When my eldest son was four years-old, we used to play in the garden. He would find a stick and run at me, saying: “Ah ha, Captain Hook! Let’s have a battle.”

Fast-forward a couple of years. We were on a camping trip in Devon. We went to collect wood for the campfire. I found two sticks and gave one to him. I said: “So, Peter Pan, we meet again.”

He said, “Daddy, that’s a stick, not a sword, and did you know stick begins with ‘st-‘ and ends in ‘-ick’. It rhymes with ‘brick’, you know.”

I said: “Well done, son,” but something inside me died.

The stickness of the stick, its potential to be a sword and a portal into an imagined realm had vanished. What had happened since our last battle? Henry had started school.

School is a place where you learn the literal names of things – a place where the stickness of a stick is of secondary value to the letter patterns and sounds that make up its name.

School is where lessons are long and playtimes are short. It is where my son is taught a curriculum of subjects and is then tested on the amount of knowledge he has remembered. The extent of his computational capacity (his grasp of the 3Rs of reading, remembering and regurgitating) is of greater value than the size of his imagination. Just like for the stick, the parts of Henry that can be seen, described and counted, count more than his hidden potential.  

Henry once propelled a toy car across the grass and told me where he was travelling to (usually America). Now he tells me what colour the car was and that he had found seven other blue cars in the classroom that day. Also, aeroplanes or ships are now the preferred modes of transport for getting to America: "If you drove there in a car, you’d sink," he once told me. How foolish of him to ever think you could get there in a car. 

Incalculable imagination

At school, Henry’s metaphoric competence is outranked by his capacity for literal meaning-making and logic – the naming of parts. Everything needs a value, a measurement. His incalculable imagination is just that, incalculable, and so instead we focus more on that which can be measured. 

And yet Polanyi’s paradox, in which we ‘know’ far more than we can articulate or provide evidence for knowing, tells us that we have greater capacities than those which we can evidence. Nowhere is this more apparent than in education.

Calculations and rational decisions dominate, but there will always be a more advanced learning partner in technology.

Robotics will soon outperform us in many areas of our lives, including school. Rather than feeling threatened by this, we should feel liberated. When computers free us up to devote more time to our hidden human capacities, our potential for imaginative play will be rediscovered again.

No longer will young learners be stripped of their unfathomable ability to pretend in order for them to do something more observable – and more easily measured – in class. Instead, they will be allowed to reconnect with the creativity and resourcefulness they showed during those pre-school days spent in the garden – the very skills and capacities that will be in demand in the future.

A glance at predictions of the future for employment, including the Future of Skills Report by Pearson, for example, shows us that wide-ranging megatrends in urbanisation, climate sustainability and technological change, to name but a few, are combining to rewrite the list of skills employers will be seeking in 2030 and beyond. Human capacities beyond retention and recall, like creative thinking and resourcefulness, will be highly prized. Pre-school children have these in abundance.

Why should we continue to skew the agenda in schools towards applied logic, information processing and knowledge retention when computers have already been outperforming us for decades?

Rediscovering humanity 

What else should we be looking for, and encouraging in schools, and how can technology help?

Questions like these are being asked at education conferences and festivals across the world these days, just as they should be, like the International Festival of Learning in Suffolk this summer, appropriately titled: Uniquely Human Skills in a Technological World.

If a revolution in education is indeed coming, let it not only be based on what AI can do for us; let it be driven by what we can do that AI can’t. May it force us to rediscover what it means to be human, just what and where our potential is and how best we can unlock it in the most formative years of school.  

Up to the age of about 7, a child learns subconsciously most of the time. Young learners can shift effortlessly between real and imagined realms because their brains have not yet developed sufficiently to be able perceive the difference. That's why childhood is so exciting – and so precious. In those moments when reality merges with fiction, new possibilities and solutions are formed.

Creating rich and memorable learning experiences for children is important not only for keeping their metaphoric competence alive. Learning needs to be rich because it's in these early stages that children’s characters are forged and set – for life.

It is a tragic irony that at the precise moment when children are programming their subconscious (which will drive their decision-making throughout their lives) we blunder in, reset the agenda towards making progress in literacy and numeracy, and start measuring their ability against adult norms and national expectations.

Childhood is about growth but nothing stunts growth more than sorting and ranking. If you think you are good at something in school when you’re 7, you will be good at it throughout your life. If you think you are bad at something in school aged 7, you will be bad at it for the rest of your life, because your seven-year-old subconscious brain tells you so.

All of us are still controlled by the lessons we learned in school, not from what the teacher believed she was teaching us, far from it; but from the way we felt, the way we thought and the way we perceived ourselves in relation to others. This was our curriculum.

But in this character-forming, yet creativity-zapping crucible that we call school, enter those augmented and virtual realities now afforded to us.

It's technology that has the potential to help us rewrite the curriculum we teach in schools and redesign the learning environment that our pupils experience each day. It is new technologies – with their capacity to create virtual and augmented realities – that can be the saviours of our children’s awe and wonder.

Let them create a backdrop to learning that is so rich and awe-inspiring, it leaves indelible marks in children’s memories – happy memories of childhood, upon which a secure adulthood is always built.

Andrew Hammond is headteacher at Guildhall Feoffment Primary School, Bury St Edmunds. He is also a patron of the International Festival of Learning that takes place this year on 28 June 2019, which is partnered with Pearson , and focused on the blend between technology and uniquely human skills