Exploring Learning Innovation with Graham Brown-Martin

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Aidan McCullen: Today’s guest takes us on a journey in search of innovation in the way we learn and teach.

His book asks the most vital questions about the purpose of education and the true role of technology in its transformation. It captures a broad canvas of opinions for many of the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners from the world of education, technology, and design, including the late Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, SUTA Mitra, Andreas Schlicker, and many, many others.

The book is now 10 years old, and I thought we’d share the thoughts of a pioneer in learning innovation, neurodiversity and regenerative economy. We welcome the author of Learning Reimagined. Now [00:01:00] revisited a decade later, Graham Brown. Martin, welcome to the show.

Graham Brown-Martin: Oh, thank you very much. What an auspicious introduction. I do appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Aidan McCullen: We were talking for like 20 minutes and we went down so many rabbit holes, like we better press record at this stage, I went down rabbit holes before I even joined you. I was preparing all day. Went down countless YouTube videos, the 30 short videos that you have on Vimeo that are part of the book as well.

And then you’re a prolific author on Medium and many other outlets as well. I thought I would give a little bit of background of that thing I mentioned the Pioneer because you’ve been doing this for decades at this stage , and across today’s show, I’d love to share. What you first worked on and what you were pioneering, and then how much has changed and how little has changed.

I thought that’d be a good way to set us up.

Graham Brown-Martin: Gosh, I don’t know how far you want to go back. Really. I think it’s interesting for me to remember that , I started working on mainframe computers which I [00:02:00] dunno how many of your listeners will know mainframes. These were enormous computers that were, take up whole, I mean like large rooms.

So my first proper job was at the Open University working on a big mainframe computer. Which was like the size of a bus really. With these big dis packs, the size of American washing machines, which you’d put your hand in and twist this thing in 10 megabytes, which was huge. Would come outta this. Of course, this has got less power than a feature phone. I mean, not even your smartphone, I mean the old Nokia feature phone. So that’s when this journey started. And that actually it was from that, that got me into. Computing for education. And I suppose initial ed tech with a, a scheme in the eighties called the Micros in School scheme, which was about I think the UK government at that time saw this, if you like, the third industrial revolution coming along , where desktop computers and so on, and how the future would be, or part of the future would be programming com [00:03:00] programming computers and using computers. And so they had this. This program to put computers into schools along , with educational software. And I started writing educational software on some of those very early micro computers in the eighties and, that’s how I got to know a company in Oxford called Research Machines.

I mean, there were the three companies that were supported by the government at that point were in this scheme were research machines or rm ACORN with the BBC Micro and Sinclair with the Spectrum and all that kind of stuff. So we were writing software for those kinds of things. And that was really interesting because, in one sense. I think the UK government got it right. Which was, , it’s a generator generation of people who were ready for that third prepared for that third industrial revolution. And actually, if you then see the effects of that, you roll that into the nineties. I., the uk would you believe was probably the leading country in video game [00:04:00] design.

 These sort of old games that we used to play on our BBC like elite and so on. This software engineering came out of the uk. I mean that, that soon passed as we moved into this century. But it was interesting because. As things developed as we moved into the third industrial revolution a lot of lobbying that went on with government was really from very large corporations that, that weren’t, that weren’t based in Europe, that were, you know, mainly US corporations that were advising government, I mean, here and, and other places, and saying, well, actually, you don’t really need to know how to com program the computer so much.

Now you need to, to learn how to use office applications. And, and those kinds of things. And you know, and, and by and large that was probably right, because actually not everyone’s gonna be a computer programmer, right? We need to be able to use computers and, and, and so on. But that was that sort of transition that happened. And then there was a sort of resurgence of this education and computers and schools and everything else. It then started again. I mean, in this century, [00:05:00] I mean, just, just, I, I suppose probably the last, over the last 10 years, this idea of being makers rather than consumers. technology has been a big part of that.

So I’ve still seen these cycles go round and round. I jumped out of educational computing ’cause I was inspired by a gentleman called Seymour Papper who was one of the revered learning theorists and best known for the learning theory of our constructionism. Which is different from Instructionism.

