Human Capital Theory - But What Humans Can Do Has Changed...

Pasi Sahlberg, on the AI in Education podcast, put his finger on the thing my whole paper keeps circling. For sixty years, schooling has run on human capital theory: education exists to prepare young people for work. It served us beautifully. Then he delivered the line that stops you cold. We don’t actually know what the work is anymore, or whether there is work, or anything.

The OECD’s own Education for Human Flourishing framework says the human capital model now prepares children for yesterday’s jobs, and calls instead for human agency, meaning, and the capabilities machines lack. That is precisely the bet my paper makes, in a NSW primary classroom.

As a primary teacher, I have spent years marking spelling tests as though each one were a load-bearing wall. It is not.

The morning of my proposed school teaches the foundations honestly, and the four-hour afternoon teaches taste, judgement, and the things AI cannot, which turns out to be most of the actual economy now.

Find out more www.primarai.com.au/theprimaraischool