The Examined Life

Sir Anthony Seldon - What is the purpose of education?

• Kenneth Primrose

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Sir Anthony Seldon is one of the most influential voices in the UK on education. He has led three prominent independent school, and written or edited more than 40 books.

In this episode we explore how education can honour what truly matters in a time when AI can outscore us on the tests we designed. Sir Anthony Seldon lays out a shift from human capital to human flourishing, urging schools to cultivate agency, character, and love of learning.

• redefining the purpose of education toward human flourishing
• harms of exam-driven systems and narrow metrics
• every child’s unique gifts and “song”
• AI exposing the limits of cognitive-only assessment
• OECD’s human flourishing model and core competences
• coaching pedagogy to build agency and judgment
• practices for inner life, mindfulness, and body care
• virtues and pro-social habits for a resilient future
• choosing subjects you love to sustain motivation
• balancing measurable outcomes with the immeasurable

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Any feedback or ideas can be emailed to me at kp@examined-life.com


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SPEAKER_01:

We're human beings, in the same way that you can't measure the beauty of a sunset, um, in that numerical way, or what makes your heart sing, what makes your life worth living, just because you cannot measure it does not mean that it doesn't matter. For human beings, often the most important things in our life, when we look back at the end of our lives, the things that we'll be thinking about, most of them will be, by their very nature, immeasurable. So, how can we respect those things that never, never under the sun will ever be able to be measured?

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, and welcome to the Examined Life Podcast with me, Kenny Primrose. This is a podcast about living more thoughtfully and deliberately in an age that really encourages us to do so. My guest today is Sir Anthony Selden, historian, educationalist, writer, and editor of more than 40 books, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, and one of the UK's most influential voices on education, leadership, and human flourishing. I've been fascinated by Sir Anthony Selden for a long time. His voice in education is a distinctive one that has often resonated with some of my own feelings. I've often felt that schools can feel a bit like factories, measuring everything and draining students of life and curiosity in the pursuit of exam grades. Anthony has voiced these misgivings too, and argued strenuously that schools need to focus more on human flourishing, on moral development, on character, and those aspects of life that cannot be evaluated easily. He's not only written and spoken eloquently about these, he's implemented programs in those schools, some of the most prestigious in the country, that he has led. In our conversation today, we explore the big question that has driven much of his work. What is the purpose of education? It's always an important question, but it's especially timely now in an age of AI where it's reshaping our future, and it's hard to know how to prepare the next generation for the world they will inherit. There are no quick answers here, but some urgent and important questions. We discussed the dangers of systems too baited on exams and what it means to educate humans in the age of AI. I found it fascinating and I'm delighted to share it with you. As ever, do please share this episode with others you think might like it or on social media. Sign up for this Examined Life on Substack, where you can receive updates, bits of writing, and you can support the show. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll hand over to my conversation with Sir Anthony Selden. Anthony, thank you so much for joining me today, for giving a bit of your time. I really value it. You as a kind of historian, public figure, educationalist, someone I've been actually fascinated by the work of for many years. You've just written a book, The Path of Light. You're kind of morally um propelled in lots of ways, and you're interested in the formation of the next generation. So I'm wondering, is there a question that you've been driven by or preoccupied by?

SPEAKER_01:

So well, it's very nice to be on, and thank you for having me. The question is, I think, what is the purpose of education and how well do our schools and universities do it? And you know, allied to that obviously, what is an educated person and how can we in our own lives retain that passion for curiosity as we go through life?

