Running with Robots

The American High School's Third Century

Greg Toppo, Jim Tracy

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English

MIT Press
03 June 2025

Computing: general

How the technological changes that are reshaping the future of work will transform the American high school as well.

How the technological changes that are reshaping the future of work will transform the American high school as well.

What will high school education look like in twenty years? High school students are educated today to take their places in a knowledge economy. But the knowledge economy, based on the assumption that information is a scarce and precious commodity, is giving way to an economy in which information is ubiquitous, digital, and machine-generated. In Running with Robots, Greg Toppo and Jim Tracy show how the technological advances that are already changing the world of work will transform the American high school as well.

Toppo and Tracy-a journalist and an education leader, respectively-look at developments in artificial intelligence and other fields that promise to bring us not only driverless cars but doctorless patients, lawyerless clients, and possibly even teacherless students. They visit schools from New York City to Iowa that have begun preparing for this new world. Toppo and Tracy intersperse these reports from the present with bulletins from the future, telling the story of a high school principal who, Rip Van Winkle-style, sleeps for twenty years and, upon awakening in 2040, can hardly believe his eyes- the principal's amazingly efficient assistant is a robot, calculation is outsourced to computers, and students, grouped by competence and not grade level, focus on the conceptual. The lesson to be learned from both the present and the book's thought-experiment future- human and robotic skillsets are complementary, not in competition. We can run with robots, not against them.

By: Greg Toppo, Jim Tracy
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 133mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262548588
ISBN 10: 0262548585
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 03 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Greg Toppo, a journalist who has covered education for more than twenty years, is the author of The Game Believes in You- How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. Jim Tracy, Ph.D., has been the Head of several independent schools and also President of a teacher training college founded in collaboration with MIT. He has held many senior advisory positions, including Senior Advisor to the Executive Team at Jobs for the Future, Board Member at LearnLaunch, and member of the MassRobotics Advisory Board.