Rahim Hirji on Education Futures: how you would redesign a curriculum if you believed the bet had changed

Svenia BussonYou have extensive experience in education technology, twenty years at the intersection of technology and education. How did you come to dedicate your career to it?

In hindsight it looks like a straight line, but it definitely wasn't. I did computer science at university and I thought that was going to be my calling, and then followed into a career within banking, and then pivoted into media. It was only when I was working for HarperCollins, where I got involved in Collins education and educational textbooks, that was really my early calling into education. I realised that was the place that I wanted to be, and got involved in edtech type propositions before we called it edtech.

Education then was very physical and there was some digital content, and then I got involved with new things. Online tutoring. I joined a business called Maths Doctor which was one of the first online tutoring businesses. What was interesting at that time, around 2010 and 2011, was that whilst we think online tutoring is such a normal thing now, parents were very scared of having their kids being taught by someone on the other end of the internet. That has very much changed now.

Then I co-founded EtonX, which was teaching soft skills to Chinese students at scale across China, and then across Asia and then globally. Then I joined Quizlet. For the last few years I've been assisting edtech businesses, non-edtech businesses, AI-only businesses, and other corporations, supporting them in thinking about AI. I still see myself as an edtech or an educational person even though I've never been a teacher.

Svenia BussonAt EtonX, were you touched by the meltdown of the Chinese tutoring market?

When we were there, there were lots of rumblings about that. When you're a backed startup and you're trying to do things, you're a little bit scared of it. So we had taken advice around that at the time. Nothing happened while we were there, but we had heard of companies who had already made the decision not to continue in China. Ultimately EtonX took a step out of China and became a global online only proposition, and we made that decision before the major edict happened.

Svenia BussonThe central concern running through your book is education, schools, children, what we teach and why. What made you write it?

I remember when I was at EtonX and was in Shanghai, we were meeting with a bunch of different organisations. I remember going to meet a Shanghai startup which demonstrated to me how machine learning worked within education. At that point in time I was quite taken aback, because you could see the personalised element around AI. I kept that with me, but I hadn't seen anything really happen until I was at Quizlet, and there was definitely some early GPT work that we were doing there before ChatGPT came out.

Why I decided to write this book: there's an educational theme around it. It's not specifically for kids, not specifically for students or parents, it's for adults in general. I feel as if we're going into this new era where these different sets of skills become important, because the stakes have changed somewhat. No one knows what they're doing to some degree, whether they're in the workplace. We're coming up with new policies around AI, not just at schools, governments are coming up with them.

The way that I was looking at this was that AI is becoming a leveller in many different degrees within the workplace. And so if AI is becoming a leveller, what are the things that AI can't change? Those were really about the human skills. Companies that I saw in this space were not looking at the human skills. They were looking at cost reduction, how they would do digital transformation, things of that ilk. And I leaned into this thing around human skills.

It becomes very pertinent for anyone who's in school right now. My youngest is fourteen and we're going through this change in the world right now. In ten years' time she's going to be in the workplace. So I had these multiple stakes: the personal stakes for what my kids are going through, and then what I'm seeing in society, and my own personal growth. I always wanted to write a book, and I thought about writing that book when I saw that stuff in China ten plus years ago, and I decided this is the time I need to research this in a big way. Spoke to lots of institutions, and then came up with this thesis of super skills.

Svenia BussonYou're a parent. Are you not afraid that our current educational models are absolutely not preparing students for a world where AI is everywhere? How worried are you for the next generation?

I am worried, and I think any parent is worried. My oldest is nineteen and so she'll be looking for internships and will soon be in the world of work. If you look at that early stage of a career right now, there's what we call the missing rungs, where there are fewer of these entry level jobs in the workplace.

But if you go back to your central question, which is around whether we are teaching the right things in school, there are core things that we will continue to need to learn. There's a core thing around maths, and many schools have these character values that you're teaching. I was speaking about this with a friend the other day and they said, well, if you were to take a step back right now and said, this is the bet that we're going to take, the world is going to turn into this in ten years, how would you redesign the curriculum? What would you teach? What would you not teach? And what would you change?