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, excellent. I'm an educator myself, and I'm fascinated by this question. What are we educating for? And I wonder how that question has shaped the way that you have led institutions, written many books, and spoken publicly about education. What to you is education for?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, um I think that it's important so that no one looking at listening to this will be mistaken. I have spent my life in the independent sector of education. It wasn't my intention, and I have tried at different points in my life to break into the state system, but never managed to get a job. So I think it's important to realise that my own experience will quite fairly many people will see as very partial. For all that, I think that a young person who is three or five or ten or fifteen or eighteen at a state or independent school faces very much the same kind of issues as do the teachers, as do the parents. And I think, dare I say this without being howled down, we make too much of the divide between the state and independent education system, and we can think that they are a world apart. I don't see it that way. I some are in very privileged uh state schools with a very academically ambitious, highly specialized, highly qualified teaching staff. Others uh are in schools that find it very hard to find uh specialist teachers of Spanish or physics or mathematics and other subjects indeed, and where there's little opportunity for music and dance and drama and sport and trips and adventure. So the whole system is very fragmented, and what I think about it applies the education applies equally whether someone is brought up in the most underprivileged state school, wherever that might be, or the most privileged state or independent school. And for what it's worth, I think the best state schools are better than the best independent schools. They might not do as well in Sunday Times, Parent Power, or other league tables, but in terms of the quality of the education, um I think that they are doing often a much better job. And I've said that all the way through my career. So, what is the process of education? I think education is is about discovery, as the word means, and it's discovery what every person born in this country or anywhere in the world has uniquely to offer. And I think that everybody, all the nine billion people on earth, have unique and if they are not let out, drawn out, uh at school, they are less likely, considerably less likely, indeed, to have those developed and drawn out later in life. So, you know, we can rejoice in Lionel messes or in our extraordinary virtuoso singers and actresses, our Kate Winslitz, our um incredible whoever they are, Morgan Freeman, um Taylor Swift. But who are the Swifts, the Einsteins, the Freemans who were not discovered? And it's not just about people with stellar one in a hundred thousand, one in a million talent, it's about the fact that everybody has a their talent, everybody has their song. And if it isn't developed and identified, or if schools validate people only on the basis of their cognitive ability through exams, then this gives you a very poor start in life, a very lopsided start. I mean it's necessary to do that, but it's not sufficient to do that. And every widow there's a leader in the system is baked in that one-third of people uh don't succeed at mass and English, and therefore they have a a stamp on their forehead for the rest of their life that they they fail, that they you know, they're overwhelmingly the people who need the most encouragement in life. So it's deeply distressing that this system continues year after year, and that we celebrate huge excitement, cracking of champagne bottles that the state school of the year or the Inprints School of the Year or whatever, it results. And it's pernicious to do that because um there may be a school next door that's actually doing a much better job with perhaps less able, academically, less cognitively able young people, but doing an extraordinary job preparing people for life. So I think there's something bigger than just exams, and that is this identification of each child's love and what they truly love, what they truly feel themselves doing. And if those things are not drawn out, then they will, you know, you see it quite early on with young people who feel that the current mix of school is not for them, they'll start absenting themselves, or as they'll muck around in class, or they'll try and destroy the learning of others, they will internalize the fact that they're bad or badly behaved people, they'll fall in with the wrong sorts of people outside. By the wrong, I mean people following illegal paths, it could be drugs, it could be extortion, it could be thieving, robbery, it could be anything that is damaging to individuals and society rather than helping and healing. And we're responsible for those people. We're all responsible for these people. So, you know, I've been saying this all my life, and nothing's very much happened. But you there are now, there are encouraging things that have come out of OECD that perhaps we can talk about. But you know, that's my overall feeling.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I found your perspective really refreshing as someone who's worked in both independent and state sectors and seen this kind of one size fits all approach to education being quite damaging to students who don't necessarily fit into whatever is being measured. And you're famously someone who's interested in unmeasurable things in education and in putting resource into them. So at Wellington, you established the teaching of happiness, you've also helped establish the action for happiness. I guess I'm interested in how you get people putting resource and time and energy into things that you actually can't really measure because this seems like one of the issues in education. If we're interested in formation of the individual, people in a very utilitarian society want to be able to measure impact. How have you uh sought to navigate that in your career?

SPEAKER_01:

Happiness is not an end. And it is something that we you know, relative states of happiness, I mean everyone listening to this, how content are you today listening to this? Uh and if you are feeling irritable, sad, angry, distressed, why is that? And it's not good for you to feel those things, and probably not good for people who interact with you. So what can we do to help ensure that your life that means you, yeah, you, the person listening, can lead a life which is more inwardly fulfilling. You know, um bad people, people who are antisocial are not happy. Look at the eyes, look at the faces of those people who you know, at the bottom of the pile, people in prisons, people who are just about to rob you as you're listening through your headphones, a person coming up behind you and look at their face. You you you we it's indivisible that people who are happier, kinder will have kinder, happier, softer faces than those who are destructive of others. And everybody is redeemable. And how can we bring hope, love, life, education to those in prison, those people um who are deeply mentally distressed, deeply depressed? There is a way forward for everybody, there's a way out of this for everybody. Uh and it is on this path to being more content, and that will mean being more pro-social and and less self-absorbed, and it will mean being more respectful of other people and moving away from being unkind, disrespectful to other people.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, interesting. The values that uh brought in society at the moment through things like social media are making us far more focused on the self and perhaps less pro-social. Is that something uh you've observed or do you see so asking then about observation and and education I'll come on to the question.

