JONATHAN JANSEN | Why we need more Georges in our schools and varsities

As I listened to a humanoid robot explaining Newton’s three laws — “as if to a 14-year-old”, was the prompt — the goosebumps spread across my skin.

What? An object’s motion does not change unless a force acts on it (involuntarily, I think about the South African government, a motionless object). The more force you apply to an object, the faster it accelerates. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

His name is George, says the electrical engineering academic behind this stunning innovation. Makes no sense, I told my deadpan colleague and his three smart button postgraduate students building the robot. This is Stellenbosch University, the last outpost of Afrikaner nationalism and you name him after the historical enemy? King George comes to mind or that Beatles chap. In this part of the world, people still pronounce PW Botha’s hometown with the guttural “ge-org” to distance themselves from empire. But George? Why not name him Rassie, I offered.

They built George from scratch and to human height, not taking the easy route of getting one from China or the US. Soon George will have legs and stride the Rooi Plein, the beautiful red-brick square where Maties students hang out, and interact with those young minds. George has hands that rotate to some degree and give you a thumbs up. A book is held in front of the facial sensors and George reads the title. What do you see in front of you, George? Five objects on a table and three people, comes the response. In this fascinating specimen robotics, engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), anatomy, physics and education come together to produce a truly remarkable invention.

In a short time with George, you can see how in the movie a man falls in love with his disk operating system or how a new grief bot (also called AI ghosts or death avatars) that inputs everything about your late mother, including voice recordings and pictures, can give you a sense that you’re actually talking with a beloved family member.

I am so excited about the possibilities that George portends. Wouldn’t it be great if we could replace some of our professors with a George teaching mechanics or (yes) poetry? When a teacher is absent, a preprogrammed George can be called from the staff room to teach geography. It's always a good thing to have the revision lesson done in a different voice: George to the rescue. There are already companies which make their AI bot a valued member of the staff meeting.

When you cannot see the future ahead of you, as these new technologies demand, you fall back on the only thing you know. Your posture is defensiveness, your tendency is to blame. We have no money. No, you have no balls

And then reality hit me. In universities around the country, academics still teach the way they did 30 or 40 years ago. They drone on with one-dimensional PowerPoint slides. There is very little interaction from the 300 students in Psychology I or the bulging class in Chemistry II. Our teaching is still largely teacher-centred, our learning still passive. Remarkably, many of our universities see large language models, the most popular being ChatGPT, as a threat to assessment integrity rather than question the poor quality of assessments to begin with.

Our schools ban cellphones — one of the dumbest things you can do this side of the century. Among these Luddites, George would be stillborn — “never stood a chance” should be the headline obituary. In the meantime, other countries are racing ahead with AI and technological innovations that make teaching more efficient, assessment more manageable and learning more enjoyable. We cannot do coding and robotics, say departments of education, because there’s no money. That’s like saying kids won’t be able to brush their teeth any more because toothpaste is too expensive. Yes, it’s as shortsighted as that.

Our biggest challenge in South African education is not resources; it is the lack of imagination, the paucity of ideas. When you cannot see the future ahead of you, as these new technologies demand, you fall back on the only thing you know. Your posture is defensiveness, your tendency is to blame. We have no money. No, you have no balls.

Change does not happen in schools or universities or governments or companies without leadership. The last university vice-chancellor to take AI seriously as an institutional project has since left the country to head up a UN university. Apex High, a no-fee school in Electric City (appropriately), and Thomas More College, lead the country in technology innovation, say the AI experts . Kenya is No 1 on the continent in digital education that even reaches the deep rural areas of that country.

This is what I have learnt from my years in education: when you have focused leadership with compelling ideas, the resources will follow.

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