It's a difficult question, because obviously there's government investment and funding, but what are the core things that you might want to look at? Is AI literacy one of them? You might take digital and AI literacy as one and that might be a core thing. Reading and maths and proficiency around those areas are also important. But then there are these human skills which I keep talking about, and so, super skills. I would lean more into those things as we go forward. And you'd probably design a completely different curriculum based on where you think the world is going to. Those are the harder decisions that governments need to take right now. They are high stakes decisions. If you get this wrong, it could go badly wrong. If you get it right, it could go very right for those individuals.

Svenia BussonHow much should we teach those super skills versus the traditional hard skills, basic numeracy, literacy, and what in French we call culture générale? Would you do fifty-fifty?

It depends on what you think the world is going to be like. Is work important? What's the end goal of education? Are you preparing them for a world of work? Are you building their character? Is school the main premise to do that? Are parents the main premise to do that? Is government? We can go into that in significant detail.

I just feel that the core of the curriculum, what we call cultural general or whatever you called it, is still important. All of those things are still important, but there are these new, impending skills which become more important the closer you get to the workplace. It's changing all the time. Maybe I'll be saying this now and in ten years' time they'll be less important.

I remember three or four years ago when students or parents would come to me and say, should we teach them computer science? I said, yeah, absolutely, they need to know Python, go and do some extra coding classes. It's not that I don't think now that Python is not important. I think it's still important, or having some level of coding logic. You don't need to necessarily be a coder. But there's more of these other skills that come in, and it becomes a very different decision for a parent or a school to make about what we are going to include within our core curriculum to create these great individuals that come out at the other end.

Some of these tasks are never going to go away. I remember it used to be a norm to take notes in a meeting. Now you have AI notetakers and actions are farmed out to you. There's going to be more and more of that, even within computer science. There are fewer software developers being recruited into the workplace. So the world is changing, and it's changing all the time. How do you embed these things so that the curriculum becomes flexible over a period of time?

Svenia BussonTell us about the super skills themselves.

I did a lot of research to get to these, and spent a long time, and then I pattern matched them to some of the other reports that are out there. The World Economic Forum reports, McKinsey, all of the people who have got lots of resource to look into this stuff. I came up with seven core skills. I always get the order wrong, which is bad for an author. Curiosity, change readiness, big picture thinking, which is like very strategic thinking, principled innovation, empathy, global adaptability, and then one that I call the augmented mindset. I detail them in the book, very much through stories and examples, to make it very readable, whether someone's just about to go into the world of work or is in the middle to end of their career.

I'd take a step back to put those super skills in context, because you can slice up skills in many different ways. I developed this thing called the super skills ladder. If you think about the different levels of skills that you might need, they start with survival skills, and then they move into street skills, being able to converse with others and communicate. Then I call it specialist skills, so vocational skills to be able to do your job. And then soft skills, the stuff that EtonX taught, critical thinking and so on. And then super skills. In the same way that you'll know Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this is the super skills ladder. You need all of these levels to be able to exist in this new sphere.

When I talk about super skills, I do still think these other skills are really important. It's just that this new world demands these other skills on the top. Some of them have already been taught. Some schools are already teaching character values around curiosity, for example.

The reason why this becomes important is that middle layer, specialist skills or vocational skills, is the stuff that is being attacked the most. The stuff that you've been taught to do to do your job is starting to shrink away. When you speak to organisations they're talking about, oh yeah, we've got to elevate your role as human beings. That's what some of the research papers are talking about. That's really where super skills fits into this whole bracket. It allows you to really think about what are the things that are not going to be taken away by AI, and how do you provide a level of discernment and judgement to be able to do jobs in the future.

Svenia BussonAre they teachable? Can you teach curiosity? Can you teach an augmented mindset?

Some of this stuff is teachable. Whilst I've been in education I'm not an educator, and having spoken to some early years teachers, even in curiosity, the very basics of curiosity is the willingness to ask questions and the willingness to fail, or the willingness to ask a silly question and standing there.

But there are some that are more difficult to actually teach, and they're kind of experiential. Empathy, for example, is difficult to teach formally. But going to school and having relationships with your peers, students having friend groups, knowing when you're having that argument, knowing when someone is down and having to think in their shoes why they might be down, walking between classrooms and understanding individuals, that's where kids learn empathy. It's not something that you learn necessarily in the classroom, but it's something that you learn by going to school and having relationships and having friends and being able to ask questions. So it really fits into day to day, but it's something that you need to know that you have to lean into.

