What is the Artemis Project?
The Artemis Project is a space in the school week for originality and adventure – time given over to revelling in academic exploration beyond the confines of traditional curriculum divides, norms and spaces whilst embracing a truly outward-looking, holistic approach to education grounded in, and giving back to, our vibrant community.
The project is a dynamic one, reflecting our commitment to a future-focused and innovative curriculum – it is being designed to evolve with our students and the world in which they live, growing organically out of our mighty community and their diverse talents.
The experience of each year group will be different – some will work collectively towards a common goal, and others will explore diverse electives to craft their own academic pathways – but throughout, students will be supported to harness their curiosity, foster intellectual agility and adopt an entrepreneurial mindset.
Named after the goddess Artemis, capturing both her adventurous spirit and her lunar associations, the project, like NASA’s own, seeks to grow a new generation of explorers – whether interstellar or thoroughly terrestrial – giving students space to stretch their intellectual wings and to throw themselves into the unknown.
Why this new approach?
True to our Modern Scholarship ethos, the project will take an innovative approach, drawing on our embedded work on design thinking, the opportunities created by our Rapid Prototyping Suite and our work on the Science of Learning, whilst remaining grounded in the rigour and joy of traditional scholarship. Our purpose is to educate brilliant girls to be well rounded, well qualified and well prepared – in essence we are building young women prepared to flourish both at school and beyond. And we know that true ‘flourishing’ is about more than just academic outcomes. Aristotle outlines in his work on what he coins ‘Eudaimonia’, that true human flourishing or ‘living well’ goes beyond fleeting happiness or short-term achievement. Instead, it is about achieving a state of purpose, virtue and satisfaction through the realisation of one’s own potential. Thinking about the purpose of education and, indeed, of school in these expansive terms is central to our approach at Putney, where our core pillars of Modern Scholarship, the Putney Spirit and Culture & Community are all equally crucial in growing women of character, consequence and compassion. Artemis will provide space in the school timetable for students to explore and enjoy the intersections between these aspects of their education.
Why now?
In his speech at Rice University in 1962 announcing America’s determination to land on the moon within the decade, Kennedy spoke of the ‘breathtaking pace’ of change in scientific discovery and technological change in the preceding years. Were he still alive, it would be interesting to know how he would have used his rhetorical prowess to describe the rapid acceleration in the intervening decades. Indeed, just two years after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Moore coined his law from which has grown the understanding that ‘technology grows exponentially’. And yet, with the advent of AI, many argue that Moore’s law underestimates the rate of change, which can be said to be double exponential – in other words, the rate of change itself is increasing exponentially. To some extent, education has been protected from these technological and scientific transformations and the impact they are having on the world around us – our curriculums and modes of assessment are relatively similar to those we experienced at school and would, indeed, be familiar to Kennedy. And yet, has what is required to flourish in the world changed?
With the rise of automation and AI, workplaces are changing rapidly. With the World Economic Forum predicting in their 2025 Future of Jobs Report that 39% of core job skills will be disrupted by 2030 and AI transforming the job market and hiring practices, it is crucial that we equip students for the world they will enter. AI Literacy is no longer an ‘optional extra’ but an essential part of the toolkit of those who will flourish in the modern world and the ‘fastest growing’ skill in the World Economic Forum report. There is a strong consensus that AI Literacy is about more than knowing how AI tools work: it is about a critical understanding of the opportunities, limitations and ethical implications of these tools, something AI Literacy lessons in our academic and pastoral curriculums seek to achieve. However, a more ambitious vision of AI Literacy is presented by Christopher Dede, Senior Research Fellow in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, who argues that “the contrast for me is between doing things better and doing better things. Ninety-five percent of what I read about AI […] is that it can help us do things better, but we should also be doing better things.”
Through engaging with innovative, interdisplinary programmes and new approaches to learning, our Artemis Project will empower students to consider what these ‘better things’ could be.
Why it matters
For all that has changed in recent years, there are, in fact, some striking constants. Aristotle, writing before 300BCE, argued that Eudaimonia could be achieved through good performance of the ‘characteristic function’ of human beings – their ability to reason. Skip forwards to 2025 and the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report identified, alongside the significant disruption in the jobs market, a strong constant – analytical thinking remains the single most sought-after core skill by employers. Indeed, in what has been dubbed the ‘age of AI’, I would argue that the significance of human-centric skills is vastly amplified, that our age should instead be called the ‘age of humans who have mastered AI’ (though it is admittedly a less pithy metaphor).
In workplaces where ‘bots’ are being built to do the work of humans, those who have the skills that AI cannot master, those who have honed and can evidence the skills of collaboration, creativity, rhetoric and critical thinking, will be best placed to flourish. Take critical thinking, as Fawwaz Habbal, Senior Lecturer in Applied Physics at Harvard points out, ‘AI can engage in processes that resemble critical thinking – data analysis, problem-solving, and modelling – but it has limitations. Critical thinking requires the human experience, the human insight, and ethics and moral reasoning. Machines today lack all of that.’ The same goes for the art of rhetoric: LLMs are adept at simulating an Aristotelian approach to rhetoric – producing logical-seeming arguments (Logos) and feigning empathy (Pathos). However, they cannot adopt a ‘rhetorical stance’ due to these same limitations – they have no embodied experience, do not understand or experience human emotions and entirely lack Ethos or ‘character’. No large language model could have written, much less delivered, Kennedy’s Rice University speech.
Our Artemis Project will give us a unique opportunity to allow students to consciously hone these human-centric skills. They will build deeply human experiences and insights whilst connecting with the community around them, think critically about real-world problems whilst working collaboratively to solve them, and delve into ethical and moral questions whilst honing their rhetorical skills. Whether they are investigating the algorithms that underpin our city, debating the impact of power structures on paradigm shifts in scientific discovery or visiting museums to assess the ‘ethics of display’, students will be crafting an interactive and entirely unique curriculum vitae in the broadest sense of the word – a course of their school life – a testament to their intellectual journey and evidence of their prowess in these very human skills.
Innovation in our DNA
Whether technology is changing exponentially or double exponentially, the modern world has evolved and will continue to do so. With innovation in our DNA, it is natural that Putney should look to evolve our curriculum – like Kennedy, we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard!