Read the full transcript of Episode 93 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, featuring a conversation with host Debra P. Wilson and guest Carl Hendrick, identifying a clear dividing line between the educators who approach AI as “this is the end of the world,” and those who see potential for its use. Coming from a background in the science of learning, Carl has a unique perspective on what he thinks the exciting opportunities are to advance our understanding of learning in new ways, and where he believes a more traditional, human-centered approach remains invaluable.
Debra Wilson: Carl Hendrick is an internationally recognized expert in the science of learning and instructional design. He is a professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam and leads research projects that bridge cognitive science, educational psychology, and classroom practice. He is a member of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education Science of Learning editorial board and works with government education departments and large school networks internationally to support evidence-informed teaching, curriculum development, and teacher professional learning.
He began his career in the classroom as an English teacher in an inner city London school before completing his PhD in education at King's College London. His work focuses on helping teachers and school leaders apply evidence-based strategies such as retrieval practice, spacing, and explicit instruction to improve student learning. Carl is co-author of How Learning Happens and Instructional Illusions, and regularly delivers keynotes and workshops around the world on responsive teaching, curriculum design, and professional development.
It seemed particularly important for us to involve Carl in this season of New View EDU, as we see many schools looking very closely at what happens in the classroom, how technology today might be impacting it, and what education in the future might look like.
Carl, it's so great to have you on New View EDU. Welcome.
Carl Hendrick: Many thanks for having me.
Debra Wilson: I'm so excited to have this conversation because this season we've been talking a lot about sort of like the broader picture of education. But I’d love, given your background, that we really get to talk about learning, like really what happens in the classroom. And so, I want to start us with like, you know, this feels like a time when many common understandings about education are like, they're really on the table, you know, just what we think learning looks like? What do we think, you know, how we structure schools? What are some of the most exciting changes you see as possibilities?
Carl Hendrick: So I think the big rupture that's happened in education recently is AI. And I think that there seems to be this separation with people in education of this is the end of the world, or this is, you know, something that's going to be helpful to educators.
So my background is in the science of learning. And what we know is that we have about, you know, seventy years of evidence from laboratories, mainly with postgraduate students in labs. And we've got a pretty good grasp of things around retrieval, spacing, memory. How do we retain information? How do we encode it? How do we store it? How do we process it, retrieve it? What we know a lot less of is how to kind of operationalize that in a classroom. Because a lot of the conditions under which the science of learning was established looks really nothing like a classroom.
And so I spent a long time really trying to find out things that weren't really taught to me in my teacher training year and that it took me kind of five years to figure out. And so you end up with a place where you go, OK, to give you an example, we know that spacing out your learning is effective. We know that. It's much more effective for creating that change in long-term memory that we want students to have. We want students to not just memorize facts, but we want them to be able to use that knowledge to think critically. We want them to be able to transfer that knowledge to feel more confident learners in any given domain. And that really is about the presence or absence of knowledge in that domain.
However, if you say to somebody, OK, I'm teaching third grade math, I'm teaching this topic. If I want them to remember this stuff in six months, in twelve months, what's the optimum spacing? We don't know that. And we don't know that because we don't have the messy data of learning. And I was thinking about this recently with like, I went to Austin last year for the first time, and I was in a Waymo. And I had this incredible experience of driving around a self-driving car and realizing that the only reason this happens is because the models have been trained on thousands of hours of data. And not just here's the, here's the Google map view of the street. And the car goes down the street and takes a left. It's all the messy, the cyclists kind of turning left. It's the you know, sometimes there's roadworks here, it's the unpredictability of drivers. So just training that model on that over and over and over and over again, the model can then respond and adapt in real time.
That lives in the heads of teachers. And it's very variable. So some teachers are good at it. Some teachers are able to have that kind of Waymo, you know, the ability to adapt in real time to changing conditions. And some teachers are just incredibly good. The easy part is the, is the kind of the curriculum and the lesson plan saying, OK, like here's the Google map of the street and the road. The real challenge is in the responsive element that teachers have. And we just don't have enough data about all the messiness of learning.
