february 4/5 2017 Can Silicon Valley really hack education? Hannah Kuchler reports The making of Rodrigo Duterte Why Simon Kuper is boycotting Trump’s America Winter warmers: Honey & Co’s spices Subscribe to the FT HOME WORLD US COMPANIES MARKETS OPINION WORK & CAREERS LIFE & ARTS Sign In Subscribe FT Magazine Add to myFT Read next Tim Hayward Inside Silicon Valley’s classrooms of the future Veggie Pret, London: green without Technology is transforming education, with personalised learning at envy the heart of the curriculum. Is this the future? Pupils at the AltSchool in San Francisco's start-up district © Carlos Chavarría 19 Save FEBRUARY 2, 2017 by: Hannah Kuchler In chalets scattered across the snow in California’s ski country, a school of the future is taking shape. Warm inside a classroom, teenage twins Laurel and Bryce Dettering are part of a Silicon Valley experiment to teach students to outperform machines. Latest in FT Magazine Surrounded by industrial tools, Bryce is Sample the FT’s top laying out green 3D-printed propellers, which stories for a week Tim Hayward will form part of a floating pontoon. The 15- You select the topic, we deliver the Veggie Pret, London: green without news. year-old is struggling to finish a term-long envy challenge to craft a vehicle that could test Select topic water quality remotely. Robert Shrimsley Enter email address School quiz nights: it’s the taking So far, the task has involved coding, part… Sign up manufacturing and a visit to a Nasa By signing up you confirm that you have read contractor who builds under-ice rovers. “I Gillian Tett and agree to the terms and conditions, cookie The drugs that kill more than pain policy and privacy policy. suck at waterproofing. I managed to waterproof one side, did a test of it, it proved waterproof. I made sure the other side was Laura Marling on songwriting, waterproof, put both sides on and both of them leaked!” he laughs. breakdown and class privilege Laurel, already adept in robotics, chose a different kind of project, aimed at developing The Inventory the empathy that robots lack: living on a reservation with three elderly women from A Q&A with actor Josette Simon the Navajo tribe. “The experience was just, honestly, it was really . .” she trails out, her navy nails fiddling with her dark-blonde hair. “They didn’t have running water, didn’t have electricity, they had 54 sheep and their only source of income was weaving rugs from wool.” The Detterings have embraced personalised education, a new movement that wants to tear up the traditional classroom to allow students to learn at their own pace and follow their passions with the help of technology. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his wife Priscilla are leading the push to create an education as individual as each child, aiming to expand the experiments beyond the rarefied confines of Silicon Valley. Bryce Dettering, 15, alongside a milling machine at the Tahoe Expedition Academy in Kings Beach, California, where he is a pupil © Carlos Chavarría Tahoe Expedition Academy uses software developed by Facebook and Summit Public Schools, a free charter chain 200 miles south in the Bay Area. Every morning, Laurel and Bryce log on to their “personalised learning platform”, which looks like a website, and progress through a “playlist” of reading material, videos and tests. They decide which modules to learn next based on what they enjoy or have yet to master. By focusing on what they need and want to learn, rather than following a class-wide curriculum, the platform frees up time for additional projects that encourage taking risks and solving problems. Having disrupted the world, the tech community now wants to prepare children for their new place in it. Leading venture capitalist Marc Andreessen predicts a future with two types of job: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told what to do by computers. Silicon Valley wants to equip young people to rule the machines by focusing on what makes them individuals. But how far can this reinvention of learning be extended from the wealthy environs of northern California to the broader US education system, where some state schools struggle to provide up-to-date textbooks, let alone personalised, digital tutoring? The Detterings’ parents signed up for an alternative education after Laurel became frustrated at her private girls’ school in San Francisco. She was ahead of her peers and not content with drawing on her shoes — which is what her mother had done when she was bored in class. “I was really good at looking like I was listening and dreaming in my head,” Sue Dettering smiles. “This generation does not tolerate that very well.” Tahoe Expedition Academy combines academic teaching with what it calls “constructive adversity” — adventures that push kids to the edge to build character. Like an