In his book, Thumbelina, Michel Serres makes an obvious demand that states that before undertaking teaching , a teacher has to know his or her students. This is fundamental to the success of the classroom. Hence, maybe we have to ask: Has our classroom changed? With the changing society have our students metamorphized? Serres’ book is an attempt to demonstrate that our students have transformed with the changing atmosphere around us. Serres indicates that those that are sitting in our classrooms are new human beings. They are the children of the digital revolution. With the coming of AI, this change is accelerated almost beyond our imagination. These changes affect the way we relate to knowledge. The digital revolution led to the death of the middle person. AI seem to be all set to put the last nail to this middle men. Our health required the mediation of doctor. Law and order required police and judiciary. But within a world of AI, these mediators are fast dying. Apps are fast substituting them. Hence, we have to ask: Is there any room for teachers/ professors in this new world? Will this growing infocracy with the power of AI mean a death sentence to our classrooms? We are already accessing knowledge without mediators. How we produce, circulate and share knowledge has changed. These new knowledge practices have certainly made a deep impact on our students. We do not just internalize and externalize knowledge like generations before, but also share/mediate knowledge among us. These knowledge mediating practices have become sites where we create, absorb and circulate new knowledge. This direct access to knowledge is only going to increase with every passing day impacting education at all levels.
The architecture of transmission of knowledge that required the mediation of teachers and professors (knowledge workers) is levelled down. Democratisation of knowledge practices had begun with the discovery of writing and was extended by printing. In the West, it is thought that this change in knowledge practices broke the monopolistic control of the clergy but established institutions and teachers that produced , transmitted knowledge and certified the acquisition of the same on the part of the students. With the coming of the Internet, knowledge mediators have gone on the verge of elimination. Knowledge mediators have played crucial role in the production and transmission/ dissemination of knowledge in the age of writing and printing. Knowledge practices were disciplinary practices. They produced disciplines that disciplined the students and even the knowledge workers. In the power of these knowledge practices, we entered what Michel Foucault calls disciplinary societies. Disciplinary societies use bio-power that operates on our bodies and produce docile bodies. This is why the system of education of disciplinary societies is often called domestication or silencing by Paulo Feirre who sees education as cultural action for freedom. This project is taken further by Bell Hooks in her book, Teaching to Transgress. With the digital revolution growing on the wings of AI, we seem to be put on accelerated pace towards the deschooling society of Ivan Illich. All in all the digital revolution has moved us from literacy to electracy ( Gregory Ulmer).
The bio-power that sustained the education practices that were based on mediation have given way. The classroom that was based on the model of Plato’s cave is breaking down. The students that we tied to the benches, classrooms, labs , libraries and other knowledge regimes are becoming free. They can produce and consume knowledge in the power of the internet, computer and the smart phone which are embedded with several AI algorithms. Hence, teaching-learning practices are changing. The discipline of the classroom does not work. The students can produce and consume knowledge. They have become prosumers. They can also transmit knowledge. Knowledge is crowd sourced and democratized. We have stepped into what Ulmer calls electracy. Access to knowledge is democratised. We have come to post-literate state. We do not need the certification of universities. The degree holders of these universities may not be experts. Direct access to knowledge makes it possible for non-degree holders experts to emerge. We still have slight difficulty. What the digital revolution has done is opened our access to information. There is a world of difference between information and knowledge. In order to decipher knowledge from information we need practical wisdom ( Phronesis) of Aristotle. We have great access to the digital repositories of knowledge yet we still need the wisdom to discern knowledge from information. The platforms like Youtube have begun to substitute schools, colleges, universities and teachers . We are indeed living a knowledge revolution. The free , immediate and direct access to knowledge is transforming us all. We have become as Serres describes naked in the face of the internet.
The internet has become our new architecture of education. We have search engines, encyclopedia , AI tools that instantly summarise, remember and write for us. We have Chat-GPT, NootbookLM and other AI tools that replace mediatory institutions and individuals of disciplining societies of Foucault. We have become decapitated. Our heads have tumbled down. Serres tells us that we have become like the proverbial Rev. Denise, the Archbishop of Parish who went running up the hill with his decapitated head in his hands. We move headlessly with computer or smart phone in our hands. Our cognitive work is done by AI tools. The so-called the smart world leaves only the cognising task to us. We have to recognize the tasks done by the AI tools. This means we will be deeply transformed by this new AI-enabled digital world. The future, therefore, is in the net. We have almost become mindless/ headless , the paradox is that we have task of recognising the outcomes of the AI and thus, have to be mindful. We also have to be mindful about the limitations of AI . Internet will house all knowledge data bases . This would mean that we will not need to remember but we need the mindfulness to decipher knowledge from the heap of information as well as mindful wisdom to recognize the outcomes of the tasks performed by AI tools. It has been right said that the heart of education is the education of the heart. We will still need to educate our heart. A world that makes us headless will become worse if we become heartless. We will need the education of heart to conduct ourselves in the new knowledge order opened by the digital revolution powered by AI