The last one, which I call the augmented mindset, people call it different things. In very simple terms it's human plus AI. That's what the world is coming to. We're defaulting to using AI for different things, and my thesis for this augmented mindset is, when is the right time to use AI? There's this concept of human in the loop, and human in the loop comes in at a later stage, and you're making sure that you're checking things off. My concept within this augmented mindset is really, how do you take a step back? How do you think through a problem first before defaulting to AI, and then using AI in the right way? So using your human capabilities but augmenting them to be super powerful.

The example that I give to most people is taking a piece of paper, and if you've got a problem to solve, actually writing it down and trying to figure it out and brainstorm it, without going to a Google doc or straight to Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or whichever one you use. Really think about the problem, set yourself, and go through that level of friction, because by going through that level of friction you're using your brain, you're using your grey matter to sit down and ask the question of yourself first before you go to the machine.

I think stepping away is really important, and knowing when and where to use AI is going to be an important skill to have. It's very easy for me and you to just default to using AI, and knowing when we are being part of the algorithm. We see it every day. Google Maps, you default to the first place that comes up to you. Or you might be on Netflix, and I sat next to someone the other day and their Netflix recommendations were completely different to mine, and I thought they were very much the same, but that's the algorithm working. You think, this is the top ten that I should be watching, but actually that's because it's defaulted to you.

The other one is, why do you pick a thirty-minute or a sixty-minute meeting? It's because when the product manager for Google Calendar back in the day decided that they wanted to have a default meeting, it was thirty or sixty minutes. And that hasn't really changed. Can you imagine all of those lost minutes by trying to fill up those meetings? There are these long-term impacts.

Svenia BussonWhat about a fourteen-year-old? Can a fourteen-year-old think about when it's good to delegate and when they should do the work and accept the friction? What are you saying to your daughter?

This is something that I've debated in my head for quite some time. I've got a hard rule with my fourteen-year-old. She has not used any AI at all up until now. And I'm not sure if that's the right answer or the wrong answer. I've just written an article about what to teach your teen, how you would go about doing it and here are some resources. But I'm going to sit down with her this summer and try and teach her the guard rails around using AI. This is how you would use ChatGPT. Don't think of it as a cheat code. Here are some additional tools that you can use to do certain things. There's some stuff for fun, obviously, but there's some stuff to augment your thinking.

What I think I've instilled in her is that you have to go through that friction, otherwise you're not going to learn. We've seen students go through education having cheated, because it's easy to cheat using ChatGPT to get to those essays, which don't really look like essays because they're so bland, and submitting them and then getting a zero for it. Those are the examples I'm giving to my daughters: if you do this, one, you're going to fail, and two, you're going to be behind. We still live in this world of high-stakes exams. In the UK we have our GCSEs and A levels and then you go to university and you still have exams at the end of it. So it's still important to be able to prove that through, and it's not just experiential.

I think I might have failed in the social media thing, because that phone is very difficult to pry away from her. We've got other rules around phones. But I think if I was to be freewheeling around AI, it would be a disaster. And I'm not sure what other parents do. I know there are examples of other fourteen-year-olds or thirteen-year-olds or eleven-year-olds who are building amazing apps or using Claude Code and doing great things, but in the main I would draw a hard line.

Svenia BussonA lot of parents are in your position, where they don't really know what to do. There's really a need for supporting parents in navigating that.

Some parents that I've spoken to ask me what to do about AI, and I say, well, you can't make the decision unless you know it yourself, and so they need to go through the learning. We're in this weird world now where everyone is at a base of zero and is growing. What I say to them is, you need to have a stance on it, or you need to have some knowledge in how to use it in your day to day, before you can make a decision about what you do with your kids. And at the very least, go through this process with your kids.

Everyone is learning and the world is moving so quickly. My recommendations today will be different tomorrow and probably different in January. But in general, we're in this world where we have to learn all the time, where we have to unload what is no longer good, and we need to learn what is really pertinent to our day-to-day lives. And that's not just for the kids, but also for the parents, in that some of the stuff that they used to do for their day-to-day job is no longer relevant and they need to rethink how they do their job in the future.

Svenia BussonWhat should be the role of companies? Should they train us into these seven super skills? Is it their responsibility, or is it our own?

