There is nothing artificial about our children’s intelligence

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Published by the Communications Team

Today we celebrate International Day of Education, 2025 and it is right that we should embrace the revolutionary potential of AI to transform how our children learn, how our teachers teach, and how our schools are managed. Last year I was appointed to the International Expert Committee of the World Bank’s K-Digital Innovative Solutions Program for Education and spent a few days in South Korea, appraising some of the most innovative AI-enabled projects imaginable. The potential of AI and the opportunities it brings are boundless. Indeed, in a few weeks I shall be launching my own AI-enabled Applications for tracking and supporting the growth in the professional capabilities of teachers in low-and lower-middle income countries.

But I do worry that much of the time being spent on building the intelligence of machines is less time spend on us thinking about human cognition and its development in the most trying conditions.

We know that human cognition is deeply embedded in our social interactions, our cultural practices, and particular histories. We also know that cognitive development relies on cultural tools, such as language, symbols, and technology, each which mediates our thinking and problem-solving. In short, human thought is shaped by societal influences, collective experiences, and intellectual tools and artifacts that evolve over time.

AI is the newest, and possibly the most revolutionary cultural tool to have emerged in recent times. It lives on our smart phones and even smaller wearable devices, and serves variously as a conversational partner, idea generator, note taker, navigational assistant, and general harbinger or predictor of the future. So powerful is it that we can be forgiven for thinking that our intelligence is a poor artificial copy of a real intelligence that lies elsewhere.

Nothing can be further from the truth. The power of AI lies in its interaction with human cognition. It is how we probe it – the questions we ask it, that feeds it, so that it becomes more powerful; and its replies, that we interrogate, negate, and reframe, in turn enhances our cognition. Perhaps we should recall the once fashionable theory of historical and dialectical materialism – the symbiotic relationship between mind and environment.

If this still holds true, then to celebrate the promise of AI as a powerful mediator of meaning is to ensure that we ready our children to probe and question, enquire and reflect, test and re-test.  To achieve that, we need to build the architectures of human cognition, strong enough and savvy enough to accommodate, shape, and reshape the powerful intelligences of the tool. In short, mind building tool, mind learning from tool, and tool learning from mind.

A certain way to achieve that is to build the resilience of human cognition through enabling our children to read. I am pleased to be working this year with UNICEF and the World Bank on relaunching the ‘Book Flood’ experiment in Sudan after it was halted during the civil war. Parents will support the drive to improve literacy and the build the readiness for their children to engage with powerful tools, on their own terms.

 

Discover how David Johnson has been working with the government of Sudan to support primary education.

David Johnson is University Reader in Comparative and International Education and Professorial Fellow, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. David studies learning and cognition and is particularly interested in tracking the learning progression of children, and the growth in the professional capabilities of teachers across national systems of education in low and lower middle-income economies.

Many of his studies have been conducted in partnership with the National and Federal Ministries of Education in Africa, South Asia, and Central America.

In recent years, David has been working with the World Bank to support the Government of Sudan’s Emergency Primary Education Support Project (funded through the Global Partnership for Education. His role was to help the Government establish a National System for the Assessment of Student Achievement.

The first study found that children in the third grade of primary school read on average at a speed of just 15 words per minute. That is too slow for them to comprehend what they read; the common understanding being that children at this stage of schooling should be reading at least 40 words a minute to comprehend at least 80% of what they read.

The key difficulty to making progress in reading was the availability of interesting, age-appropriate reading materials in homes and schools and the involvement of parents in a national literacy drive. David persuaded the then Minister of Education and the World Bank to launch a pilot ‘Book Flood’ experiment where a graded reading scheme consisting of over 100 volumes in each set of readers was distributed to 2,000 schools. Parents were encouraged to record the books their children read by pasting a postage sized ‘stamp’ that contained the picture of each book cover onto a record sheet. The results were extremely encouraging and the Partnership of Education and the World Bank readied themselves to launch a national reading programme.

Sadly, this was halted with a renewal of civil conflict in Sudan.

In 2025, the World Bank has handed on the project to UNICEF and David will be supporting the Government of Sudan once more to launch the National Reading Programme and to carry out a third National Assessment of Reading Achievement.

Due to the ongoing conflict, the vast majority of children in Sudan have had a severely interrupted education. More than 17 million of the 19 million school-aged children remain out of school in Sudan today. Even before the conflict, seven million children, one in every three, were unable to access quality education or were dropping out. Schools have partially opened in six states in Sudan (UNICEF, 2024).

David’s work is part of a larger programme in Sudan to build the long-term national primary system’s capacity to deliver quality education by strengthening data collection and use, and improving the monitoring and tracking of children’s progress through learning assessments. A pilot study, led by David, resulted in an important intervention whereby parents were supported to help their children and given extra reading material though a “Book Flood”. Positive results emerged from the study which is now being scaled up with the support of the World Bank and UNICEF.

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