The Future of Education: Artificial Intelligence and Personalized Learning Revolutionizing the School System

All eyes are on the school system. Even in countries that are at the top of the Pisa ranking, criticism is mounting. Voices are being raised against putting age groups on the same level, ignoring individual differences. The school could not raise the standard of the students significantly.

Dozens of studies have tried to identify the best educational practices by comparing institutions according to the scale of a country but also between countries, whether in terms of learning method, recruitment and promotion of teachers, class size or access to IT tools, in taking care to minimize the impact of social professional and financial to neutralize the environment. of origin. The observation is incontrovertible: none of this matters.

Research has shown that hitting the jackpot by attending the best school in town has no bearing on the eventual academic and professional performance of the lucky winners, whether they are in Chicago, New York or China. In the end, children who fail a college selection test by a few points and do not go to the targeted elite school will have similar results to those who passed by a few points and were admitted with a precious sesame.

The amount of teaching has replaced teaching. Tutoring has been a method of education for the aristocracy for centuries. It involved exposing young children, individually and continuously, to an adult tutor, an expert in his field, who guided them but also engaged in intellectual conversations without ‘ try to get them to pass a predetermined exercise. Obviously, this extremely expensive method of teaching was reserved for an elite. By industrializing education, we created a system of mass production that improved the lot of most people individually, and the world as a whole, but we would have lost the artisanal process that shaped the lose the most beautiful minds.

A 2004 Harvard study found that self-taught students did twice as well on a standardized math test. This new desire for education is reflected in home education, which has exploded in the United States, from 1.5 million children to 2.3 million from 2019 to 2023, but again the model cannot be used on a large scale.

A virtual teacher

This is where next generation artificial intelligence comes in. Last week, in the middle of the left-wing war in San Francisco, a progressive wanted to criticize the education startup, Mentava, because it was funded by Garry Tan, the head of the famous incubator Y Combinator and Moderate Democrat. By doing this, she focused on this young company that was created in 2022, attracting hundreds of subscriptions at $500 per month.

What does Mentava do? It offers a virtual tutor for children, from 2 years of age, to teach them to read and count. The goal is strong, close to accelerating movements. “The acceleration of education means the acceleration of human success messenger RNA vaccine it came a year later? How many lives would have been saved if humanity had been cured of cancer a year earlier?, can we read on her website. Mentava is just one of the solutions available. The most famous name is Synthesis. Used by more than 10,000 children aged 7 to 11 for the more affordable amount of $29 per month, it is inspired by the principles of home education inspired by Ad Astra, the private school planned by Elon Musk opening in Texas through his foundation.

This personalization is not new. After all, MOOCs have become very popular among high school students, 70% of whom are bored in class in the United States. But the artificial intelligence of a generation changes everything, because it is able to accept its interlocutor, encourage them, encourage them, recommend this or that content, while human seizures his Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, the leader in these virtual courses, launched a virtual assistant, Khanmigo, last year. His partner? Open AI.

Robin Rivaton is the Managing Director of Stonal and a member of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Political Innovation (Fondapol).