I would say both. The smart organisations will be thinking about this, but really, in advising individuals, I think you need to take agency into this. No one is going to suddenly say to you, hey, come and learn all of these skills, because it's a whole new training budget. Companies are not necessarily going to do that. Those with budget and those who are forward thinking are going to realise that this is where they need to lean into.

But I would say to individuals, first, please buy the book and have a read of it. That's my first plug. But these skills are so pertinent for the future. And it's not just me saying it. These are my seven skills, but you read all the reports, see what's going on, look through your own lens on what's happening, and take this hypothesis of these seven skills and say, do you think these are going to be important? And if you do think they're important, then go into them and go and learn them.

Equally, the concept of AI is going to be an ongoing stream. If you think about my augmented mindset, that involves learning AI. You need to be proficient at the very minimum. In five years' time AI literacy is going to be a given, it's going to be a norm, and so you need to get to that very quickly. We talk about 2030 as a point just because it's a round number, but get AI literate very quickly and then take a step forward from there. It's an important thing to take a step back yourself as an individual and say, look, what is my job turning into, and how do I protect it and how do I protect my career for the future? Some people are checking out and saying, look, I've only got five or ten years left, I'm going to see if I can survive and try to do things that mean I don't need to lean into this. But I think that's a copout. I think it's very risky.

Svenia BussonIf I really get into these seven super skills, do you think I will stay employable, or can I still be disrupted by AI?

Who knows what's going to happen with AI. It's moving so quickly, it is a vertical curve. But our biggest protection against that is to lean into skills that cannot be taken away by AI. I'll go back to that ladder. I still think all of those things are still important and you need to invest in those areas. It's just that this becomes an additional category that you need to invest in for your job.

For example, you can't just have these super skills and be an actuary. You still need a broadness of these skills. You still need soft skills in this new world. Actually they become more important. The concept of relationship is so important now, both with yourself, two with your peers and your team, but three, a relationship with a machine and how you're going to deal with that. So it's a combination of all of these things. These super skills on their own are the ones that become a differentiator for those who are not investing in it, and that's the way that I think you should think about it.

Svenia BussonThank you so much, Rahim, for sharing your experience, for sharing your work around these super skills, these human skills that are tremendously important. Is there anyone you'd suggest as a future guest? I'm particularly interested in the curiosity super skill, because schools and institutions sometimes tend to kill curiosity.

I love schools that are forward thinking. I'm a governor at a school in North London called Channing. It's a girls' school, a private school, and they very much look into these character buildings and character traits, and they instil these from a very young age. When I read through their documents and decided to speak to them about it, and having been a governor for a while, I was really wowed by it. So I would say, find these great schools. I could introduce you to the head of the junior school there, or the head, and the way that they talk about it and the way that they instil curiosity in these girls is just phenomenal, because of the way that you see these girls come out at the end. Someone who started from three and gone all the way through until eighteen, and you see how they've built up in character.

I think you'll see that these are the kind of people who, it doesn't matter what's going to happen to the world, they might be AI today or BI tomorrow or CI the next day, whatever it is that's going to hit them, because they've got this level of curiosity in the world, they're prepared for anything.

I give that as an example because I'm a governor there, but there are other great schools. I've seen some in the UAE, and how forward thinking they are around AI, and you speak to these schools and they're really instilling character within them as well as going down this AI route. So I don't think it's about the tech. I've been in edtech for all of this time and I'm obviously pro AI and pro technology, but I'm also pro human, and so these human skills are so important.

You can find them in different guises. Very forward-thinking CEOs or chief people officers. There are those who think long termist. They're not thinking, I need to cost cut. They're thinking, how do I take these individuals, provide a level of support and thinking around them, and see how we can grow because of this new future that we've got available, and how do we jump on the opportunity because of our human capital? That's a very different way of looking at AI. Where you think, oh, it's going to take my job, it's going to change everything, instead you think, okay, here is the opportunity ahead of us for the next five, ten years, even more.

Someone who's visionary in that way will be saying, okay, if that is the opportunity for us, what do we need to do to our human capital, to our team? How do we bolster our team to be able to deliver on that? Maybe we need to have new skill sets, maybe we need new individuals, and therefore what do we need to invest to get that return? That's a very different way of looking at it, and AI becomes an enhancer rather than an oh dear, what are we going to do tomorrow type thing.