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(Full disclosure: this piece involves me once again extolling the virtues of Pilgrims’ location and community. I’m sorry. Asking me not to extol the benefits of these cornerstones of my childhood is like asking Eric Cantona to stop peddling pop-philosophy, B.A. Baracus to embrace modern concepts of masculinity, or Mr Toad to tear his eyes and ego away from that bright new shining motor car. It’s just not going to happen.) 

To business.  

I’m delighted that tomorrow morning we’ll have some 24 parents joining us for an AI/Machine Learning-related coffee morning. It’s a chance to listen to and discuss both ideas, and professional and personal experience which will move us forward in our thinking and, so, our future practice. Now, AI is also something I have covered several times in these newsletter articles, and with good cause: a more profound influence on our future world may never have existed. But each time I consider it, I am brought back to the same line of thought. It’s not a lone line of thought; it is one I find present among the many, many other considerations on a regular basis. It’s just ‘there’; like that piece of lint you just can’t brush off your best suit. 

It goes something like this. As we encounter the boundaries of technology’s potential extending almost exponentially, as we connect with quite what it is that AI is – and may yet be – able to do, the power of the question ‘What should it be able to do?’ grows in its critical centrality. And in order to discern this, one must root the debate in the richest and truest veins of human culture, human heritage, human moral and political philosophy, human ethics and, yes, human theology. This is why I foresee such immense value in a not-too-distant future where a Pre-Prep Pilgrim steps out of a literacy class where the understanding of our linguistic building blocks has been linked to the very simplest concept of what a Large Language Model is, into the Pre-Prep playground, where they then play in the shadow of a cathedral that represents a culmination of past human architectural, spiritual and aesthetic efforts. And let’s not forget the tip of the tower of the chapel of St Mary visible in the other direction over at the college, and the sound of the flowing Itchen babbling away just over the fence. What a crucible for these little Pilgrims to be fired in, ready to take forwards a refined notion of how ‘what is possible’ interacts with ‘what matters’. 

Alongside this consideration – as was suggested in a podcast I was listening to recently – is the argument that, in a post-AI age, the importance of functionality in human education will be overrun by the importance of vitality. ‘Functionality’ in this case being the ability to perform a function, and the system of knowledge that will enable one to do so. ‘Vitality’ in this case representing both the skill and opportunity to ‘breathe’ life, energy, inspiration and creativity into a situation, and also representing how crucial this will be in setting apart what makes human input different from machine input. Creativity of thought and of process therefore become of heightened importance and this is an area we shall be exploring a good deal more moving forwards.  

Interestingly, this podcast also stressed the point that environment dictates performance. I would like to suggest that on this front Pilgrims’ delivers the competitive edge precisely by having such a rooted, historic site with which to meld far-sighted considerations of the future. Isn’t that a nice conceit? 

Tim Butcher
Headmaster