SPEAKER_01:

Um yes, I have observed it, but it's hard to be you know precise and definite about it. But that that systems often will if if you're running a train system, then it's very important that trains run on time. Um if you have an education system, what's the equivalent of trains running on time? Well, punctuality, obviously, for young people and actually turning up rather than absenting themselves. These things are important. Um but uh the system is bent towards what can be measured. But as a very famous person said, and I'm going to paraphrase it, not everything that measures that can be measured counts or matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. And that's why I say that exams are, which by the way, are going to be changing massively under AI, because exams were technology-specific uh structures, devices, because of the technology of the day. Now we have AI, we don't need exams to do the job that exams do. But that kind of measurement is important, but it's not all important. And some of the things that are equally and in some ways more important cannot be measured in the same way. So you, everyone listening to this, will have somebody that they love. Um and if you say, do you say to that person or people, it might have been a it might have been a mother, it might have been a sister, it might have been a child, do you say, well, today I love you four out of ten. And let's try and get that to eight out of ten by the end of this year. And we're human beings, and in the same way that you can't measure the beauty of a sunset in that numerical way, or what makes your heart sing, what makes your life worth living, just because you cannot measure it in the same way as you can how somebody done a mathematics test does not mean that it doesn't matter. For human beings, often the most important things in our life, when we look back at the end of our lives, the things that we'll be thinking about, most of them will be, by their very nature, immeasurable. So, how can we get better at measuring or assessing the value of some of these things that lie beyond the immediate cognitive tests in in schools? And how can we respect those things that never, never under the sun will ever be able to be measured? So this is the this is what this reaction is. It's a reaction that is profoundly human and humane, and it's being driven partly because AI is the absolute nightmare for everybody who's always said all those newspapers. It it it is scooping out precisely the skills that those exams are measuring. What we've done, it it it's really shone a light, AI, a devastating, cruel light on how wrong education's been, because the very things that these cognitive exams uh measure are the very things that the AI will be able to do, already does better than human beings, and will be able to do enormously better next year and in five years' time. And then when you have quantum uh power behind AI, it will be so transformative. So, what are the things that only human beings can do, and how do we put them? Do they not have a place, any place in schools? And how can we value those? Because we are in a really existential crisis at the moment. And so let's get back to our model of what lies inside us.

SPEAKER_00:

It's really interesting. I'm fascinated to explore a bit more about the AI thing because it sounds like uh you see some positive sides to what's happening with AI in education. I I like your point that we need to think about what makes us distinctively human. Personally, I suppose as an educator, I fear AI because getting a large language model to think for you and to write for you means that you have very little sense of mastery or an ability to think properly or whatever. And if we are replaced by machines in those capacities, Then I fear for the kind of people we will become.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, that's hopeless, isn't it? Because we are they they're coming. I mean, the machines are coming and they're coming for us. And creative people are extremely upset and worried that they can paint not just better than them, but already they will be able to paint uh or sing or compose um better than they can on their very best day and in their style. And therefore w what scope is there for a writer, an artist, a composer uh um when the technology will be doing your thing better than you can yourself very soon. Um and quantum massively enhances the power of these machines. So it's coming for us and we are blind to what is happening. Uh we are not preparing our country, our world well enough for AI. And we need to be doubling down on what it is that is human and what it means to flourish. And that's why I've been very attracted to the work that OECD, so that's the organization for economic cooperation and development, founded after the Second World War to bring countries together and help growth, and it has quite rightly developed a very powerful economic educational barn which runs the international test called PISA, PISA. And they've become far too dominant in shaping education systems around the world uh around measurable things. But in the last five years, under the head of OECD, the head of the education side of it called Andrea Schleicher, with a very brilliant thinker, very high-powered thinker called Michael Stevenson, working with the top education systems in the world, has devised a new model called the human flourishing model. So this replaces or advocates the replacement of the human capital model of education that we have in Africa, in India, in China, in Russia, in Europe, in the Americas, and the Australia and everywhere else that I have forgotten to mention, that we have a system of education which is primarily, of course we don't say that in our mission statements that we know and love and forget, but it is fundamentally about preparing young people for their place in work and to a lesser extent to fight and defend the country, and to staff the civil, police public services. So uh that is what education is for, your place at work. And the human flourishing model is a very different model, uh, and is concerned to develop the competences, and there are five competences, and everyone can read this on the OECD's website. It's now been published in November 2025, uh, a very different framework and a very different understanding of what education is. It can be summed up not perfectly by education being something done uh less to young people with an economic end in mind, as something done with and for young people and finding out what they uniquely have to offer. So here at Wellington, where I'm uh back for a while, to help oversee this, the piloting of this model and working out what does it mean in practice, not just in the UK, but in our schools abroad. But we're working with our partner state schools in the UK, uh, very much to look at, you know, how can you still give the state what the state wants in terms of and what universities want or employers want in terms of exam results, albeit doing them much better and more holistically, while also really nurturing the individuality, the heart and soul, the head, the heart and the hand, the mind, the body, the emotions, the soul of young people. How can you do that in a much more holistic way that will allow them after they leave school, well, while at school, but after whatever they go and do, to lead more fulfilling lives in the workplace, more fulfilling lives as citizens, as contributors, as individuals in society, and with a mind that gives them a passion for learning for the rest of their life, and also a desire to contribute to society for the rest of their lives.

