort of old games that we used toplay on our BBC like elite and so on.
This software engineeringcame out of the uk.
I mean that, that soon passedas we moved into this century.
But it was interesting because.
As things developed as we moved intothe third industrial revolution a
lot of lobbying that went on withgovernment was really from very large
corporations that, that weren't, thatweren't based in Europe, that were, you
(04:23):
know, mainly US corporations that wereadvising government, I mean, here and,
and other places, and saying, well,actually, you don't really need to know
how to com program the computer so much.
Now you need to, to learn howto use office applications.
And, and those kinds of things.
And you know, and, and by and largethat was probably right, because
actually not everyone's gonnabe a computer programmer, right?
(04:43):
We need to be able to usecomputers and, and, and so on.
But that was that sort oftransition that that happened.
And then there was a sort of resurgenceof this education and computers
and schools and everything else.
It's then started again.
I mean, in this century, I mean, just,just, I, I suppose probably the last,
over the last 10 years, this idea ofbeing makers rather than consumers.
(05:07):
technology has been a big part of that.
So I've still seen thesecycles go round and round.
I jumped out of educational computing'cause I was inspired by a gentleman
called Seymour Papper who was oneof the revered learning theorists
and best known for the learningtheory of our constructionism.
Which is different from Instructionism.
So the sort of education that we havein schools today might be termed as
(05:30):
instructionism, which is I'll tellyou how to do something and you do
it, and I'll tell you whether you'vedone it right and they'll test you.
And that kind of stuff is broadcast.
Medium PEPPER had a differentidea, which was that, that,
that we would use computers.
So in, in that otherinstruction is ideas, is idea.
Okay, well if education isinstruction, then we'll use
computers to do it more efficiently.
(05:51):
Whereas he thought, actually no.
We could use computers todo something different.
We could use computers as atool of inquiry and creativity.
And project-based learning and so forth.
So a lot of those ideascame from Sumo Papa.
I'm sure we'll come back tothat later in this conversation.
'cause I think it's relevant to thetransition that we're now making as
we go from the, we're in the fourthindustrial revolution, aren't we?
(06:11):
And how we then move into the fifth.
But I should point out thatI took , a sort of a detour.
On the way to this bit was that , inthe work that I'd been doing in the
late eighties and early ninetiesaround what we used to call multimedia
and CD rom and interactive CDROM and all those kind of things.
I had a company, I. Then Istarted when I was about 21.
(06:33):
That developed a lot of thevery early technology around
audio and video compression.
A lot of the things we take forgranted now on our phones and all
that kind of business, we stillhave patents for that and so on.
But what I found was that was actually,although I was imagining it, that
technology to be used in education, likeencyclopedia with videos and all that kind
of stuff, which of course did happen.
(06:55):
I got more traction in the musicindustry and the feature film
industry and the video game industry.
So for the nineties was really prettymuch me involved in the music industry
and just disrupting it a little bit andcreating record labels and so forth.
And here we are.
That work you did, you then haveseen it pay dividends . I mentioned
the 30 videos on Vimeo as well.
(07:16):
I'll link to those in the show notes, butI wanted to jump on that thing, that idea
of instructionism versus constructionism
yes.
Yeah.
, I mean, the different learningtheories and different
approaches to, to, tolearning and education.
And I don't think it'snecessarily, either or.
It's having a balance, but , becauseof the way that we have to
some extent industrialized oureducation systems we've tended
(07:39):
to lean towards instructionism.
Because actually, if you look at theway the assessment system works, we
the assessment system hasn't reallychanged in, in, in, in a very long time.
Has it really?
, if we look at what our children are doingat school, it's probably pretty much the
same thing as we were doing at school.
I'm reminded of , a time when my whenone of my teenage daughters, when they
(07:59):
were a child, said to my mother, my latemother, when she was doing a project
, at school, she says, Nana, , what wasschool like when you were at school?
And she said, probably the same as you.
And this was interesting 'cause she,because actually absolutely right.
