Something that of course interests anybody who’s taught in a school or in a university, is how to teach. And I haven’t a clue how to teach, as a matter of fact, although I’ve taught for years and years and years. I never had a lesson in my life on how to teach. I became a lecturer at Cambridge without one lesson on teaching, on how to teach, quite an extraordinary thing, you know, plunged into it and you’re supposed to do it, you know, which actually I did. I loved teaching, it was never a problem, and I used to give lectures, actually, I must admit, minimum of sort of previous work on it. I’d just sort of stand up there and give a lecture pretty well, which sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. I now think one ought to be prepare an awful lot more than I did at that time. But now there’s a very tricky point here. Cambridge then and now, and Oxford, very much based on individual contact with the teacher to the student. You do have big lectures and so on but they also have about an hour a week where you discuss with one teacher or maybe two students together, maybe one, not more than two though, a particular topic and you write an essay and the essay is then read by that teacher, supervisor, as he’s called, and pulled to pieces. So you see the work that you’ve been doing for a week absolutely torn to pieces by somebody who’s taken the trouble to read it properly, knows the subject and also knows how to think and write. Now, I personally believe that this is really important, that at university level you need individual discussion with the teacher, individual criticism of your work, in detail. But, how on earth can you do that now when 50% of the population go to university, enormous number of teachers, limited finance into the universities, might be they’re completely under financed, so that, you know, the government tends to say education, education, education, and there’s no money given. Well, I say no money, I mean far too little. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s practical to have the ways of teaching in Oxford and Cambridge into all the universities even if the money was there, the people wouldn’t be there to do it. So I think this is a great problem. Now, I wonder you know whether one can really use modern technologies for replacing, if you like, the person to person relationship of supervision, how far IT, as I believe it’s called, can actually replace that intimate criticism and the opposite, every now and again a slap on back, you know, a little indication that you’ve done rather well. How can you do that mechanically? You’ve got mechanic or machines and whatnot in industry producing loads of goods whereas people used to do it by hand, can you do that for teaching? Can you actually have machines teach human beings interactively? And that, I think, ultimately depends on making machines intelligent. Will it ever be possible to have a machine that you can converse with, that you can not only get an amazing amount of information from, which you can from the web or net, whatever it’s called, now, which is wonderful, but even more intimately, perhaps by talking to the machine? And I think this will come actually. I think that the enormous memory of computers almost certainly can be harnessed for teaching in an interactive way once we develop artificial intelligence. That’s my guess. Then I think we can get universal education at a really high level, like in Oxford and Cambridge. That’s a sort of dream but I’d like to see that come about, I really would.