And so I'm excited because I think when I started using AI, that was the first thing I thought, which is that we're going to be able to, first of all, capture the messiness of learning, as in kids trying, failing, trying again, trying a different way. And then from that, then we'll be able to answer those questions much more concretely around spacing, around retrieval. So I think probably in 10 years' time, we're going to see a world in education where a lot of the stuff that teachers do that they instinctively know is not effective, you know, marking books, grading books, a lot of administrative stuff, is just not that important. And we'll probably free up a lot of that and hopefully we'll see a world, we'll see a classroom or a school environment where teachers can really do the thing that teachers are so good at, which is being a mentor, being a coach. Inspiring, motivating kids, because that's the thing that is the sort of hard constraint in schools.
The constraint is not really time or curriculum or you know, lesson plans or all the rest of it. It's that kind of, how do you affect a fourteen year old who's just decided they're no good at this topic? Like it is, it's going to be a parent, it's going to be a teacher, it's going to be that coach or someone who's going to reach out and have that impact. So I think we'll probably see a world where we'll start to answer those questions about the science of learning and hopefully create a school culture that will be more feasible for teachers.
Debra Wilson: I know you've written about how, you know, the things you learn in the lab about learning, they don't translate necessarily very well to school. You know, they're very different environments and I mean, do you think AI is going to allow, you know, almost like a conversation to be happening between the lab and classroom and figuring out like how to how to how to make that I don't know, almost like a more efficient back and forth between like what works in the lab, then what does that look like in a real classroom and how do you capture, you know, that, the sort of like the overall efficacy of the practices that we're talking about?
Carl Hendrick: Yeah, great question. So everything we know about learning, we know kind of tangentially. We don't really know it directly. So we measure it after the event happens. We can't really see learning happening in the same way that we would test for things in a real laboratory. And so a lot of it becomes this signal to noise problem. So typically you put an intervention in place, and that could be a program, a teaching style, a curriculum, and you typically get a pre- and a post measure of that. And so you're then attributing the learning to a whole range of things. You're not really getting the richness of how did this kid come to know this thing? What were the causal factors in that?
And so the number one thing that any teacher or any kind of parent needs to know is, kids can really pay attention to probably four things, in fact any human, four new things. And if you're a kid, nearly everything is new. And so you're getting, constantly getting that sense of overload. So careful instruction design is key.
So I think what AI's going to do is it's going to be able to draw together all of these myriad disparate elements around learning, like the you know, the hundreds of thousands of different variables. AI is going to be able to fill in lots of those holes and it's going to be able to kind of A) get a model of what the kid knows, B) have a model of the terrain to be learnt, the curriculum. And the crucial thing is C), the instructional moves to close the gap between the two. Once we have that up and running, and I'm not particularly precious about like, in terms of learning, I don't, learning doesn't care how it happens.
Doesn't care if it comes from a teacher, a parent, a book, doesn't care if it comes from a movie, it doesn't, your brain doesn't discriminate. And so if you can create environments and cultures or conditions where kids are learning, now that's different to schooling. We want kids to be in a social, acculturated environment. We want to teach them things about being in society. But in terms of just learning stuff, we can do, I think, a lot better than the typical model.
That took me a long time to kind of get my head around. But I think we're inevitably going to be in a place where you know, 30 kids in a room, all moving at the same time. That has really been successful and it's been good. But I think it's, it's, we're going to get into a place now where we can, you know, those kids who are flying at the top, they don't need to sit in a corner with a worksheet. Those kids who are already struggling, they don't need to sit with a teaching assistant pretending that they're doing this thing. We can kind of meet them where they're at.
And the last thing I'd say on this is why I'm interested in AI and why so many people are just like terrified by it, and think that if you're interested in AI and education, it's like you're some kind of devil, is because in every other field you're seeing these massive changes in terms of the workforce, in terms of workflow, in terms of like a whole range of things. And if we just think in our field that we can just simply “No, everything's going to be business as usual,” you know, radiologists are doing this and you know, they're curing cancer, they're solving energy problems, they're you know, all the, you know, health is completely transformed by AI, but yet we're going to just bumble along, I think that's we're we're missing out an opportunity.
We're missing an opportunity, paradoxically, to make education more human. Because we can make more time for that human interaction. We can, we can offload a lot of the kind of the heavy burden stuff that, you know, we know is not really that important. Yeah. So I think, I think it's exciting times, but it's going to take… there's a lot of people who are, you know, wedded to certain ideas and that's fine and that's good. We should, you know, there's lots of different ways to be, you know, for schooling can happen. But yeah, I'm excited about all that.
