Foreword
Foreword
In 2034, my son will finish school. I don't know what the world will look like when he does, and nobody who tells you they know is being straight with you. That uncertainty is where this book starts.
I've spent more than six decades in education, as a teacher, adviser, school leader and consultant, across Asia and beyond. When I began teaching I used a manual typewriter and reprographic devices like mimeograph machines (Gestetner) with a waxy stencil wrapped around an inked drum to push ink through cut letters or drawings onto paper to produce worksheets for students. We had spirit duplicators and hectographs and overhead projectors - these were the cutting-edge high-tech of the seventies and eighties.
Over all this time I've watched plenty of technologies arrive with big promises. Some of them improved learning. Many didn't. What separated the two was rarely the technology. It was what the adults around it decided to do.
That is the argument of this book. What happens to education over the next twenty years will depend less on how capable AI becomes than on the choices that teachers, parents, school leaders, governments and companies make about it. Those choices are still open. Some of them are being made quietly, in procurement contracts, in assessment rules and in the habits children form with the tools in their pockets.
The book grew out of my newsletter, AI in Education – Deliberately Human, which I wrote for school leaders and educators through 2025–26. I wanted something short, plain and honest: what the evidence says, how strong it is, and what a sensible person might do next. Where the evidence is thin, I've tried to say so. Where I have an interest, I've tried to declare it.
You don't need to be a technologist to read it. You need to care about children, about teachers, and about what it means to learn. If you do, I hope the chapters help you ask better questions, and to push back, politely and firmly, when the answers on offer don't hold up. I have tried my best to verify the facts, list my sources and use AI to help me organise my writing. I guess this book is the result of human and AI cooperation, which is how it should be, but with me who decides what is written.
Paul Penfold
October 2026, Chiang Mai