So the sort of education that we have in schools today might be termed as instructionism, which is I’ll tell you how to do something and you do it, and I’ll tell you whether you’ve done it right and they’ll test you. And that kind of stuff is broadcast. Medium PEPPER had a different idea, which was that, that, that we would use computers.

So in that other instruction is ideas. Okay, well if education is instruction, then we’ll use computers to do it more efficiently. Whereas he thought, actually no. We could use computers to do something different. We could use computers as a tool of inquiry and creativity. And project-based learning and [00:06:00] so forth.

So a lot of those ideas came from Sumo Papa. I’m sure we’ll come back to that later in this conversation. ’cause I think it’s relevant to the transition that we’re now making as we go from the, we’re in the fourth industrial revolution, aren’t we? And how we then move into the fifth. But I should point out that I took a sort of a detour. On the way to this bit was that , in the work that I’d been doing in the late eighties and early nineties around what we used to call multimedia and CD rom and interactive CD ROM and all those kind of things. 

I had a company, I. Then I started when I was about 21. That developed a lot of the very early technology around audio and video compression. A lot of the things we take for granted now on our phones and all that kind of business, we still have patents for that and so on. But what I found was that it was actually, although I was imagining it, that technology to be used in education, like encyclopedia with videos and all that kind of stuff, which of course did happen. I got more traction in the music industry and the feature film industry and the video game industry. So [00:07:00] for the nineties was really pretty much me involved in the music industry and just disrupting it a little bit and creating record labels and so forth. And here we are.

Aidan McCullen: That work you did, you then have seen it pay dividends . I mentioned the 30 videos on Vimeo as well. I’ll link to those in the show notes, but I wanted to jump on that thing, that idea of instructionism versus constructionism

Graham Brown-Martin: yes. Yeah. I mean, the different learning theories and different approaches to, to, to learning and education.

And I don’t think it’s necessarily, either or. It’s having a balance, but , because of the way that we have to some extent industrialized our education systems we’ve tended to lean towards instructionism. Because actually, if you look at the way the assessment system works, we the assessment system hasn’t really changed in, in, in, in a very long time. Has it really? , if we look at what our children are doing at school, it’s probably pretty much the same thing as we were doing at school.

I’m reminded of , a time when my when one of my teenage daughters, when they were a [00:08:00] child, said to my mother, my late mother, when she was doing a project , at school, she says, Nana, , what was school like when you were at school? And she said, probably the same as you. And this was interesting ’cause she, because actually absolutely right.

Really it was very much about the inculcation of facts and procedures and then. The test, which makes sure that I’ve been able to, remember and absorb those facts and procedures for long enough to pass a test. And also that would be a performance metric for the teacher to see how good they were at inculcating those facts and procedures and that kind of broadcast teacher at the front. Type mode , is a form of instructionism and it goes back actually to the church and things like that when we had one, only one copy of a Bible and everyone would then make their own copy by reciting it and writing it down and so on. So , that’s where that came from.

This kind of broadcast thing and instructionism and that’s how we test. [00:09:00] And so because we test that way, things haven’t changed in all this time. We have this tyranny of measurement. And this goes back to sort of industrial processes, and we can trace this back to like the original management consultant, if you like, Frederick Taylor who, got his measuring stick out , and transformed craft production into mass production, industrialization, this was the first industrial revolution and second industrial revolution. I mean, and, and I say that in a sort of sneering way, but actually. In many ways. It created a lot of progress. , the fact of, , we look around our home and our things , and the sort of mass manufacturing and so forth. I mean, it has improved people’s lives a great deal.

That idea of measuring things and being able to create processes. And rules , and data to drive those processes to improve manufacturing. And we [00:10:00] had an education system designed to support that. And it got us to here. I think where we’re going is probably not gonna get as much further unless we make some course corrections. 

Aidan McCullen: This is where I like the Venn diagrams of all your experiences and, , the innovation part because , I have the book there, the Winslow Taylor. There’s a book called The One Best Way Frederick Winslow Taylor. And so it’s the story of him and how he created the One Best Way. And I thought, as I said, I did a lot of research on you and listened to podcasts and YouTube videos, et cetera, and what I like about what your message is that you can’t just fix one part of the system. So there’s the education system and the idea that you’ve created almost everybody the same. And because the metrics are the same and deviation is not often rewarded. 