Debra Wilson: You have me thinking about a bunch of things at once, but I'll start with this question.
I just came from an educational conference. I was talking to a colleague, and she saw this study. I don't remember what country it was out of, but we'll find it for the show notes. And basically it showed that you know, excellent teachers, very effective teachers who use AI to sort of say, help with lesson plans or you know, designing experiences, learning a certain thing. If they're using AI to do that, they get that much more effective. Like on the back-end, you know, sort of back-end testing of the students, it can actually be a help. Teachers who are not as effective, when they use AI, actually, they get less effective in their classroom.
And I assume like there's a judgment component in there, right? When you and I use AI, a lot of judgment and discernment goes into when we get the AI response, do we think it's a good response or not a good response? So like, when you're thinking about the classroom, the school workforce, like the very human interface with our students and learning. Like what are you thinking about? You know, should we be thinking about hiring differently?
Carl Hendrick: So you're absolutely right in what you're saying, that AI is really a magnifier of existing things. I would say first of all that chatbots should be banned in the classroom. And AI is not ed tech. AI is different. Ed tech is a delivery, it's always been about delivery, it's always been about a kind of a device.
AI is a completion tool. It is agentic. It does things. And that is a massive difference in our civilization. So when I think about schooling, I think so much of what goes on in a school, if we're being honest, is a compromise. It's really, if you look at the history of learning, for a long time it was one to one tutoring. And we, you know, this is the, Benjamin Bloom's famous two sigma problem, which is that, how do we, we know one-to-one tutoring is super effective. How do we scale that up to thirty kids in the classroom? Which, we can't afford to do that. And so, the modern classroom of thirty kids, one teacher is a really great compromise. And teachers have to be unbelievably skilled.
And one of the tragedies about our system is that the variance in teacher quality is massive. In fact, as Dylan William reminds us very often, it doesn't really matter what school your kid goes to, but it matters greatly what classroom they're in. But there's teachers who are unable, the system can't do anything about them. They're in posts, they're not going anywhere. And you know, whatever professional development you're putting in place is moving the needle very, very low amounts. And so you have these massive variances in outcomes for kids in our public school system. And that, surely that can't be right.
I would also say that, like, if the system is dependent on these superhero teachers, these kind of, you know, Robin Williams' Dead Poets Society type teachers, then the system can't sustain itself. Then every school is in a situation where you have one in 20 teachers who you know is up to scratch and really doing a good job. And then you've got another 10, 15 year old, you know, kind of dialing it in, OK. And then you've got five. Anyone who's ever run a school or been in leadership in a school knows that there's a disproportionate amount of time, of your time as a leader goes on a much smaller pool of staff and teachers, and often at the detriment of, you know, other kind of broader issues. So if the system is based, you know, it is dependent on these teachers who are really killing themselves, doing an incredible job, then, you know, we could probably say, like, there's three things that we have our teachers do. There's instruction design, there’s curriculum. There's the teaching of it. And then there's assessment. I think two of those can go within two years. I think we're going to live in a world, I think assessment is going to be so marking, grading, assessment, that's going to be done by AI. I mean, we could do that now if we had the diffusion within our system. We could say now, you know, everything is going to be graded by comparative judgment, or it's going to be graded by AI.
I mean I, the things I've seen in the last year have shocked me, as in carefully curated LLMs marking AP Lang work. Like I'm looking at the feedback and going, that's better than I ever gave and you know as a teacher in 20 years. So then the curriculum design, I mean, if we're being honest, most teachers are not good at that. It's a really rare skill to do. And most teachers, if you give a program that you brought in, you know, that's one thing. But most teachers are planning stuff the night before. They're getting lesson plans off Facebook, off Twitter, off Pinterest. And the culture is like, try this thing. You know, this is a fun lesson to do.
I think we can do better. I don't see many dentists going on Pinterest the night before and going, I'm going to try this, you know, tomorrow.
Debra Wilson: This will be fun to do.
Carl Hendrick: Yeah. This is a fun operation, you know. And like the dentist going, Well, I know this is what the evidence says, but I don't, these are my patients and I'm going to do it my, this is what I think, you know.
