International Day of Education

“We must do far more to advance Sustainable Development Goal No. 4, to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”—UN Secretary-General António Guterres
The proclamation of this International Day of Education by the United Nations aims to celebrate the role of education for peace and development and to recall that “education is a human right, a public good and a public responsibility.”
The theme of the day is “AI and education: Preserving human agency in a world of automation,” and a number of activities are being organized. These include a webinar entitled “Lifelong learning in the age of AI.”
A recent opinion piece published in the newspaper Le Devoir (in French only) provides food for thought on the place of artificial intelligence (AI) in education. The master’s student reports on the results of an Apple study on the limits of artificial intelligence systems. She also recalls the conclusions of physicist Richard Feynman’s observations during his visit to Brazil in the 1950s.
She concludes, “Ultimately, the future of education and human intelligence lies in our ability to truly understand problems and develop creative solutions, a capacity that machines, like ChatGPT, have yet to achieve.”