The future of education - the education of the future
- Paweł Konzal
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
In an ever-changing world, one of the few constants is the question of the purpose and method of education. Education helps the next generation to understand themselves, the essence of humanity, and gives the new generations a chance to find their way in the so-called labor market. One of the important elements of the learning process is how to assess the state of knowledge and skills.
It is impossible to achieve long-term success without effort. The worst, however, is not failure resulting from indolence. Worse than laziness is putting effort into meaningless work. The system of evaluation - and therefore promotion - that is quietly being born in Polish schools may lead to just such a situation. Thousands of students will put a lot of effort into a low-value work.
The digitization of life and remote work has changed and is changing human relations, the way we spend our leisure time, interact with the environment and perceive ourselves and the world. Artificial intelligence is affecting the labor market on a micro (the way we work) and macro (downsizing) scale. Some of these changes are negative, some are positive, some are neutral. However, all of them affect the educational process - teachers, parents and students do not live in a vacuum, after all. Often, however, the impact is diffuse. Changes “happen” instead of being consciously and deliberately planned by us as a result of in-depth reflection.
An important part of education is the process of verifying the state of knowledge and skills. This verification continues throughout the school year, with additional feedback points at the end of elementary and high school. One way to test knowledge is the essay. An essay on a given topic, on the one hand, formats the way you express yourself in writing, and on the other, allows you to show the extent of your knowledge and creativity almost without limits.
2024 was the first year when students and pupils around the world started using newly available tools (such as ChatGPT) to write essays. At the same time, many professors and teachers are using the tool to evaluate student papers. To simplify, ChatGPT evaluates a paper written by... ChatGPT. As an intelligent species, it didn't take us long to come to the conclusion that such an assessment serves no purpose, at least when it comes to checking the level of students' knowledge.
The reaction, therefore, is to increasingly abandon the assignment of essays as a form of self-work. Written forms such as the essay are increasingly being replaced by tests that reduce multidimensional knowledge to a binary “Yes/No.” This does a disservice to a generation that from the first days of adulthood will be competing with artificial intelligence - better and more proficient at answering a two-dimensional question.
In addition, in Poland, this is compounded by the abandonment of so-called homework as such, which is another factor besides the growing popularity of private education (in Warsaw alone, one in five students no longer goes to state school) that will increase the stratification of opportunities for different social classes.
Oral expression [questioning of student by teacher], time-consuming and often stressful for students, is a form that gives the teacher an opportunity to thoroughly test what knowledge a student has. Not ChatGPT, not parents, not the Internet - but the student. In addition to checking the state of knowledge, it also promotes the acquisition of the skill of constructing a statement as in an essay (introduction, development, summary), but in a dynamic form - live. This skill is and will be crucial in a world where we will coexist with artificial intelligence.
Paid work will be an increasingly smaller percentage of our activity. Interactions with other people will remain crucial to life satisfaction, mental health and levels of contentment, if not happiness. In an era of digitization of life and communication taking increasingly textual form, the ability to speak and dialogue is gaining importance. So it should be part of the education process - on the teaching side, as well as testing knowledge through oral expression. Let's not forget that our first and primary form of communication was and is a conversation.