Debra Wilson: So, but what I hear you saying then is that relational piece. You know the assessment thing I think is interesting. I've read and had a lot of debates on that, you know, because the students, making sure, or students feeling that their teachers really know who they are and they have that relationship, like that's a piece of assessment, right?
Carl Hendrick: Absolutely. I think we're always going to need teachers or adults to be supportive of kids, to guide them through problems, what they're doing, and for it to be stage specific. I learned so much seeing my daughters. I've got three girls, and I taught secondary English, so I never really knew much about early years. I never really knew much about kindergarten teachers. When I saw like, their job and how they did it, I thought, my God, they're a different species. Like the care, the patience, the like, and at the same time, the teaching them how to read. Like it's phenomenal.
And so all of that stuff is super, super important. And the marking thing or the grading thing, you know, the older you get then in terms of the years and the profession, the more you're having to grade papers and do that kind of stuff. And you make a really good point, which is that when a kid writes something, they want someone to read it. They want someone to—
Debra Wilson: —Right, like a person to read it, not, not a bot. Yeah.
Carl Hendrick: Exactly. So yeah. So like maybe we can have a world where they are working on a something and maybe you have a much more kind of like, a kind of Viber type system where the student is kind of researching things and then sitting down and actually talking to the teacher and and kind of saying, OK, this is where I'm at with this, you know, blah, blah, blah. Rather than writing a draft and getting the teacher to mark it, and then the teacher marking it against a rubric and resentfully doing it. And then the, and then we know that a huge amount of grading is not read by the kids. They just look at the grade and then they go, OK, what did you get? That's what they say to their friend.
So, you know, it's just going to take a bit of thinking around that in terms of like how could we… the other thing is in terms of reliability and validity. Like I was an English teacher, head of department for a while. Every year we had kids getting a, you know, predicted I don't know, a B and then get a D, send it back to the exam board and go you know, I want you to remark that because, and lo and behold it would go up not just one grade, but two grades. You know, you wouldn't accept that in any other field. And that happens every year. That happens all the time.
So human marking is not in any way reliable and valid. So I think it would take, it just takes a bit of thinking around, OK, the end point is we want kids maybe to write an essay. But like how they get there. Do they need to do 10 drafts of it and the teacher marks it? And I think that, you know, that's where teachers are going to have a an outsized impact where they can, you know, what if we had a world where it's marked and then the teacher and, where you free up the time for the teacher and the student to sit down and go, OK, what did you get? What you know, tell me why you think it was graded that mark. What, you know, what happened there? What, like, what were your weaknesses? You know, much more like a kind of coaching relationship.
Debra Wilson: Do you see some of those experiments? Like so, what you're describing actually happens in one of our schools. They teachers, particularly in English classes, they use, AI will mark it up. The teacher will review the markings just to make sure it's accurate. But I think it's every two weeks, a teacher sits down with a student to talk about, like, tell me about your thinking here. And the theory is I think, I think sort of what you're getting at.
It's almost like a tit for tat, right? Like, OK, we're going to take this off your plate because this is incredibly time consuming. We're putting relationships at the center. And so that, like that's, we're going to double down on that value. So the assessment by AI, you're not devaluing the teacher student relationship. In fact, like you're centering that more. Are you seeing schools experimenting with that kind of approach, like as you, I know you're out on the road speaking a lot. I know you get a ton of studies and sort of different ideas, but are you seeing schools like really start to play with this on some level?
Carl Hendrick: Yeah, so one of the schools I work with, I'm lucky to work with a number of schools and different governments and countries, and Alpha School are doing, people kind of find it difficult in the same way that people I think find you know, when the internet came along, or even like, you know, sitting in the back of a Tesla, you kind of think this is, this feels wrong.
Their whole thing is we're going to use AI to design curricular assessment. We're going to front load that into two hours. So we're going to get kids to learn things faster. And then we're going to have four hours for the kids to be kids, and to do other stuff and to play sport or to have challenges or, you know, do projects and different things like that.
But the reason I'm interested in it is because it's all, the learning design bit is explicitly science of learning.
Debra Wilson: It's hard coded, literally hard coded. Yeah.
Carl Hendrick: Yeah, yeah. It's explicitly how, what's the best science that we have to teach this curricula? What's the best sequencing? What's the best evidence we have for kids to know this stuff, to be tested on this stuff, to do it to mastery?