Yes. I had this experience with my son recently, so he was kind of, I want to go off the beaten track a little bit with my essays and stuff like that. And , we’re lucky enough to be able to give him [00:11:00] grinds. So we give him grinds and then he gets rewarded by some teachers for actually going off the beaten track and given a different answer from everybody else.

So sometimes it works, but then I thought fast forward to him being in a consultancy or working for an organization. And people don’t really want people to go off the beaten track. They want people to execute and exploit the current advantage, not find a new one. In most organizations, yes, that’s what most organizations need.

So that’s the second part. And then there’s what’s rewarded in society. So one of the things, I think the way you put it was. That the highly valued jobs, are not highly valuable. So being a nurse, being an educator, are highly valued, yet they’re not highly valuable. You don’t get paid a lot in those jobs, and that system needs to change. It’s systemic. The entire change is systemic.

Graham Brown-Martin: I think you’ve summarized a lot of my thinking actually. Which is enormously useful. I’m glad that it’s recorded. ’cause [00:12:00] I might use that. But no, that’s absolutely right. A lot of people have come to me and sort of said, okay, look, if we fix education, we can fix society.

And, it’s a wonderful notion and I wish it was true. But I don’t think that’s how it works, unfortunately. And I think that these things are interlocking. Smarter people than me have written about this. You could go back to Marks actually, if you wanted to. The sort of superstructure and base. And I’m not doing this from a kind of a socialist perspective or anything like that. It’s just how societies work. We have a base, which is the economy, and then the superstructures, which support that, whether it’s mass media, religion education , and so forth.

And they maintain the base. , and the thing is, if you’ve benefited from the status quo, the base being a status quo, you’ve got no motivation to change it. And so things get locked in there. But over time, of course, if those things shift. Those structures will come , to stabilize the status quo.

We see that all the time as soon as a political leader or even a business leader , or anybody [00:13:00] is threatening the status quo. I. You’ll find a lot of organizations and structures and everything else coming around to, to defend it. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes perhaps not.

Sometimes it’s maintaining self-interest and so forth. And it’s interesting that you mentioned your son who will. Go down his own direction, of passions of interest and so on. And I think this is really interesting and also an indicator for the future because we’ve lived in an education system in a society, and when you do a test and examination, there’s one right answer. Do you know what I mean? 

Now. Okay. Two plus two is four. Yes, I get it. But we’re not talking about that, are we? We’re talking about interpretations of things. We’re talking about how we respond to challenges, how to respond to problems and, and, and so on. And actually, if we look at nature and biodiversity, the reason why there is such biodiversity is so that if there is a, an environmental shock. There’s enough difference [00:14:00] between the with, you know, the different sort of, you know, with, let’s say it’s flora and fauna to respond to that in some way. Okay. So it’s not, they’re not all responding in the same way, if we had a monoculture, if we didn’t have diversity , in the natural world and then there was a threat, then the chances are that it wouldn’t survive. Now the same is true of businesses and organizations and corporations. I mind you to think of, say and I’m not picking any one particular one, but I’m gonna say Blackberry. Now, when Blackberry, of course, they were hyper successful, weren’t they right at the beginning and then all of a sudden they weren’t.

And if you looked at the organization when it collapsed, everyone on the board was from an accounting and finance background. And I don’t have a problem with accountants and financing. What I’m saying is that they all came from the same sort of background. They weren’t. They weren’t particularly diverse in their thinking. And of course they were then adapted, you know, it’s like groupthink. This sort, the sort of idea groupthink. So when a threat came from outside, and in [00:15:00] this case it was the iPhone and touchscreens and all that kinda stuff, they didn’t know how to respond.

They just, okay, we’ve got a real keyboard. We, there’s no way they could beat us. The rest is history, right? And it collapsed. And that’s because there wasn’t enough diversity and different ways of approaching a challenge in order to respond. They were, it was a monoculture and I think that’s problematic.