SPEAKER_00:

So within that, I know you have an interest in character formation. What what are the virtues you think are going to be central for the coming generations?

SPEAKER_01:

So the OECD model has a number of competences, as I said, five, and they are acting in the world, understanding the world and appreciating the world, acting in, understanding, and appreciating the world, and then ethical competences and problem-solving competences. And this doesn't knock out the old system, it keeps the best of the old system about which there is so much to admire and value and nurture and treasure and appreciate, but it is taking it forward into the second quarter of the 21st century, recognizing that the system hasn't given employers what they want. For a long time, they've been grumpy, complaining about the work readiness of young people, overly cognitively developed but underly developed in every other aspect of human life, that it hasn't helped young people learn to live. Look at the rise and rise and rise of mental unhappinesses amongst young people, which we now are taking seriously, and not just blaming on COVID, and not just blaming on social media, although basicism very significantly have contributed to it. But part of the solution there is exactly what you were saying, which is if it's all about me and my results, me and my career, then there's no uh relationship with others. We are social beings. Algorithms are not going to fall in love, though they will be very good at convincing us that they have fallen in love. But human beings can and will and do, loving others, loving lives, loving nature, loving the arts, loving anything, including ourselves, is one of the unique characteristics that education systems can and should be developing. So in this model, we've got five, ten years of work ahead of us while we crunch it through and work out what does it mean in practice? Some of it will be able to be measured, and some of it will never be able to be measured. But we'll get better at measuring the non-cognitive aspects.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I I mean, the rising tide of AI, it feels like we're making machines more like humans and humans more like machines, as you see, this new framework of rooting us in our humanity. You previously used the word soul, I know you've got a kind of spiritual practice, you do yoga and meditation regularly. How much would you like to see that embedded within an education system, the attention to one's inner life?

SPEAKER_01:

AI has considerable benefits, point one. At least if someone is listening to this in a very remote part of the UK or Europe or Africa or Asia or the Americas, Australasia, Antarctica, and the Arctic. They might not have a very good history teacher, but AI will allow you to have the most brilliant personalized history teacher and give real formative, real-time formative assessment. I mean, massive benefits. Um I think it's wrong to if we think that you know that that we're allowing the AI to do it. Increasingly, AI is taking over and AI is coming up with its own solutions. AI is different to any earlier technology in that whatever the technology was, production of steam or production of electricity, human beings were in charge of it. Now the AI is increasingly in charge of it. So AI can think, perhaps not the right word for itself, it's certainly in an autonomous way. And one of the things that that will force us to do is to make us reflect on the human residual. Don't want to talk about my own work put in a book I published ten years ago called The Fourth Educational Revolution. I was saying exactly that, that the education system is making us more like machines. How do we then use the machines, the algorithms, the AI to make us more fully human? And that is the genius, that's the art of it. Um so, and then the spiritual dimension, well look, maybe shock, maybe consciousness will turn out to be the divine within us. Uh leading uh scientists in the world are no closer, comprehensively no closer to understanding what consciousness is, and maybe they never will because consciousness is the presence of the divine. My own spiritual practices, yeah. I mean, I think that we all have things that not all of us, but we all can have things that we do. Yoga isn't particularly spiritual, though I think looking after one's body is important, and we should be at the heart of school helping young people learn that they have bodies and you know in young people may or may not be able to afford a a car, but if there is, people look after their cars and read the instruction manuals, but we don't really teach well enough what the instruction manual is for the human body, and learning how to exercise and learning how to strengthen and to stretch uh and relax the body is one of the things that yoga does, but there are lots of other ways of doing that. Meditation, mindfulness is very good too. I also go to church, I pray, uh, but you know, others will uh go to mosques, go to synagogues, go to temples, or not. And there's an option there that one can take. One can either think that there is no spiritual life, or that there is something, and people have that option and that complete freedom, and that's part of what it means to be human, to look at that question and to reach a decision that is right for that person, recognizing that what one thinks at twelve or eighteen or twenty-five or uh fifty might not be what one thinks subsequently, and that readiness to that open-mindedness and open-heartedness is something that I think can helpfully be engendered along with lifelong curiosity, the asking of questions, the every question merits another question. It is about active learning in the place of passive learning, it is about lifelong curiosity, lifelong creativity, lifelong sense of community and compassion, which the best education systems will be engendering and which are key to the human flourishing model. So we cannot stop AI. It's arguable, but a council of despair that AI is going to zap human beings inevitably. I don't think that needs to happen. Um either with a hard zap, I mean, they simply make the systems on which uh food security, our energy security, our water security are dependent malfunction or a soft zap, which I think is the more likely, which would be an infantilization that you know so we no longer read maps. When was the last time that you looked at an A to Z question? I mean, no I mean, no no no one, I mean, I mean, you know, maps, at this atlases maybe, but but maps get from A to B no longer needed. How long will it be before we no longer need books? How long will it be where our immediate thought in our head is rather than I'm gonna work that out, and the thought is I'm gonna ask chat or another generative AI system to work it out for us. Now, these are the the nursery steps, the nursery slopes up to human infantilization. It's a slippery slope uphill, and we are on it, and we have to put into not certain how much time we have, but we have to put into our education system rigor, the development of human agency, and that's why coaching is so important, because the best teachers teachers can be very egotistical, they can stand at the front or wherever they want to stand and give the answers out, uh, and take great pride that their kids have done brilliantly well in the GCSE's near levels, or they can take great pride in the kids working it out, the young people themselves working out the answers through a coaching model and them asking questions. And at best, yeah, this is what we need to, the best that's what the tech will be doing, will be asking questions rather than giving answers, will therefore be strengthening rather than infantilizing. Think of it as a muscle, think of our brain as a muscle. And if we are uh everything is done for us, then the muscles in our arms, our core strength is is just taken over. Yeah, after all, at heart, who is not actually a little bit lazy and would sooner, you're tired, you're not feeling very well, it's not been a great day, or whatever. You just get the car to drive you, you get the all the key decisions taken over by others, and there comes a point where suddenly you realize that mentally you're dead. And how do we go do the opposite? How do we strengthen the arm if we're just focusing on the arm rather than let the arm muscles become atrophied and defunct? How do we strengthen? You know, how do we put that at the heart? That's what education, that's what this is all about. How do we put that real rigor? Because brain on one level is a muscle and performs like a muscle. And you know, those people who are going through their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, who are using their brain will find their brain much more active and much more capable. And those people who retire and think, oh my goodness, thank goodness, I've got no, don't think again for the rest of my life. And very quickly, you know, they probably die. That sounds a bit morbid, doesn't it? But you know, that their their brains will become much more flaccid. So, how do we put rigor, uh human rigor and human agency, where it's the individual themselves deciding, not surrendering their individuality to others? So this is real stuff we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00:

One of the people I'd interviewed previously asks the question, what should we be doing for ourselves, even if a machine can do it for us? Because if it's all about the end product, then of course you can outsource because of convenience and comfort to machines. But actually, there's a lot in in the thinking, in the using of our muscles or bodies, or brains but that is constitutive of human flourishing. And I suppose I know of a few schools who will utterly shun technology in order to keep those muscles working. So reading hard text and not outsourcing thinking and that kind of thing to machines which can do it more efficiently. And I suppose this is maybe a reason why some people would like to resist the AI revolution because they see it as inevitably going to infantilize us because we like comfort, indeed, and efficient.