The counterintuitive thing is that for many people in the community, that is typically done by a teacher in a class of thirty. And so what is fascinating to me is that you have that, you have the conditions that look much more like how the science of learning was established. As in a kid with a laptop, there's no set starting point. They're starting out where they are. So they test into a unit. So they're placed. They, it's according to their ability. And then the lesson will be kind of appropriate to where they're at.
And then they can, so the kids tend to go much quicker because they're not sitting in a room of thirty where they kind of know half of it, they don't know half of it. There's a lot of noise in the room. It's just a very kind of focused environment. But I understand that people are, they're doing innovative thinking there. And it's I think it's, you know, we're probably three, four years away from that being, or that type of model.
Debra Wilson: I mean, do you think that's, like I mean they're sort of at the extreme, right? Like so, like two concentrated hours of AI-facilitated learning a day, right? So classroom teachers are like, that's, it's sort of anathema to what they do, right? Like so it just doesn't, it's not only is it hard, they can’t wrap their heads around it and they don't want to wrap their heads around it. They'll say like, you know, we don't know that this is actually healthy for kids in the learning environment.
What do you think the hybrid looks like? You know, particularly as kids get older, right? Like what, you know, I mean you could set some pretty enterprising kids loose with some AI and they could teach themselves a lot. Because that also, I mean, AI does, as you point out, also captures the data kind of that you're looking for from a learning science standpoint. That's very hard to do, you know, even in a differentiated classroom, because you're still talking very human to human.
Carl Hendrick: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the hybrid model will be where you may have a, you may have a system where the accountability is happening at a kind of different level. Right now the accountability is, a lot of it is with teachers.
Debra Wilson: Right. Well, and to your point that's incredibly, a human inconsistency is just built into the system.
Carl Hendrick: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean I quit teaching three years ago. I was twenty years as a teacher. One one of the things that, it was an old guy that I worked with, and he said he was retiring and he said, you know, the difference between when I was, when I started teaching and now, is if the kid didn't do well, the conversation with the parents or the head was, Mm, you know, why didn't you work hard enough? Why didn't you study? Why didn't you put the hours in? And he said, Now it's to the teacher, what did you do? Why didn't my kid get their predicted grade?
So the accountability is very much front loaded with the teacher for things that they're really unaccountable for, whether that be student motivation, poor curricular materials, bad behavior, a whole range of things. So we could create a system where the accountability is a lot more like, in that model where you have—and by the way, when the kids are working on laptops, there's no chatbots. They're doing a knowledge-rich curriculum, used spaced retrieval practice. They're, you know, they're kind of doing the same thing as like a lesson would be, you know, or a really well planned lesson, but they're just getting, they're cognitively, like learning happens when you think hard, when you have to take knowledge and apply it. And in a lot of our lessons, kids are not thinking at all.
They're daydreaming, they're cosplaying thinking,
Debra Wilson: That's, that's grim.
Carl Hendrick: Yeah. Well, it's just, you know, I mean, you think of your own experience in school.
Debra Wilson: Right. Right. No, but we've all just sat there and just taken notes, right? And it just flows through your head. Yes.
Carl Hendrick: Right. A lot of our kids are going to lessons, they're turning up, the teachers trying their best, they're learning very little. And then when they get a month out from the exam, they're cramming it and they're passing an exam and then they're moving on. Like that's not happening all the time, but that's, you know, a lot of that's going on.
So I think you could have a system where the accountability happens at the level of a more kind of centralized, here's a really great curriculum, here it is sequenced. So the teacher then is not really responsible. The teacher then is responsible for the behavior, the motivation, the application, the mental kind of well being of the kid. You know, they might have tutors like a small group that they work with and say, Hey, you know, like I noticed that you, you know, in your, in your session here this morning, I noticed, you know, they would get that feedback.
Now, you didn't try these problems or you know, you didn't want to do those problems, or you know, the AI will give the coach loads of amazing knowledge about like, you know, this kid, like, they just don't understand what a compound, you know, whatever it is. So they don't understand the definition of this word. You know, so then you could have that kind of human interaction.