So if we have an education system which outputs a monoculture , or we have society or organizations that don’t have that sort of diversity in them, then I think innovation stalls. , and I suppose quite timely actually, given the kind of things that are happening in the world right now. But I’ve got a record and I continue to go on record and saying that diversity drives innovation. So I think that back to your point with your son, I think, congratulations to you in supporting his passion and his ability because he’s directing his own learning. I think that’s a good thing, and I think there’s not enough opportunities within our [00:16:00] existing education systems to do that. And I say that to someone who was expelled from school at 15 because that was a self-directed learner. I think I did most of my learning when I was playing hooky and going into London and spending time in the science museum and stealing books from foils.

Aidan McCullen: But I genuinely believe that’s why you have the success you’ve had in a different field. And , I told my son this, I was like, going, look, if at the very least you treat school as a way that anything in life works, which is you have to be disciplined to. Complete what you say you will complete by a certain date.

I said that is in every single sport. That’s in music, that’s in everything. If you wanted to go those ways, at the very least, learn that as a template to do things. That’s, but then I told ’em the story. I dunno if you noticed the story. Le Petit Chaperon Rouge is. The Little Red Riding Hood.

And the story is really, don’t deviate from the path because it’s dangerous, especially for little girls. That’s what the story is actually to do, to [00:17:00] warn children. And a lot of those, a lot of those nursery rhymes were, or those children’s stories were to warn children from deviation. And I thought about that.

And then to your point about Blackberry. , in my workshops, I tell the story of the Irish Potato famine that we were reliant on one type of potato. That was one of the big problems. While there’s like 150 species, we had won the Lumper Potato. And that businesses not only rely on only certain types of people that succeed within, inside the organization, but they actively, and inactively actually often they don’t know.

They ostracize different thinkers or different thinkers leave because they don’t feel welcome or they’re actually in some cases gaslit or 

Graham Brown-Martin: a, it is like an innovation immune system.

Aidan McCullen: Yeah. And, and, and I, and I get it to a point, but to your point with the speed of change of innovation today and the cycles of change so quick that you actually don’t have time to adapt.

So there’s another element in [00:18:00] nature, which is pre adaptation where there’s some DNA in a species that’s ready in case the environment changes. And that’s the way I see. Neurodivergence, different thinkers, within an organization. So the organization almost needs to, if they want to call it, tolerate them for the change in the system and then they come into their 

Graham Brown-Martin: I think the neurodivergence thing is interesting. I’m myself neurodivergent. I’m autistic with DHD but a late diagnosis, I only got a formal diagnosis five years ago, so I’ve still been leaning into that and understanding more about it and so on. But, and then looking at my life in the sort of rear view mirror and just like, oh, okay.

Oh, now I get what was going on there and all that kind of business. Now the thing about Neurodivergence is it’s not a recent phenomenon. I mean, neurodivergent people are humans. Humans have always been neurodivergent and to a, to a greater or lesser degree. And, but we have this arbitrary normal, which came out of industrialization.

The arbitrary normal, the thing that we call neuro typic and everything else is the result [00:19:00] of the first industrial revolution. , what you’re doing is you’re taking a group of people, many, many of us who were used to being outside, being hunter gatherers, if you wanna go back far enough and so forth.

But of course, the education act that came into power in the UK was about taking these unruly people from the countryside, from the agricultural world, from of cottage industries and so forth, and then putting them through a process. Of training them to prepare them for the first and the second industrial revolution. And that required a certain level of consistency in the output of those, of those schools and colleges and so on. And also, there were practical issues. In those days, not everyone had access to a library. We didn’t actually have, pocket calculators and all that kind of stuff.

So mental arithmetic and being able to remember. Large parts of books and all that was very valuable at that point, particularly when, the British had its empire and all that kind of stuff , and so it just sort of replicated [00:20:00] that whole thing out there. But those education systems, certainly the education systems of the 20th century, what it valued was efficiency and consistency. What you wanted was a workforce, whether it was in the shops, in the offices or the factory that would generally sit still for up to eight hours a day. 

