Education for Superbrain: Is the technological agenda suffocating education?

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Our connection to technology is like a love-hate relationship. Technology gave us vaccines, video calls, and much more. Yet despite the good, it can also become a toxic logic of rationality and measurable results that may be at odds with the spirit of education. When we are so focused on efficiency, effectiveness, and functionality, how does that shape people?

The machine culture we live in tries to achieve fixed goals with minimum input. But when it comes to education, the process is more like farming. It is a slow cultivation of human literacy and shaping lives. Education unfolds the potential of the young, searching for national futures, developing culture and civilization. There is no shortcut.

Yet technology’s logic creates an environment of accountability through measurements and hierarchy. It bends for conformity, standardization and linear progression in the name of fairness, but squashes inspiration and creativity along the way. In such a context, is there room for education to be an open system for human interaction with society, valuing relationships and surprises over certainty?

Humanity is undergoing another industrial revolution through AI, genetic engineering, and the internet of things—intensified by the pandemic, globalization, and digitization of finance. The time is ripe for us to pause and reflect on how machine culture impacts education, and to seek alternative paradigms for its future.

Lumina College, founded in 2015, offers adult learners a different kind of education, one that reflects on and reacts to the implications of our individual and collective values. As a Christian academic community rooted in Hong Kong with global partnerships, Lumina explores the ways of the world through the lens of faith. It is only one way, but hopefully one that stimulates many others.