So I think, you know, we're just at the start of this. We're only three years into this. Most teachers I know, or in fact most people I know, they're using a kind of free model of Chat GPT and using it like it's Google and then going, it's not really that, you know, it doesn't really do that much, you know. When you're like, the uses of LLMs, carefully trained LLMs, like the top tier models, the stuff they can do is frightening and every new iteration, you know, just gets more powerful and powerful. So yeah, personally I'm excited by it.
Debra Wilson: That's a great lead in. I want to switch gears a little bit from how kids might learn in the future to what they might learn in the future. So, and this gets to the “Children of the Magenta Line.” I love this piece that you wrote for your Substack that we'll put in the show notes, but you, you kind of talk early in the piece about the focus on like accumulation of knowledge, and you kind of take on progressive education a little bit, that it went too far, more more into skills and a little less into that baseline knowledge. And with the AI, I mean, I agree with you, like you see some of these LLMs, I mean, they are amazing. And then when you start building agents that can do things for you, like, it's—it takes it to another level.
But I think one of the pieces—and I just spoke to a bunch of people about this at this education association meeting I went to—that you need those points of knowledge to put them together. So, you know, as you're thinking about like what kids learn, because you know, ultimately you'll be interacting with AI. How are you thinking about, you know, how, like, what kids are actually learning? Does it evolve? Like, how should we be thinking about that in education from your perspective?
Carl Hendrick: So here I think I'm, you know, kind of a traditionalist in the sense that I, you know, I go with Matthew Arnold's “the best that's been thought and said.” And when we think about science, we think about major discoveries in the field, and that could be Darwin, Newton, Einstein, you know, whatever that is. They are the major discoveries in science over hundreds of years.
And kids should, they should have that knowledge. They should know what that is. They should know, you know, certain mathematical proofs. For me, I think in literature, then here's where it becomes a contentious issue. They should study Shakespeare. And the reason they should study Shakespeare is because, as Harold Bloom reminds us, Shakespeare kind of shaped the modern consciousness. And he is the most influential voice in the last five hundred years. He is omnipresent everywhere.
And so that's the kind of birthright of kids. I think we owe it to the kids to pass on that knowledge and give it to them. Now, whether they like it or not is irrelevant. You don't look at a science curriculum and go, you know, Darwin's a bit boring, so we'll do something else this year. Or we'll, you know, we'll leave out Newton and we'll you know, we're doing physics, but we you know, we don't like that, so we'll do something else. And so in literature and culture there's these kind of hugely important points that, just to be a kind of citizen and to be a part of our democracy, it's really helpful to know what these things are.
So I think that there, you know, and it, when you look at it, there really isn't that much of a debate. I mean, there's like, if the debate is like, should we teach Shakespeare or should we teach some contemporary author because, you know, like there isn't really a debate there. Like it, Shakespeare is the most influential figure and it's a dereliction of duty not to teach him. It's really important to have other voices and other cultures and represent other identities and we should always do that. And I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, but I think that we should look at the kind of, the totality of human culture and expression and say what are the high points, what are the significant things that will help children to navigate our world?
Debra Wilson: Do you still think that's long form? You know, it depends on the school, but sometimes like, kids won't read full plays, which I always find a little bit strange. And I actually can say I've never seen this in an independent school. But I mean it's, it's counter to, you know, I don't know, sitting down with Julius Caesar or Coriolanus, or, you know, The Tempest, is very different than sitting in front of a screen with AI for two hours, right?
Carl Hendrick: Yeah, great question. If you're teaching Othello, the beginning point of Othello isn't, here are the dates, here are the words you must learn by heart. The beginning point of Othello is to stand in front of a twelve year old, fourteen year old and say, “Imagine you've met the love of your life, and then your best friend tells you that that person that you thought that you loved has betrayed you.” And then you would present Othello and you'd say, “Here's this guy.” He's this noble, valiant warrior. He loves this woman. He goes, his father is racist and calls him out, and he stands up in front of his father and the Duke and says, She had eyes and she chose me. In other words, you're actually insulting her by thinking that I've, you know, done as this.
And so the beginning of the play is this incredible thing, and at the end he strangles her. Spoiler alert. And the question then becomes, the question that becomes for these, for these kids, you know, you stand up and you say this, what happened? How did—this wasn't, this was a strong man, an intelligent man, how was his mind poisoned? And that's the story of the play. And then you're you're, as Christine Counsel calls it, you're heralding knowledge. You're saying, look at this, look at this incredible story. Right, let's get stuck into it.