endless educational gap year, each high-school senior has spent 130 days away in the past three years. One group went to Greece to work with Syrian refugees, while a class of 13-year-olds drove and kayaked to the Mexican border to interview border patrols and immigrants and see how Donald Trump’s wall could shape the region. Tahoe pupil Laurel Dettering; part of Bryce Dettering’s pontoon, with a 3D-printed propeller © Carlos Chavarría Bryce’s blueprint for his pontoon © Carlos Chavarría “Rote learning is done — computers can do that,” says Sue Dettering. “The kids are going to have to have the interpersonal skills to work in groups, to communicate well, be creative, arrive at an answer in many different ways.” Their father Bill, who runs a tech company, says other parents think they are brave — but believes this new education is sensible. “It really is the human-oriented jobs that are going to be the opportunity.” Related article The uncertain future facing the next generation of workers is partly Silicon Interested in AI? Help Valley’s fault. Tech companies have stripped shape our coverage out jobs as they transform industries, from What do you want to know about retail to media to cars. Artificial intelligence automation and its impact on jobs? will accelerate the shift, with Accenture predicting that AI will increase labour productivity by up to 40 per cent by 2035, when Bryce and Laurel turn 33. Fewer workers will be needed for the jobs we have now, so kids must be prepared for the jobs we cannot imagine. Silicon Valley is, as ever, optimistic. It wants to move on from a 19th-century, artisanal model of education — where knowledge resides with each classroom teacher — to a 21st-century personalised experience that technology can replicate on a global scale. The new model focuses on skills, not knowledge you can Google, and social abilities that will be needed, whatever the workplace. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan © Reuters When Zuckerberg and Chan’s daughter Max was born in 2015, they announced they would donate 99 per cent of their Facebook shares, worth $45bn at the time, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Penning an open letter to their firstborn, they focused on the prospects for personalised education. “You’ll advance quickly in subjects that interest you most, and get as much help as you need in your most challenging areas. You’ll explore topics that aren’t even offered in schools today. Your teachers will also have better tools and data to help you achieve your goals,” they wrote. More than a year later, Zuckerberg is posting Max’s toddling attempts on Facebook to his 85 million followers, and CZI is looking to make education investments. Personalised education is not new: in 1926, Sidney Pressey created a “teaching machine”, where students could read material and complete multiple-choice tests at their own pace, pulling down levers and receiving sweets for correct responses. The personalised education movement combines a testing machine for the big-data age with a key idea taken from Maria Montessori, who developed her approach more than a century ago: that each child should drive their own learning. Silicon Valley hopes new technology will help personalisation finally succeed at scale. Today’s teaching machines look like data dashboards, which teachers monitor as each child works through tasks and tests. This instant data speeds up teachers’ decisions — they don’t have to wait until a child hands in homework or for the results of an end-of-term test. In class, they can spot who needs help and assemble impromptu tutoring groups, while others steam ahead, taking on honours units in subjects they love. A moving line on the student’s dashboard shows the term ticking away, prompting them to stay on top of units where they are slower. Final tests are only taken when a child is ready. The problem Silicon Valley is trying to solve can be summed up by a 1984 study by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom. Cited by every personalised-education advocate including Zuckerberg, it found students who received one-on-one attention performed better than 98 per cent of their peers. The challenge is to achieve the benefits of that one-on-one tutoring in a class of 30 or more. An external view of the +Impact School at Tahoe Expedition Academy, Truckee, California © Carlos Chavarría Personalisation is so popular in the Bay Area that parents can pick their experiment: public, private or funded by non-profits. The Tahoe Expedition Academy is a private school, charging up to $17,000 a year, with a focus on the outdoors. The AltSchool combines a start-up filled with engineers and product managers, funded by CZI and venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, with a chain of private “lab schools”, where parents pay about $27,000 a year.