Really it was very much aboutthe inculcation of facts
(08:21):
and procedures and then.
The test, which makes sure thatI've been able to, remember and
absorb those facts and proceduresfor long enough to pass a test.
And also that would be a performancemetric for the teacher to see how
good they were at inculcating thosefacts and procedures and that kind
of broadcast teacher at the front.
(08:43):
Type mode , is a form of instructionismand it goes back actually to the church
and things like that when we had one,only one copy of a Bible and everyone
would then make their own copy byreciting it and writing it down and so on.
So , that's where that came from.
This kind of broad cast thing andinstructionism and that's how we test.
And so because we test that way, thingshaven't changed in all this time.
(09:05):
We have this tyranny of measurement.
And this goes back to sort of industrialprocesses, and we can trace this back to
like the original management consultant,if you like, Frederick Taylor who,
got his measuring stick out , andtransformed craft production into mass
production, industrialization, thiswas the first industrial revolution
(09:28):
and second industrial revolution.
I mean, and, and I say that in asort of sneering way, but actually.
In many ways.
It created a lot of progress.
, the fact of, , we look around ourhome and our things , and the sort
of mass manufacturing and so forth.
I mean, , it has improvedpeople's lives in a great deal.
That idea of measuring things andbeing able to create processes.
(09:53):
And rules , and data to drive thoseprocesses to improve manufacturing.
And we had a education systemdesigned to support that.
And it got us to here.
I think
Where we're going is it's probablynot gonna get as much further unless
we make some course corrections.
This is where I like the Venn diagramsof all your experiences and, , the
(10:16):
innovation part because , I havethe book there, the Winslow Taylor.
There's a book called The One BestWay Frederick Winslow Taylor.
And so it's the story of him andhow he created the One Best Way.
And I thought, as I said, I did a lot ofresearch on you and listened to podcasts
and YouTube videos, et cetera, and
what I like about what yourmessage is that you can't
just fix one part of the system.
(10:37):
So there's the education systemand the idea that you've created
almost everybody the same.
And because the metrics are the sameand deviation is not often rewarded.
Yes.
I had this experience with my sonrecently, so , he was kind of.
I want to go off the beaten track a littlebit with my essays and stuff like that.
(10:57):
And , we're lucky enough tobe able to give him grinds.
So we give him grinds and then he getsrewarded by some teachers for actually
going off the beaten track and given adifferent answer from everybody else.
So sometimes at works, but then I thoughtfast forward to him being in a consultancy
or working for an organization.
And people don't really wantpeople to go off the beaten track.
(11:20):
They want people to execute and exploitthe current advantage, not find a new one.
In most organizations, yes, that'swhat most organizations need.
So that's the second part.
And then there's what'srewarded in society.
So one of the things, Ithink the way you put it was.
That the highly valued jobs,are not highly valuable.
(11:40):
So being a nurse, being aneducator, are highly valued,
yet they're not highly valuable.
You don't get paid a lotfor in those jobs, and that,
that system needs to change.
It's systemic.
The entire change is systemic.
I think you've summarized alot of my thinking actually.
Which is enormously useful.
I'm glad that, that's recorded.
'cause I might use that.
(12:01):
But no, that's absolutely right.
A lot of people have come to meand sort of said, okay, look, if we
fix education, we can fix society.
And, it's a wonderful notionand I wish it was true.
But I don't think that'show it works, unfortunately.
And I think that thesethings are interlocking.
Smarter people than mehave written about this.
You could go back to Marksactually, if you wanted to.
The sort of super structure and base.
And I'm not doing this from akind of a socialist perspective
(12:23):
or anything like that.
It's just how societies work.
We have a base, which is the economy,and then the superstructures, which
support that, whether it's mass media,religion education , and so forth.
And they maintain the base.
, and the thing is, if you'vebenefited from the status quo, the
base being a status quo, you'vegot no motivation to change it.
(12:44):
And so things get locked in there.
But over time, of course,if those things shift.
Those structures will come , tostabilize the status quo.
We see that all the time as soon as apolitical leader or even a business leader
, or anybody is threatening the status quo.
