You have been to sixty-plus countries, how has that influenced the way you see the world?
I love engaging with people, knowing cultures, seeing how we live and how we love, and creating community. In essence, humans are social animals. We like to live in communities. We are family groups. It was beautiful to see how unique values such as cooperation, collaboration, tolerance, and helping each other cut across cultures.
The second thing is that it is almost extensive, with an infinite number of cultural identities. The third thing I see is that many people struggle. They struggle for a living, work and to get a meal for their children.
What has your journey at Eidos Global been like, when you started compared to your vision and mission statements?
Eidos Global was born out of a debate workshop in a public school. We were students and I was 18 years old. As young people, we wanted to learn. There was no teacher. We used the classes for learning and learning by doing and learning by playing. Experiential. This made our students super committed and the learning was effective.
Then, we expanded first to Argentina, then into Latin America and globally. We decided we find a different way to educate. We found a new pedagogy. So, 15 years ago we decided to found Eidos Global because we wanted to change global education. We focus on two things, critical thinking and social commitment.
Fifteen years later, we are a social enterprise working in 95 countries and we reskill a million people a year. It is still about learning by doing and focusing on skills that are meaningful for life, digital skills, social, emotional and cognitive skills. This is to enable our learners to thrive in a world of changing realities.
Read also: My life’s mission is to ensure youth have access to education, understand AI – Delille
There are many educational interventions to solve some of the sector’s seeming perennial problems. The UN, UNESCO, and UNICEF, have deployed many of these interventions but the data don’t show much progress. What do you think is wrong?
Passion and priority. I participate a lot in the United Nations Assembly and UNESCO’s Conferences. We spend trillions on wars, and guns. To solve the whole educational problem it will cost $100 billion, three years. It is about priorities. It was not as bad as it is right now.
Now many children are out of school and those in school are not learning. Now we have an acute shortage of teachers. We have the problem in Africa and Latin America. People don’t want to be teachers because they give you a shitty salary, you have 60 children in the class.
You have to teach them and solve a whole of social and emotional problems that they have from their families. It is all a priority. If you ask a country like Nigeria to spend on education as a priority it will take up to 50 per cent of the budget. Who will take that decision? None.
How do we tackle these problems? You may want to use a country in Latin America as a use case.
Let us not talk about South Korea, Finland, or Singapore, they have money. We need to think of the classroom and the educational system. By educational system I mean, the Ministry of Education, directors, supervisors, the heads of schools and teachers.
I will change the whole system to be oriented to the learning outcomes. How the kids learn and do meaningful stuff out of the knowledge that they have. It is not about subjects. It is about skills, communication, critical thinking, and empathy. We are living in the age of artificial intelligence.
How we implement the knowledge is more important. The content is not relevant anymore. It is what we do with it to change the community. Change the outcome, change the content. Again, what I will do, to fix this huge issue that we have with a shortage of teachers and large class size, is to trust our children and our young people.
Everybody is bossing young people around. You have to do this or that. But when we give them the power and chance, young people can plan the entire class. It is called community learning, peer-to-peer learning. So you need one teacher to a hundred students in this scenario.
What have been your best and lowest moments as Eidos Global founder?
One of the best journeys was when I saw our alumni changing the world, from a situation of extreme violence and suddenly becoming a national deputy and member of Parliament. This is huge. You can see us transforming not only one life but society. The only reason that Eidos exists is because the education system does not work properly.
In 2015, we ran out of resources and for three months we were sitting in a living room, working, generating content, and hoping that someday someone would trust in us again and would get the resources to work. That was tough. Having no money to pay for a thing. That was super tough.
How did come of it, how did you get a vital lifeline?
Microsoft. We did some work for them in the private sector because of the privatisation of education. So we started rethinking to see what’s out there. We approached with our Eidos, values and skills that we preach. This was our lifeline.
Do we need more of Eidos Global or should we consolidate on the other interventions that already exist in education?
I would not like Eidos Global to be a huge organisation with thousands of employees across the globe. This is not unlikely. The most beautiful thing will be for every educator, teacher, and pupil in training to be focused on skills, the pedagogy of learning by experience, to have interactive content and learn useful things.
From the conversations so far, what will be your summary of this WISE 11 engagement and focus, which is AI?
Everybody is speaking about the ethics of AI. I am not sure this is how to put it. It is like saying politics and AI. Are you left, right, or social democrat? In ethics, it is the same thing. We have situational ethics where we analyse the situation first. We have deontological ethics where the law is what you follow. And by saying the ethics of AI we are not having the real discussion.
When we are coding an algorithm and feeding it with data, we make a lot of choices and we have to be conscious of them. Imagine a kid, seven or eight years old, he will take it as a tool. Another thing, I think it is not artificial intelligence but an augmented intelligence that helps us as humans to do more.
