Disrupted History

I sometimes think people say they are fine with disruption… until it actually disrupts them.

We are not in an age of approaching disruption. We are living inside it. And yet, as educator and technologist Dr Nick Jackson warns, many are sleepwalking into an educational crisis. One where institutions claim to embrace innovation while shuffling forward with the same scripts, assessments, structures, and assumptions that predate the AI age.

As Carlo Iacono recently noted, the latest AI systems – Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Opus, GPT-4o – don’t just match human capabilities in key domains. They surpass them. The evidence of asymmetry is “blazing,” yet many in education cling to “comfortable delusions about human supremacy” which refuse to acknowledge a “stark truth” about the impact of GenAI when used skillfully.

Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman’s TED talk lays it bare. AI is not just automation or information processing – it is decision-making, goal-setting, and adaptive learning. It is moving from passive algorithms to “active agents.” The genie is not only out of the bottle; the genie is capable of creating more genies.

And in our classrooms and staffrooms? There are those who periodically bemoan students for using the tech literally at the fingertips. Some seem to blame the tech… for… for… for existing it seems. Some bury their heads in fluffy pillows of busywork – they wear the blinkers of status quo, business as usual activity. These self-selected blinkers which blind them. Far too few people are authentically acting on the evidence before them. Few are reimagining what thinking, creativity, inquiry, and authenticity mean in an AI-mediated world.

Perhaps if our students are turning to AI as a substitute for their learning, shouldn’t we ask why our pedagogy feels so unworthy of their effort, trust or engagement?

Jackson rather darkly I feel argues out that we’re hurtling towards a chasm – one at least as wide and damaging as that created by smartphones and social media – between how young people actually use GenAI and how our systems refuse to respond to that reality. Echoing Iacono’s sentiments (while taking a different slant), he points out that many are sleepwalking towards a disaster.

Sleepwalking into irrelevance, clinging to tired forms of summative assessment.

It’s past time for many educational leaders to wake up to the morning light of the AI age. We’re past the dawning of a new era in education.

Our schools and our students have no need for another round of politicians’ rhetoric or handwringing. We have no time for masterful inactivity by the leaders of our schooling systems and schools. We needs neither hanrahanism or utopianism.

The AI wave that we ride right now requires of us all courageous imagination and innovative action. We live in a disrupted the present. Our students need pedagogies that are generative, agentic, and ethically responsive.

History teaching, as explored in my current research, offers an opportunity to model the way for other subject area disciplines here. History is well-placed to deliver a technology-infused, future-oriented pedagogy that isn’t about sitting in the past but preparing students to shape what comes next. A subject pedagogy that offers both continuity and change.

The bridge across the coming chasm will not be built from fear, but from design. Intentional, reflective, and transformative design.

But first, we need to wake up.