Science & Tech
How AI could radically change schools by 2050

Howard Gardner (right) was joined by Anthea Roberts.

Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

September 19, 2025 4 min read

In Ed School panel, Howard Gardner says tech could make ‘most cognitive aspects of mind’ optional for humans

By 2050, education will look radically different than it does now, according to psychologist and social scientist Howard Gardner — the originator of the theory of multiple intelligences — and Anthea Roberts, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and founder and CEO of the AI tool Dragonfly Thinking.

Gardner, speaking during a forum Wednesday at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called AI as fundamental a change to education as the world had seen in 1,000 years — and even said it may render obsolete many of the forms of mind he is famous for describing.

“The need to have everybody in the class doing the same thing, being assessed in the same way, will seem totally old-fashioned,” he said.

The forum, titled “Thinking in an AI-Augmented World,” took place in Longfellow Hall and was hosted by Martin West, academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education.

“AI is already shaping the future of education in ways that everyone in the sector, from policymakers and leaders to teachers, parents, and students, needs to understand,” West said.

Gardner and Roberts offered distinct perspectives of an AI-augmented education system.

In Gardner’s view, by about 2050, every child would need a few years of schooling in the Three R’s: “Reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic, and a little bit of coding,” he said. After that, teachers who functioned more as coaches would expose students to activities that would challenge their thinking, expose them to ideas, and guide them toward professions that excite them. “I don’t think going to school for 10 or 15 years as we’ve done it makes sense,” said Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education.

Roberts offered another vision. Where previously knowledge production was “the actor on the stage, the athlete on the field, the writer of the book,” the next generation must be trained to orchestrate a team of AIs. “You become the director of the actor, you become the coach of the athlete, and you become the editor of the writer,” she said. “It requires actually having very strong faculties in terms of how you’re engaging.”

Gardner said artificial intelligence has him rethinking some of his previous ideas on essential cognitive abilities. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, first published in the 1983 book “Frames of Mind,” outlined distinct types of intellectual competency: logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

A later contribution, “Five Minds for the Future” (2005), posited five kinds of minds that education policy should aim to develop: the disciplined mind (learning subjects like history, biology or math); the synthesizing mind (putting strands of thought together in sensible ways); and the creating mind (“This is one we’re all interested in but it’s rare: It’s coming up with something new which actually sticks,” Gardner said). Two other modes — the respectful mind and the ethical mind — help us deal with other people and with complex societal problems.

Artificial intelligence, Gardner said, may soon displace three of the five.

“I think most cognitive aspects of mind — the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, and the creative mind — will be done so well by large language machines and mechanisms that whether we do them as humans will be optional,” he said. “On the other hand, I don’t believe for a minute that aspects of respect — how we deal with other human beings — and ethics — how we deal with difficult issues as citizens, as professionals — can or should be consigned to even the most articulate and multifaceted, intelligent machines.”

The panelists acknowledged concerns that students might offload cognitive labor to AI, decreasing their critical reasoning skills.

“You absolutely will have the chance to cognitively offload,” Roberts said. “And you absolutely will have the chance to cognitively expand. Our duty as individuals and as educators is to try to work out how we do that expansion rather than that replacement. There isn’t a clear answer to that yet.”

Roberts said that she was compelled to put her academic books back on the shelf and start building AI tools after a younger colleague developed a “Robo-Anthea” that could converse fluently from her perspective.

“I now spend almost all my time in constant dialogue with LLMs,” said Roberts, who is also a professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. “In all my academic work, I have Gemini, GPT, and Claude open and in dialogue. … I feed their answers to each other. I’m constantly having a conversation across the four of us.”