Not ask too many questions, perform the role, often repetitive tasks, because remember by that time, Frederick Taylor and then McKinsey and all these different consultancies have had their way in terms of creating processes and rules and data-driven and all that kind of business. And so what we really had was human robots and not everybody was good at that. Do you know what I mean? And so this is where we got the idea of neurodivergence and I’m talking about genetic neurodivergence here. I’m not talking about acquired neurodivergence like MPD or PTSD , or those kind of things, which is a consequence of environmental or chemical trauma.

I’m just talking about your sort of autism and ADHD [00:21:00] and dyslexia and all these kind things. These are all valuable traits. Incredibly valuable traits. If you look back at history and you look back at how we survived as a species and how we fed ourselves and so on. These were incredibly valuable traits, but in a situation where we want to put you on the sort of a conveyor belt so that the output would be a consistent and efficient workforce, neurodivergent people to a greater risk degree would fall out of that system. You know what I mean? 

And I was one of those people. And there are others. So this idea then , as we go through a sort of a shift in society, a shift in the world, , and I think why it’s opposite to this conversation is ’cause we are in this fourth industrial revolution at the moment. And we’re still seeing it. I think a lot of people have got almost like daily shock by the kind of amazing things and also the frightening things that the AI and robots and so on can do. , but this is a logical conclusion of industrialization. This is what [00:22:00] happens, you know?

Graham Brown-Martin: And I think it’s a good thing. I think we should accelerate it if we can. No, we can do it safely. It’s the idea that if we define everything by a detailed job description, if we have processes and rules and then data and it’s done by that, then we can automate it. Which means that by the end of the fourth industrial revolution, and we’re just at the beginning of it now, but it’s probably got another 10 years to go, we would’ve been able to automate everything that’s governed by repetitive tasks, process rules and data-driven stuff, and all that kind of business. And it’s like that stuff will go. And the interesting thing about this is that in the past, if we look at the sort of the second and third industrial revolutions, we saw technological unemployment, but it tended to be blue collar workers. The working classes and so forth and rightly or wrongly, and I think wrongly, we didn’t pay enough attention to that.

That’s why we ended up getting what guy standing from the London School of Economics called the Precariat, where you moved, manufacturing, say, from different parts of [00:23:00] the country. To where it was cheap. ’cause profit use, profit, incentive and everything else. And that’s absolutely fine.

You move the jobs but then you have to retrain, you have to kind of. Retrain people, lifelong learning, all that kinda stuff. But that didn’t happen. Of course, it’s successive governments and it doesn’t matter which party we’re talking about. They all, they were all as bad as each other in a way. And different parts of the world didn’t pay any attention. And so, you know, that ended up, I mean, we are seeing it now. I mean, in, you know, last summer in, in, in, in the uk, in London, you know, riots but people blaming, you know, there’s, there’s, suddenly there’s people have less money because apparently we’ve got more millionaires and billionaires than ever, but money’s a finite resource. 

So where do they think that money came from? It certainly didn’t come from the poor people that you’re burning in hotels. Do you know what I mean? But that’s the way society works. But anyway, the point is that we are moving through this in one sense, an amazing time in history where what we’ve called work is being automated. So then we have to think, okay, well, but we still have an [00:24:00] education system that’s having that output and it’s still going. It’s like this machine that we can’t stop. And we also have governments here, but everywhere who are still locked into this economic thinking of the second really industrial revolution. First and second, not even really the third. To be honest, which is we work this many hours a day and we take this salary and all that kinda stuff.

And it worked from the sort of 1950s and everything else. Do you know what I mean? Where everyone could afford a house and so on. But we’re now seeing is greater inequality because of what I mentioned earlier. So my point is. What happens next? What happens in the fifth industrial revolution when all these jobs have been automated?

Well, the jobs of the future, I’ve often said, are the ones that machines can’t do. And the things that machines aren’t good at are things like intuition, empathy, social interaction, complex problem solving, creativity, imagination. And these things are uniquely human. And these are the [00:25:00] sort of things that we were trying to eek out of, back to the thing about your son going off on his own path being, we didn’t want creativity , on the factory production line. We didn’t want someone to go, oh, I wonder what the red wire does, rather than the blue one. We didn’t really want creative accounting, but if we did, we didn’t want anyone to talk about it.