I. You'll find a lot of organizationsand structures and everything else
(13:04):
coming around to, to defend it.
Sometimes for good reasons,sometimes perhaps not.
Sometimes it's maintainingself-interest and so forth.
And it's interesting that youmentioned your son who will.
Go down his own direction, o ofpassions of interest and so on.
And I think this is really interesting andalso an indicator for the future because
(13:26):
we've lived in an education system ina society, and when you do a test and
, examination, there's one right answer.
Do you know what I mean?
Now.
Okay.
Two plus two is four.
Yes, I get it.
But we're not talking about that, are we?
We we're talking aboutinterpretations of things.
We're talking about how do werespond to challenges, how to respond
to problems and, and, and so on.
(13:47):
And actually, if we look at natureand biodiversity, the reason why there
is such biodiversity is so that ifthere is a, an environmental shock.
There's enough difference between thewith, you know, the different sort of,
you know, with, let's say it's flora andfauna to respond to that in some way.
Okay.
(14:07):
So it's not, they're not allresponding in the same way.
, if we had a monoculture, if we didn'thave diversity , in the natural world
and then there was a threat, then thechances are that it wouldn't survive.
Now the same is true of businessesand organizations and corporations.
I mind you to think of, say andI'm not picking any one particular
one, but I'm gonna say Blackberry.
(14:28):
Now, when Blackberry, of course,they were hyper successful, weren't
they right at the beginning andthen all of a sudden they weren't.
And if you looked at the organizationwhen it collapsed it, everyone
in the board was of, was from anaccounting and finance background.
And I don't have a problemwith accountants and financing.
What I'm saying is that they allcame from the same sort of background.
They weren't.
They weren't particularlydiverse in their thinking.
(14:50):
And of course they were then adapted,you know, it's like groupthink.
This sort, the sort of,i i idea groupthink.
So when a threat came from outside,and in this case it was the iPhone
and touchscreens and all that kindastuff, they didn't know how to respond.
They just, okay, we'vegot a real keyboard.
We, there's no way they could beat us.
the rest is history, right?
And it collapsed.
And that's because therewasn't enough diversity and
(15:12):
different ways of approaching achallenge in order to respond.
They were, it was a monocultureand I think that's problematic.
So if we have an education systemwhich outputs a monoculture , or we
have society or organizations thatdon't have that sort of diversity in
them, then I think innovation stalls.
(15:34):
, and I suppose quite timely actually,given the kind of things that are
happening in the world right now.
But I've got a record and I continueto go on record and saying is
that diversity drives innovation.
So I think that back to your topoint with your son, I think,
, congratulations to you in supportinghis passion and his ability because
he's directing his own learning.
(15:55):
I think that's a good thing, and I thinkthere's not enough opportunities within
our existing education systems to do that.
And I say that to someone who wasexpelled from school at 15 because
that was a self-directed learner.
I think I did most of my learning whenI was playing hooky and going into
London and spending time in the sciencemuseum and stealing books from foils.
But I genuinely believe that'swhy you have the success you've
(16:19):
had in a different field.
And , I told my son this, I waslike, going, look, if at the very
least you treat school as a way thatanything in life works is, which
is you have to be disciplined to.
Complete what you say you willcomplete by a certain date.
I said that is in everysingle thing sport.
That's in music, that's in everything.
If you wanted to go those ways,at the very least, learn that
(16:41):
as a template to do things.
That's, but then I told 'em the story.
I dunno if you noticed the story.
Le Petti, chaperone Rouge is.
The little Red Hat Riding Hood.
And the story is really don'tdeviate from the path because it's
dangerous, especially for little girls.
That's what the story isactually to do, to warn children.
And a lot of those, a lot of those nurseryrhymes were, or those children's stories
(17:04):
were to warn children from deviation.
And I thought about that.
And then to your point about Blackberry.
, in my workshops, I tell the storyof the Irish Potato famine that we
were reliant on one type of potato.
That was one of the big problems.
