Seasoned listeners to this broadcast are likely to recognise some of the themes that I am touching on this morning. Indeed, some hard-core fans with sound memories might even recall the source material I am drawing on from previous Christmas assemblies, because … well, because it’s Christmas, and any proper celebration of Christmas always requires drawing on certain traditions.

And, for many of us, Charles Dickens’ celebrated masterpiece, A Christmas Carol, the story of Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim is just such a tradition. So, that’s where I’m headed.

Published nearly two hundred years ago, in 1843, Dickens’ novella relates the story of an incorrigible old skinflint – a certain Ebenezer Scrooge – who comes to learn a life-changing lesson at the hands of a ghost and three seasonal spirits. Together these four spectres conspire to demonstrate to Scrooge that … yes, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll get to A Christmas Carol in just a moment.

Before doing that, I would like to start by reflecting on my last three days. I have spent them out of school, attending, first, a one-day government symposium and, following that, a two-day international school conference. Both the symposium and the conference were focused on the same topic – the latest “new kid on the block”, currently much discussed in education and, well, everywhere else, really. They were focused, that is, on AI - Artificial Intelligence.

With twenty-five years’ experience as a teacher behind me, I am old enough to have witnessed many technologies sweep across the school-landscape. Most of these “transformational” ‘new kids’ – from interactive whiteboards to tablet-based textbooks to VR headsets to MOOCs – burst on the scene in a flurry of hype and great excitement. They heralded, or so it was claimed, a ‘learning revolution’. Yet, once the dust settled, they turned out to have only marginal effects in the classroom, and, as weeks turned to months, and months turned to years, they largely faded from view, leaving schools more or less undisturbed in their wake.

However, this time, in the case of AI, I think it’s safe to say that the hype and excitement are justified. AI, we can be confident, will change education, pretty much root and branch. It may take two years, it may take ten, but what we have in AI is no flash in the pan. AI is, indeed, a game-changer.

What might this new game look like, once we begin to play it? No one really knows. The technoscape is changing too fast, the ripples are extending too wide, the repercussions are amassing too deep and too long. With the emergence of AI, school teaching is under the spotlight; school assessment is being scrutinized; school examinations are up for inspection; school curricula are back in the mix. Traditionally valued skills seem suddenly less relevant; novel and untested skills, on the other hand, seem suddenly rather vital. Schools, we can be sure, face a period of accelerating flux and turbulence – and for all of you in Year 10 or below, to one extent or another, it is likely to affect you directly.

So, what’s all this got to do with A Christmas Carol? Bear with me. I’ll explain.

As I sat in the audience, listening to a long line of these AI experts and gurus, and as I took on board their models and visions and their imagined futures, one theme began to grow ever more prominent in their proclamations – and the more prominent this theme grew and the more exclusive of others that might have supplanted it, the more worried I became.

The essential promise of AI, the experts agreed, the promise they kept returning to, was the increase it vouchsafed in both productivity and efficiency.

Productivity and efficiency, they told us, would go through the roof. In fact, even when they were ostensibly talking about something else – when, for example, they were discussing AI’s potential for boosting creativity or intensifying artistry or fuel-injecting imagination – they still kept coming back to this core idea: AI would make us more efficient and more productive in these domains. We would create more, and we would create faster.

That’s what got me thinking about A Christmas Carol. Let’s pause and consider for a moment the lesson that Scrooge learns from his odyssey. What is the great insight that so transforms Scrooge and, at the end of the book, gives new meaning and purpose to his life? Well, as it happens, answering this question doesn’t require reading the whole book at all, because the riddle is solved early on. It is solved in a single line from Scrooge’s first visitor, the Ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley.

Before his death, Marley had run a counting-house with Scrooge. Scrooge & Marley’s, as it was sensibly called, was a kind of small, independent bank, lending people money and making a profit by charging interest on these loans. Who uses such a counting-house? All sorts of people and for many different reasons; but, life being what it is, among Scrooge & Marley’s customers were some people who were in need, people without enough to get by, people out of funds, people down on their luck, buried in debt; in short, desperate and miserable people. People with no hope.

But, so what? After all, what was that to Scrooge & Marley? Why should that concern them? Provided they themselves can make a good living, why should they care if some of their customers cannot? If these customers are too inefficient to survive, or too unproductive to make ends meet, well, that’s their problem. It’s not for Scrooge & Marley to care if there are people who fall between the cracks, who get caught under the wheels of life, who fail its challenge.

And the fact is, Scrooge & Marley didn’t care. They were wealthy and successful men. They ran their business efficiently and productively; they turned a good profit and made a pretty penny; all was well.

That is, until Marley’s death.

For what Marley’s Ghost discovers, only on dying and only too late, is that, unbeknownst to him, he has spent his efficient and financially productive life creating a great chain for himself. A great chain forged over the years of his career as a merchant of money, the heavy and cumbersome links of which he must bear now as a burden. Weighed down by his prodigious chain, the Ghost is cursed to wander the earth in desolation for eternity. Such was his sentence.

But how can that be, demands Scrooge. You were always an excellent man of business.

Ah, there it is: “an excellent man of business”. Now falls the moment at which the Ghost of Jacob Marley can deliver the lesson that will save his old partner from his own desperate fate. Everything else that follows in Dickens’ story is a mere footnote to this moment, is needed only in order to drive this single point home, this vital point that, if taken to heart, makes all the difference.

‘Business!’ cried the ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’

Marley’s Ghost is quite clear: being efficient and being productive are not, in themselves, enough. In fact, they are altogether irrelevant – unless you are being efficient and productive at the right things, at the right times, for the right reasons. Unless your thoughts, intentions, and actions are concerned with the common welfare, concerned with charity and compassion, concerned with the betterment of others, then your overall efficiency and productivity is, in the end, a red herring. In fact, it’s worse than that; if your thoughts, intentions, and actions are indifferent to or exploitative of others, then your very efficiency and your very productivity will simply cause more suffering and more harm. In that case, your efficiency is a danger. Your productivity, a plague. Which is exactly how it was for the pre-revelatory Scrooge.

What then is the moral of my Christmas assembly? Let me spell it out.

In the shape of Artificial Intelligence, a technology is coming – a fantastically powerful technology that is set to revolutionise the way that schools do education and set to transform what it means to be a successful student. For better or worse, we are going to live through that revolution. We’re told not to worry. To be excited. We’re told that it’s a technology that will allow us to up our game, to make us all more efficient and more productive …

But … efficient at and productive of what? To that question, the technology itself is mute. It is not within it to provide an answer; we must decide for ourselves. My hope is that, both as individuals and as a community, whatever decisions we make, we will strive to resist the compulsions of efficiency and productivity for their own sake, strive to resist the temptations of getting things done just because they can be done, of churning things out just because they can be churned out.

In short, the moral is this: what matters, finally, is not so much the speed or quantity of our thoughts and actions, but the quality and strength of the values that underpin them – and the significance of these values for the others who must share our world. As with many technologies, AI may prove able to help us clarify and execute our values in both thought and action, but it is not capable of supplying those values in the first place. It is for us as a community to work together to achieve that end, to create a school that offers a space wherein good thoughts can be built on positive values. Can take root, be shared, can prosper.

Our most pressing concern, as teachers and as learners, is to hold in mind, in all we do, in all we achieve, in all we affect and all we produce, that we – and not AI – have decisions to make and that, in making them, mankind is our business.