Do you know what I mean? And all that kinda stuff. I mean it very much like that. But now of course when we look at the future of employment, it’s like, well. What we actually need is these people that have these human capacities, creative innovators, writers, artists, teachers, counselors, nurses, doctors. It’s not that they won’t work with ai. It is just that. It’s, I think the fifth industrial revolution could be amazing. I mean, this is a kind of, it’s not competing with machines, which is what we’re doing at the moment. It’s about actually collaboration with machines, we are doing the stuff that humans are really good at and machines frankly would never be good at. And the machines are mean, are very good at things that, [00:26:00] much better at some things, we don’t really like all that process and data driven stuff. Not really just, some people might do, but I’m talking about en masse, so it could be really good. But the problem really is this. I think you had a guest on one of your shows which talks about the economic singularity. And I think it’s economic singularity , is a problem, is a potential problem because it has two kind of potential outputs. The economic singularity is when the jobs that have been replaced, the jobs that are actually being, that are available to humans are not economically valued. We don’t pay. And, what I mean? There’s a mix up. What we’ve done is we’ve. Industrialize things so much and with AI and everything else. And then the wealth as I was mentioning earlier, has been concentrated to an ever smaller number of people.

We’re hearing the term oligarchy being thrown around a lot at the moment. But it’s a real thing, isn’t it? It’s a real thing, that’s not even a political point. It’s just this is what’s happened. It’s like, 400 years of liberalism, which the John Locker course was about. [00:27:00] Wrestling power away from the monarchy and giving it to the people in the term of free markets. It turned into his grave, wouldn’t he? We just go, oh my gosh, it’s great. New monarchies. Do you know what I mean? And it’s like, okay, well what do we do? Because it’s like, I think we are holding ourselves back from an amazing future. If we don’t change the economic model and the way that we value things, and there’s all kinds of different ways of doing this. I mean, from wealth redistribution to different kinds of I, I don’t like the term universal basic income because of the word basic. ’cause I think that’s just nonsense. I think it’s like, but they’re all, it is a choice about how we do these things.

But to your point that you’re making about my point is that. You could only, I’m talking about formal education. I’m talking about, the schools and universities like that can only really be transformed in response to an economic model, which is of course the kind of what I call, what I tell the base, the sort of a, [00:28:00] the status quo and everything else. The problem is that we’re in this kind of stalemate situation where there’s a small number of people in the world that have all the money. And we’ve got these massive inequalities and everything else. And actually to get past this, you have to redistribute that money. So one kind of possibility of an economic singularity is a dystopian, the precariat at internet scale globally, I mean, significant. Global civil disobedience violence perhaps. And , it could be, yeah, your worst kind of hunger gains type scenario. It could be that, or it could be radical abundance. We could get to the point where we’ve automated things so efficiently that the, that we could all have, and I be it, by all I mean everybody on the planet have what they need. To live. We could have done that with the amount of money that was spent on Covid, that the world spent around a [00:29:00] $19 trillion, I believe, in supporting the status quo during covid. Now some sort of cigarette packet mathematics here, $19 trillion would allow you to provide every single human being on the planet with food. Water, shelter, high quality education, high quality healthcare for life. Now, imagine what the world would be like if you did that. If everyone has everything that they need, people, that are getting their knickers in a twist of immigration. It’s like, do you mean all these, the things that we, that we seem to fight about and get upset about and everything else would disappear, wouldn’t they? To a great extent. I’m sure someone would be upset about something, maybe a football match or something, but not the kind of things that we’re seeing now.

And these are choices that we make and it’s like I think we are at this. [00:30:00] Just amazing time, we look, we are in spitting distance of going, okay, this is what our G seven or whatever number they’re calling it at the moment should be talking about saying, let’s look at, look, we’ve got this amazing technology globally.

We’ve arrived here. This is, we should all congratulate ourselves for getting to this point in the world. We don’t actually have to do all the kind of stuff that we had to do to get here. How can we now redesign society radically? Be through abundance so that, that we can have a, what people were talking about during covid, a genuine people and planet recovery. It is possible, but I think that back to the sort of education and so on, it’s like. We know that, people always say, what are the jobs of the future? What are the jobs of the future? But , we know they’re the ones that machines can’t do. Therefore, we know there are, with the capacities that I just talked about, the problem, , the fly in the ointment, as I said, is [00:31:00] that, but how are they gonna, we’re gonna need those people doing those jobs, but are they all gonna be on minimum wage?

It’s a bit like social care workers. The people that look after the elderly. These are classified as unskilled labor. I just don’t see how it is unskilled labor to be working in a care home. Caring for the elderly is not unskilled. And yet the reason why it’s classified like that is because of private equity owning all the care homes and trying to do, do you know what I mean?

Again, I’m not, I’m really not trying to make this political. It’s the sort of nature of this kind of late stage capitalism that we’re in at the moment. And I’m not saying capitalism is a bad thing. I’m just saying this version is perhaps not optimal for a happy society. You know what I mean?

So I think that, I think we. We are on the cusp of being able to make radical transformations, but we have to have joined up thinking, it was like, it was nice to have been invited onto Sky News and talk to Beth Rigby after the UK [00:32:00] government made this announcement about the AI action plan and everything else.

Fantastic. Great. I’m down for it, but there’s no joined up thinking between the sort of different aspects of society, including education. With work and so on. And yes, AI automation, it’s all super new, but it’s not really, we’ve had these conversations before. we had the conversations when we shut down manufacturing, when we shut down mining and all those kind of things.

Aidan McCullen: All these things. Maybe they should have been, maybe that was a good idea. But we didn’t plan for that. And it doesn’t seem to me that. Globally, actually, I’m not blaming one particular government or the other. There is that sort of sense of going, okay, we could go here, we could do this, but we then have to, we have to do everything structurally to get us there, 

 The big worry I would there’s a quote by Alexander Soni, well fed horses don’t rampage. And I always think that it’s not well fed, only [00:33:00] nourishment, but actually purpose, and that would be the big kind of concern. We won’t go down 

Graham Brown-Martin: Yeah. But, but I mean, I just have a quick one on that one. I mean, I am absolutely right. I mean, struggle, stimulus, all that kind of business. I mean, of course. I mean, I, I don’t think I’m suggesting communism or any of those kind of things that kind of like, but I think at the moment we are programmed from a very young age as profit, as purpose. Economic success as purpose. That’s make believe. That’s just a construct. The purpose of a teacher or a nurse or the sort of human things is to nurture each other to be able to go further. Maybe our destiny is in the stars. Maybe going to Mars or maybe it is, but it is, it is it for all of us. You know what I mean? I, I, I think, I don’t think we lose purpose just by having what we need to live.

Aidan McCullen: Absolutely. man. And one of the most beautiful definitions I think of education is the root of the word, Educe, which means to [00:34:00] draw out. And I always think about that to draw out. Your unique abilities to draw, your unique reason why you’re on this planet, you like you individually, and , I think that’s at the heart of all the work you do and what this podcast is about.

I’m gonna ask Graham where people can find you because you, I mentioned your prolific writer, et cetera. Where’s the best place for people to 

Graham Brown-Martin: probably best thing to go to is grahambrownmartin.com and that should take you to different places, and if it doesn’t, there’s also a contact thing on there. You can just hit me up and I always like getting emails and messages, so I’ll always reply.

Aidan McCullen: Brilliant. Well, it was an absolute pleasure talking to you. As I said, went way over and we, and by the way, we did 20 minutes off air before we even started, but it’s an absolute pleasure.

Graham Brown-Martin: Thank you so much. The pleasure was mine.

Aidan McCullen: Thanks, William Gray and Brown Martin, thank you for joining us.

Graham Brown-Martin: Take care. Bye bye.

Thanks for joining us on Inside Learning. Inside Learning is brought to you by the Learn of eight Center in Trinity College. Dublin. Learn of eight is funded by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. Visit [00:35:00] learn of eight center.org to find out more about our research on the science of learning and the future of work.