In 2020, COVID kicked nearly 1.2 billion children out of schools across the globe.

In India, 325 million learners were forced to transition to e-learning.

The landscape of education has permanently changed. The tenets of a traditional classroom are crumbling. AI powered digital smartboards, interactive chatbots and robot instructors can be found in attendance in many classrooms across the globe. As we accelerate automation and deepen digitisation, what is the future of education? What challenges, opportunities, and realities emerge? And how can teachers, in new-age classrooms with new-age tools, prepare students for a tech-fused world? 

Orly Friedman, founder and head of Red Bridge School in San Francisco, believes the answer lies in agency. Skill guided by will. And a new model of student-teacher interaction. Not another brick, she’s tearing down the whole wall, so that her students can freely and curiously navigate their learning, on their own. In turning students into auto-didacts, Friedman aims to empower them. To choose what they learn, how they learn, and at their own pace. With the aim to gain mastery over certain skills. At Red Bridge, students don’t automatically go to the next level of learning. But rather, they need to set their own goals and meet them to transition into different ‘autonomy levels’. 

An internship at the Shanti Bhavan school project in Tamil Nadu in 2005 sparked what is now a lifelong interest and passion. Since then, Friedman has been at the forefront of redesigning schooling, whether as an entrepreneur-in-residence with Transcend Education, where she spent a year creating a blueprint for a new model of education, or as a member of the founding team of Khan Labs School. She has also been a Teach for America corps member. With 15 years of experience as an educator, Friedman is well placed to reconfigure traditional roles of students and teachers – in tandem with tech. 

At SYNAPSE, Orly Friedman will unpack her approach to education. Her experiences and insights. Share how they hold up in a world with never enough teachers and increasing adoption of AI. Reflect on standards and 'smart classrooms'. And how we can navigate – and harness – education intelligence.