Sir Ken Robinson died on 21 August 2020, at 70, after a short battle with cancer. He never saw ChatGPT. He never encountered an autonomous AI agent capable of logging into a learning management system, watching a recorded lecture, completing an assignment and submitting it without a single human keystroke. He never witnessed a world in which the most watched TED talk of all time — his own, viewed more than 75 million times — would become not merely prescient but urgent in ways even he might not have predicted.
Robinson spent his life making a single, devastating argument: that modern education systems, forged in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution, were systematically educating children out of their creativity. The hierarchy was fixed and nearly universal. Mathematics and languages sat at the top. Humanities occupied the middle. At the bottom, always, the arts. Within the arts, music and visual art enjoyed a grudging respectability. Dance and drama were barely tolerated. A child who needed to move to think was not recognised as a different kind of intelligent. She was diagnosed as defective.
That child was Gillian Lynne. Robinson told her story in his 2006 TED talk with the timing of a born raconteur — a man who, having contracted polio at four and spent eight months in hospital, understood better than most what it meant to be denied the body’s natural expression. In the 1930s, young Gillian’s school wrote to her parents to say they believed she had a learning disorder. She could not concentrate. She fidgeted. She was, in the school’s words, “wriggle bottom.” Her mother took her to a specialist, who spoke to Mrs Lynne for twenty minutes while Gillian sat on her hands. Then he did something extraordinary. He turned on the radio, left the room with her mother, and told her to watch through the window. The moment they left, Gillian was on her feet, moving to the music. The specialist’s verdict changed a life: she is not sick, she is a dancer — take her to a dance school. Gillian Lynne went on to choreograph Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, and in 2014 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2018, the New London Theatre was renamed in her honour — the first West End theatre named after a nonroyal woman.
Robinson’s point was not sentimental. It was structural. The education system that nearly destroyed Gillian Lynne was not malfunctioning. It was functioning exactly as designed — selecting for a narrow band of cognitive performance and discarding everything else. His 1999 report to the British government, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, laid this out with forensic clarity. The task, he wrote, was not to do better what we set out to do in the nineteenth century, but to rethink the purposes, methods and scale of education for a fundamentally different world.
A quarter of a century later, the world has obliged with a disruption Robinson could scarcely have imagined.
In 2026, we are living through the birth of agentic AI — autonomous systems that do not merely answer questions but plan, reason, sequence tasks and execute multistep workflows across connected platforms without human intervention at each stage. These are not chatbots. They are digital workers. An agentic AI system can monitor student engagement data, identify dropout risk before it appears in grades, pull an adviser into the loop, adjust a lesson plan and generate practice problems calibrated to real time performance — all without being prompted at each step. The global AI in education market is projected to reach $57 billion by 2033. The factory floor has gone digital, and its newest employees never sleep.
Here is the central irony of our moment. Everything the industrial model of education prized — rote memorisation, linear information processing, standardised performance, the ability to sit still and produce convergent answers to convergent questions — is precisely what artificial intelligence now does better, faster and cheaper than any human being. The production line that Robinson spent his life critiquing has found its perfect worker, and it is not human. If the purpose of education was to produce compliant processors of routine information, that purpose is now obsolete. The machines have won that race, and they were not even trying.
What AI cannot do — at least not yet — is what Robinson spent his life championing. It cannot genuinely create. It cannot exercise the kind of divergent thinking that produces wholly original solutions to problems that have not yet been defined. It cannot read a fidgeting child and see a dancer. It cannot feel its way into ambiguity and emerge with meaning. The specialist who saved Gillian Lynne was not running a diagnostic algorithm. He was exercising a profoundly human form of intelligence — empathic, intuitive, courageous in its willingness to defy the system’s own categories.
For those of us in higher education, the implications are sobering. Universities are racing to deploy agentic AI for advising, retention, curriculum design and assessment. The question is whether we are using these powerful tools to double down on the conformity Robinson critiqued — optimising students for metrics that machines have already rendered obsolete — or to liberate the creative, collaborative and irreducibly human capacities he championed. An AI agent that flags a disengaged student and triggers an automated retention workflow is impressive engineering. An AI agent that helps a teacher discover why that student is disengaged — whether she is, like Gillian, simply in the wrong room — would be something closer to Robinson’s vision.
Robinson titled his final manifesto, completed posthumously by his daughter Kate, Imagine If… Creating a Future for Us All. Those two words — “imagine if” — contain his entire philosophy. It is a philosophy that a tradition built on questioning, interpretation and the creative tension of machloket l’shem shamayim — disagreement for the sake of heaven — would recognise at once. Every child who walks into a classroom carries the possibility of a future no one has yet conceived. Robinson’s life’s work was an argument for protecting that possibility, in every child, in every classroom, in every system that claims to educate. The industrial model was built for a world that no longer exists. That world has gone. The model should go with it.
The age of agentic AI does not diminish Robinson’s argument. It completes it. The machines have arrived to do the factory work. The question, six years after his death, is whether we will finally free human beings to do what only human beings can do.
Gillian Lynne needed to move to think. No algorithm would have seen that. Someone did.
Religion: Church of England/Interfaith. [This is not an organized religion but rather quite disorganized]. Views and Opinions expressed here are STRICTLY his own PERSONAL!