A refreshingly optimistic book that asks us to grasp the educational opportunities of AI, rather than shrink from them
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n 1979, the government asked Wilfred Cockcroft, a now largely forgotten maths lecturer from the University of Hull, to write a report about a crisis in the teaching of his subject to children. It was wide-ranging and meticulous, and included a chapter on a technological innovation that was suddenly becoming available to the average consumer: the calculator.
Many parents and teachers feared that the gadget would undermine a basic skill and a pillar of education – one of the sacred three Rs – producing generations of dumbed-down drones who could reach for a device in their pockets to avoid the hard graft of arithmetic.
But Cockcroft didn’t see it that way. Instead, he proposed embracing rather than fearing the calculator. Students should be taught with and without one – and tested accordingly.
