Who Gets to Shape How We Learn? | Asher Kure, Part 3

Who gets to shape how we learn?

In the final part of our conversation with researcher, educator and author Asher Kure, we look beyond the learner to the people, systems and technologies around them.

This season of Change Narratives has been about the social units that shape people. And education does not exist on its own.

Parents shape what children first believe about their intelligence. Schools shape how they experience learning. Governments determine whether those schools are safe, funded and equipped. And now, technology is changing what it even means to know, remember and think.

Asher begins with a familiar learning myth: the parent who says, “My child is not good at maths because I wasn’t good at maths either.”

He pushes back on the idea that intelligence is that fixed.

Then we move to a much harder question.

What happens when children have not simply fallen behind in school, but have been forcibly removed from it?

We talk about children returning to education after kidnapping and insecurity, the importance of psychological support, rebuilding a sense of safety, and why getting a child back into a classroom cannot be the only measure of recovery.

From there, the conversation turns to artificial intelligence.

Is AI making us worse learners?

Or does the rise of AI mean we need to rethink what education is actually preparing people to do?

Asher makes the case that competing with AI may be the wrong goal. If technology can retrieve information, identify patterns and increasingly perform forms of critical thinking, then perhaps education needs to place greater value on the things humans can still bring differently, including creative thinking.

We also ask what this work has cost him.

Asher talks about leaving his teaching job in 2014, surviving on extra lessons, travelling from school to school to conduct research, writing through power cuts and questioning whether his ideas were right at all.

There was no degree waiting at the end of it.

He simply wanted to solve a problem.

And perhaps the most fitting answer comes at the very end, when we ask who taught him the most about learning.

His answer?

The students he taught.

This is the final part of our conversation with Asher Kure on education, learning and the social units that help shape what people believe they are capable of becoming.