While there's like 150 species,we had won the Lumper Potato.
And that businesses not only relyon only certain types of people that
(17:29):
succeed within, inside the organization,but they actively, and inactively
actually often they don't know.
They, ostracize.
Different thinkers or different thinkersleave because they don't feel welcome or
they're actually in some cases gaslit or
a, it is like an innovation immune system.
Yeah.
And, and, and I, and I get it to apoint, but to your point with the
(17:51):
speed of change of innovation todayand the cycles of change so quick that
you actually don't have time to adapt.
So there's another element in nature,which is pre adaptation where there's
some DNA in a species that's readyin case the environment changes.
And that's the way I see.
Neurodivergence different thinkerswithin inside an organization.
(18:13):
So the organization almost needs to,if they want to call it, tolerate
them for the change in the systemand then they come into their
I think the neurodivergencething is interesting.
I'm myself neurodivergent.
I'm autistic with a DHD but a latediagnosis, I only got a formal
diagnosis five years ago, so I'vestill been leaning into that and
understanding more about it and so on.
(18:33):
But, and then looking at mylife in the sort of rear view
mirror and just like, oh, okay.
Oh, now I get what was going onthere and all that kind of business.
Now the thing about Neurodivergenceis it's , not a recent phenomenon.
I mean, neurodivergent people are humans.
Humans have always been neurodivergentand to a, to a greater or lesser degree.
And, but we have this arbitrary normal,which came out of industrialization.
(18:56):
The arbitrary normal, the thingthat we call neuro typic and
everything else is the result ofthe first industrial revolution.
, what you're doing is you're taking agroup of people, many, many of us
who were used to being outside,being hunter gatherers, if you wanna
go back far enough and so forth.
But of course, the education act thatcame into power in the UK was about taking
(19:17):
these unruly people from the countryside,from the agricultural world, from of
cottage industries and so forth, andthen putting them through a process.
Of training them to preparethem for the first and the
second industrial revolution.
And that required a certain level ofconsistency in the output of those, of
(19:38):
those schools and colleges and so on.
And also, there were practical issues.
We in those days, noteveryone had access to a library.
We didn't actually have, pocketcalculators and all that kind of stuff.
So mental arithmetic andbeing able to remember.
Large parts of books and all thatwas very valuable at that point,
particularly when, the Britishhad its empire and all that kind
of stuff , and so it just sort ofreplicated that , whole thing out there.
(20:01):
But those education systems,certainly the education systems of
the 20th century, what it valuedwas efficiency and consistency.
What you wanted was a workforce,whether it was in the shops, in
the offices or the factory ever,that, that would generally sit
still for up to eight hours a day.
Not ask too many questions, performthe role, often repetitive tasks,
(20:25):
because remember by that time, FrederickTaylor and then McKinsey and all
these different, consultancies havehad their way in terms of creating
processes and rules and data-drivenand all that kind of business.
And so what we really hadwas human robots and not
everybody was good at that.
Do you what I mean?
And so this is where we got the ideaof neurodivergence and I'm talking
(20:48):
about genetic neurodivergence here.
I'm not talking about acquiredneurodivergence like MPD or
PTSD , or those kind of things,which is a consequence of
environmental or chemical trauma.
I'm just talking about your sortof autism and A DHD and dyslexia
and all these kind things.
These are all valuable traits.
Incredibly valuable traits.
If you look back at history and you lookback at, at how we survived as a species
(21:08):
and how we fed ourselves and so on.
These were incredibly valuable traits,but in a situation where we want
to put you on the sort of a conveyorbelt so that the output would be a,
consistent and efficient workforce,neurodivergent people to a greater risk
degree would fall out of that system.
You know what I mean?
(21:29):
And I was one of those people.
And there are others.
So this idea then , as we go througha sort of a shift in society, a
shift in the world, , and I thinkwhy it's opposite to this conversation
is 'cause we are in this fourthindustrial revolution at the moment.
And we're still seeing it.
I think a lot of people have got almostlike daily shock by the kind of amazing
(21:50):
things and also the frightening things.