SPEAKER_01:

Is AI alcohol or heroin? And if it's a drug, then one binds it all together. But if it's alcohol, one learns how to use it. So that's one way, amongst many ways of of thinking about it. I tend to think that it is like alcohol, but properly used, one masters it rather than it masters one. Um and one, you know, we're in charge, apart from those people who become alcoholic, and that of course can be genetically, often is indeed genetically determined, and those people have to be very much more careful. And so I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we know the answer to that. But I think that there needs to be a massive national-wide, international-wide um work, and then there are all kinds of institutes. I set up one, Institute for the Ethics of AI and Education, along with two colleagues, Priorney and Rose Luckin, chaired by a brilliant man called Clement Jones, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on AI. And so, you know, there's lots of people trying to think it through, but I don't think anyone's got there yet. Uh, we certainly need to work together uh to work out. This is the biggest thing that has hit education. I think the human flourishing model, pioneered by OECD and in the UK, driven by the Human Flourishing Institute, which Michael Stevenson heads that as one of several things that he's doing, working with uh state schools, working with uh international schools, to think how do we put this into practice? How do we put human flourishing at the heart? You know, if that is the end, and I mean, of education, so that the word, you know, we get back to what the word actually means, which is that we're drawing out what's inside people, we're giving people up, trying to understand what their lifelong passions, loves are. I mean, how many people, how many people have got to become depressed, end their lives, you know, they might be very successful, but they realize in their 30s, 40s, 50s that actually they don't want to be an X, they wanted to be a Y. And the system did not help develop that. I mean, maybe they did want to do something um in music or certain to have music a key part of their life, but they had to drop that because when they were 14, they were told that couldn't happen, they couldn't combine that with doing their academic GCSE options and Yeah, what what isn't nurtured atrophized if you could have that love? Maybe even the primary schools didn't even help and the secondary schools, particularly in the early years, didn't do enough to help young people think. I mean, how many people listening to this have asked if you are teachers or involved with young people, ask them to reflect on what you what at the age of seven, ten, thirteen, sixteen do you most love about life? What is it that you've studied that really excites you? So when I would be talking to parents, GCSE and A-level and their children, actually their children more than their parents, about the choices as they're 13, going on 14, thinking about their GCSE choices, or 1516 about A-level or international baccalaureate choices, the question is not I want to be this or that, therefore I'm gonna need this. No. Right? The question is what have you loved? What subjects do you love? And if you love uh geography, if you love biology, if you love French, then if you love art, do not give it up because you are more likely to move towards doing something either as a career or as a hobby that you love, if you stay with what you love. So many parents are understandably concerned about what will there be jobs for young people, which was a fearful part of the AI story we haven't even time to explore, but it is very understandable, but I think you're more likely to get there if you go with what you love. I mean, how often is love mentioned in our schools? It ought to be at the very heart of what we do in our schools.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you so much. I've so appreciated your time and your thoughts today, and you've given me and our listeners lots to think about. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, thank you for asking such brilliant questions. And you know, um, one reason I never like questions in advance is that it gives me the chance to think in the moment. And being in the moment is another quality that we don't took any time to talk about. Agency where we're not repeating learnt answers, but we are alive and responding, and you're very, very good at making people do that. So lucky students who um were taught by you. And thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I hope you enjoyed listening to that conversation with Sir Anthony Selden. Education and AI are themes that have kind of education and AI are themes that have come up regularly on this podcast. On the question of what it means to be human in the age of AI, I do recommend going back to my episode with Dr. Eve Poole, where we explore her question on what is distinctive about being human. And also the episode with Elam Sarcasis, where we explore what we should be doing for ourselves, even if Machine can do it for us. There are others worth listening to on education, if that's your thing, like last season's conversation with Catherine Berblesing, another one of the UK's most influential voices on education. If you've enjoyed this, then as ever, do please rate and share it. It will help others to find the show. Any feedback or ideas can be emailed to me at kpexamined-life.com. I love hearing from you. I'd like to thank you, listeners, for engaging over the course of this last year. For all the guests I've had on, for them being so generous with their time and interesting with their thoughts. For those who have supported the show in all manner of ways, financially and otherwise, the music you heard today was actually from Moby. Moby Gratis is uh a website where Moby puts some of his music on for people like me to use. And I quite liked this piece of music, so I used it here today. Uh until next year then. I wish you a wonderful Christmas wherever you are and a happy hog mine, as we say in Scotland.