You know, this isn't, you know, whether you pass an exam or not, this isn't like you need to know this because you need to pass an exam. This is like, as a friend of mine once put it, Shakespeare is an anthropological guidebook which tells you how to live. It tells you how, what to do when you get your heart broken. It tells you what to do when you lose somebody. It tells you what to do when your parents die, when your father dies, you reach for a soliloquy, you reach for a poem.
No one is reading out equations. No one is reading out theorems. You know, they're reaching for those…Shakespeare manages to touch on something about grief and death and the ephemeral nature of life and how life is short, and Macbeth does that. And so I, you know, there you can do that in a way that is… and I would hope that like that's hard to do, you're absolutely right, and you know, but when I taught Shakespeare, I used the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company videos more than anything else because actually, it's kind of dead when you read on a page. And actually there's, in any play, there's kind of about five or six key scenes. And yes, I'd love, you know, to kind of go to the play. But I would normally just say, OK, here's a scene, we're going to watch it so you see what happens. But actually it's these lines. Look at these words and zoom in on, you know, certain keywords and phrases and say, Look, this is where the magic is.
And I think you could do that in an environment where it's very scaffolded and it's very, you know, the kid watches stuff and then maybe in the afternoon period they could maybe, you know, perform the play or see the play or, you know, something like that.
Debra Wilson: So you're kind of talking about the rise of the humanities. I kinda like this.
All right, last question because we're almost out of time. If you were placing bets in education right now, you were leading a school, somebody gives you ten million dollars.
How would you invest it in programming? Like what would that change in your school?
Carl Hendrick: Well, ten million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but these days it doesn't really go very far in education.
Debra Wilson: Well, make it fifty. We'll go with fifty.
Carl Hendrick: So I would say, depending on the outcomes that we want, I think the number one thing is the what we teach. So the curriculum materials, I'd want to ensure that we had a knowledge rich curriculum with you know, all my career I've railed against minimally guided instruction or kind of progressive approaches of the idea that kids will discover things for themselves. And so I would have a curriculum, invest in a curriculum.
And then I would invest in I think probably a staff, so get the right people in, who can have an impact on kids. And then I would probably invest in…I think I would go with the model of getting kids to do a concentrated period of focus and study and to hit certain marks and create a model where, instead of sitting in a seat for six hours doing stuff that they mostly don't like doing, they can learn stuff relatively faster and then they are doing, you know, a range of other things.
Our kids are not going to be doing, they're not going to be in a world remotely like ours. And we all, every generation says that, but this is different. This is, you know, uniformly different. All kids are going to know, they're going to need to know how to read, they're going to need how to spell, they're going to need to know knowledge. But the kids who are going to be making stuff in ten years, they're going to be deploying agents to make stuff. That's just how it's going to be. They're not going to be doing, making stuff in the way we were. Does anybody seriously think that a university degree will be worth the same thing that it's worth in our day? Do we think, like, anyone who has done a degree post-2023 and it doesn't have a massive asterisk on it?
And so then the system needs to say, well, how do we capture those skills and knowledge that kids have? Universities just seem to have their head in the sand and they're saying, Well, we'll just kind of pretend that it's OK, or we'll get kids into writing blue books for an hour, but that, like university is about long term research and projects and twenty thousand word essays. So I think what will inevitably be is a world where kids will be able to make anything. Anything. They'll be able to make the things that take ten years now, like movies, video games, a whole range of things, they will be at the disposal of kids. So the thing in the meantime is like, how do we get them to see human experience, the best that's been thought and said, and that when they do start making things, that they'll have a good set of values and that they'll actually have something to say other than just the kind of YouTuber culture of, you know, kittens on skateboards and wow, look at this kind of, you know, how many mentos can I put in a Coke bottle?
And so, that's going to take a lot of, you know, like a kind of serious rethinking on a lot of things. And I hope that, you know, there'll be a lot of schools who say we don't want to do that and that's good and that's right for their community. But, you know, inevitably these improvements are going to come. And I just think if we're not, if we're not availing of them to make a better experience for kids, then we're going to lose out.
Debra Wilson: Excellent. Carl Hendrick, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure to have this conversation today.
Carl Hendrick: Thank you so much.