It's the AI and robots and so on can do.
, but this is a logicalconclusion of industrialization.
This is what happens, you know?
And I think it's a good thing.
I think we should accelerate it if we can.
No, we can do it safely.
It's, which is the idea that if wedefine everything by a detailed job
description, if we have processes andrules and then data and, it's done
(22:14):
by that, then we can automate it.
Which means that by the end of thefourth industrial revolution, and we're
just at the beginning of it now, butit's probably got another 10 years to
go we would've been able to automateeverything that's governed by repetitive
tasks, process rules and data-drivenstuff, and all that kind of business.
And it's like that stuff will go.
(22:34):
And the interesting thing about thisis that in the past, if we look
at the sort of the second and thirdindustrial revolutions, we saw
technological unemployment, but itwas tended to be blue collar workers.
The working classes and so forth andrightly or wrongly, and I think wrongly,
we didn't pay enough attention to that.
That's why we ended up getting whatguy standing from the London School of
Economics called the Precariat, whereyou moved, , manufacturing, say , from
(22:59):
different parts of the country.
To where it was cheap.
'cause profit use, profit,incentive and everything else.
And that's absolutely fine.
You move the jobs but then you haveto retrain, you have to kind of.
Retrain people, lifelonglearning, all that kinda stuff.
But that, that didn't happen.
Of course, it's successivegovernments and it doesn't matter
which party we're talking about.
They all, they were all asbad as each other in a way.
(23:20):
And in different parts of theworld didn't pay any attention.
And so, you know, that ended up,I mean, we are seeing it now.
I mean, in, you know, last summer in, in,in, in the uk, in London, you know, riots
but people blaming, you know, there's,there's, suddenly there's, there's.
People have less money.
'cause apparently we've got moremillionaires and billionaires than
ever, but money's a finite resource.
So where do they thinkthat money came from?
(23:40):
It certainly didn't come from the poorpeople that you're burning in hotels.
Do you know what I mean?
But that's the way sort of society works.
But anyway, the point , is that weare moving through this in one sense,
amazing time in history where whatwe've called work is being automated.
So then we have to think, okay, well, butwe still have an education system that's
(24:00):
having that output and it's still going.
It's like this machine that we can't stop.
And we also have governments here,but everywhere who are still locked
into this economic thinking of thesecond really industrial revolution.
First and second, noteven really the third.
To be honest, which is we work thismany hours a day and we take this
(24:23):
salary and all that kinda stuff.
And it worked from the sortof 1950s and everything else.
Do you know what I mean?
Where everyone couldafford a house and so on.
But we're now what we're seeingis greater inequality because of
the, what I mentioned earlier.
So my point is.
What happens next?
What happens in the fifthindustrial revolution when all
these jobs have been automated?
Well, the jobs of the futures, I've oftensaid are the ones that machines can't do.
(24:47):
And the things that machines aren'tgood at are things like intuition,
empathy social interaction complexproblem solving, creativity, imagination.
And these things are uniquely human.
And these are the sort of things that wewere trying to eek out of, back to the
thing about your son going off on his ownpath being, we didn't want creativity
(25:09):
, on the factory production line.
We didn't want someone to go,oh, I wonder what the red wire
does, rather than the blue one.
We didn't really want creativeaccounting, but if we did, we
didn't want anyone to talk about it.
Do you know what I mean?
And all that kinda stuff.
I mean it very much like that.
But now of course when we look at thefuture of employment, it's like, well.
What we actually need is these peoplethat have these human capacities,
(25:34):
creative innovators, writers, artists,teachers, counselors, nurses, doctors.
It's not that they won't work with ai.
It is just that.
It's, I think the fifth industrialrevolution could be amazing.
I mean, this is a kind of, it'snot competing with machines, which
is what we're doing at the moment.
It's about actually collaboration withmachines, doing the, we are doing the
stuff that humans are really good at andmachines frankly would never be good at.
(25:57):
And the machines are mean, are verygood at things that, much better at
some things, we don't really like allthat process and data driven stuff.
Not really just, some people mightdo, but I'm talking about , on
mass, so it could be really good.
But the problem really isthis I think you had , a guest
on one of your shows which talksabout the economic singularity.
And I think it's economicsingularity , is a problem, is
(26:20):
a potential problem because ithas two kind of potential outputs.
The economic singularity is when the jobsthat have been replaced, the jobs that
are actually being be, that are availableto humans are not economically valued.
We don't pay.
And, what I mean?
There's a mix up.
What we've done is we've.
Industrialize things so muchand with AI and everything else.
(26:42):
And then the wealth as I was mentioningearlier, has been concentrated to
an ever smaller number of people.
We're hearing the term oligarchy beingthrown around a lot at the moment.
But it's a real thing, isn't it?
It's a real thing.
, that's not even a political point.
It's just this is what's happened.
It's like, 400 years of liberalism,which John Locker course was about.
Know, wrestling power away fromthe monarchy and giving it to the
(27:04):
people in the term of free markets.
It turned into his grave, wouldn't he?
We just go, oh my gosh, it's great.
New monarchies.
Do you know what I mean?
And it's like, okay, well what do we do?
Because it's like, I think we are holdingourselves back from an amazing future.
If we don't change the economic model andthe way that we value things, and there's
all kinds of different ways of doing this.
(27:25):
I mean, from wealth redistributionto different kinds of I, I
don't like the term universal basicincome because of the word basic.
'cause I think that's just nonsense.
I think it's like, but they're all, itis a choice about how we do these things.
But to your point that you'remaking about my point is that.
(27:46):
You could only, I'm talkingabout formal education.
I'm talking about, the schools anduniversities like that can only really
be transformed in response to an economicmodel, which is of course the kind of what
I call, what I tell the base, the sortof a, the status quo and everything else.
The problem is that we're in thiskind of stalemate situation where
there's a small number of people inthe world that have all the money.
(28:10):
And we've got these massiveinequalities and everything else.
And actually to get past this, youhave to redistribute that money.
So one kind of possibility of aneconomic singularity is a dystopian,
the precariat at internet scaleglobally, I mean, significant.
(28:31):
Global civil disobedienceviolence perhaps.
And , it could be, yeah, your worstkind of hunger gains type scenario.
It could be that, or itcould be radical abundance.
We could get to the point where we'veautomated things so efficiently that
the, that we could all have, andI be it, by all I mean everybody
on the planet have what they need.
(28:54):
To live.
We could have done that with theamount of money that was spent
on Covid, that , the world spentaround a $19 trillion, I believe, in
supporting the status quo during covid.
Now some sort of cigarette packetmathematics here, $19 trillion would
allow you to provide every singlehuman being on the planet with food.
(29:18):
Water, shelter, high quality education,high quality healthcare for life.
Now, imagine what the worldwould be like if you did that.
If everyone has everything that theyneed, people, that are getting their
knickers in a twist of immigration.
(29:41):
It's like, do you mean all these, thethings that we, that we seem to fight
about and get upset about and everythingelse would disappear, wouldn't they?
To a great extent.
I'm sure someone would be upsetabout something, maybe a football
match or something, but not the kindof things that we're seeing now.
And these are choices that we makeand it's like I think we are at this.
(30:01):
Just amazing time.
, we look, we are in spittingdistance of going, okay.
, this is what our G seven or whatevernumber they're calling it at the
moment should be talking aboutsaying, let's look at, look, we've
got this amazing technology globally.
We, we've arrived here.
This is, we should all congratulateourselves for getting to
this point , in the world.
We don't actually have to doall the kind of stuff that,
(30:22):
that we had to do to get here.
How can we now redesign society radically?
Be through abundance so that,that we can have a, what people
were talking about during covid, agenuine people and planet recovery.
It is possible, but I thinkthat back to the sort of
education and so on, it's like.
(30:46):
It, we know that, people alwayssay, what are the jobs of the future?
What are the jobs of the future?
But , we know they're theones that machines can't do.
Therefore, we know there are, withthe capacities that I just talked
about, the problem, , the fly in theointment, as I said, is that, but
how are they gonna, we're gonna needthose people doing those jobs, but
are they all gonna be on minimum wage?
It's a bit like social care workers.
(31:07):
The people that look after the elderly.
These are classified as unskilled labor.
I just don't see how is that unskilledlabor be working in a care home.
Caring for the elderly is not unskilled.
And yet the reason why it's classifiedlike that is because of private
equity owning all the care homes andtrying to do, do you know what I mean?
(31:29):
Again, I'm not, I'm really nottrying to make this political.
It's the sort of nature of thiskind of late stage capitalism
that we're in at the moment.
And I'm not sayingcapitalism is a bad thing.
I'm just saying this version is perhapsnot optimal for a happy society.
You know what I mean?
So I think that, I think we.
We are on the cusp of being able to makeradical transformations, but we have to
(31:51):
have joined up thinking, it was like,it was nice to have been invited onto Sky
News and talk to Beth Rigby after the UKgovernment made this announcement about
the AI action plan and everything else.
Fantastic.
Great.
I'm down for it, but there's no joinedup thinking between the sort of different
aspects of society, including education.
With work and so on.
(32:12):
And
yes, AI automation, it's all supernew, but it's not really, we've
had these conversations before.
we had the conversations when we shutdown manufacturing, when we shut down
mining and all those kind of things.
All these things.
Maybe they should have been,maybe that was a good idea.
But we didn't plan for that.
(32:33):
And it doesn't seem to me that.
Globally, actually, I'm not blamingone particular government or the other.
There is that sort of sense of going,okay, we could go here, we could do
this, but we then have to, we have to doeverything structurally to get us there,
The big worry I would there'sa quote by Alexander Soni,
(32:54):
well fed horses don't rampage.
And I always think that it'snot well fed, only nourishment,
but actually purpose, and thatwould be the big kind of concern.
We won't go down
Yeah.
But, but I mean, I justhave a quick on on that one.
I mean, I, I absolutely Right.
I mean, struggle, stimulus,all that kind of business.
I mean, of course.
I mean, I, I don't think I'm suggestingcommunism or any of those kind of
things that kind of like, , but I think
(33:17):
at the moment we are programmed from avery young age as profit, as purpose.
Economic success as purpose.
, that's make believe.
That's just a construct.
It's, the purpose , of ateacher or a nurse or the sort of
human things is to nurture eachother to be able to go further.
(33:37):
Maybe our destiny is in the stars.
Maybe going to Mars or maybe it is,but it is, it is it for all of us.
You know what I mean?
I, I, I think, I don't thinkwe lose purpose just by
having what we need to live.
Absolutely.
man.
And one of the most beautifuldefinitions I think of education
is the root of the word,Educe, which means to draw out.
(34:00):
And I always thinkabout that to draw out.
Your unique abilities to draw, your uniquereason why you're on this planet, you
like you individually, and , I thinkthat's at the heart of all the work
you do and what this podcast is about.
I'm gonna ask Graham where peoplecan find you because you, I mentioned
your prolific writer, et cetera.
Where's the best place for people to
(34:21):
probably best thing to go to graham brownmartin.com and that should take you to
different places, and if it doesn't,there's also a contact thing on there.
You can just hit me up and Ialways like getting emails and
messages, so I'll always reply.
Brilliant.
Well, it was an absolutepleasure talking to you.
As I said, went way over and we,and by the way, we did 20 minutes
off air before we even started,but it's an absolute pleasure.
(34:42):
Thank you so much.
It was Pleasure was mine.
Thanks, William Gray and BrownMartin, thank you for joining us.
Take care.
Bye bye.
Thanks for joining us on Inside Learning.
Inside Learning is brought to you by theLearn of eight Center in Trinity College.
Dublin.
Learn of eight is funded byEnterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland.
Visit learn of eight center.org to findout more about our research on the science
(35:03):
of learning and the future of work.
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