What’s The Future Of School?
What skills will stand the test of time?
In such a fast changing world with technology taking centre stage, how can we think about creating the future of school? The answer I believe is educating children for skills that are at the heart of what makes us human and that technology cannot automate. Our progress as a species has come from our unique ability to communicate, coordinate, collaborate, take initiative, problem solve and simply just figure it out. Whether it was avoiding extinction during the ice age, foraging for survival as a hunter gather or embracing change with mechanisation during the renaissance - we humans have used a set of timeless skills to navigate complexity and thrive. In a world where the half life of technical skills is becoming shorter, the ability to teach our children ‘how to learn’ will be more important than ‘what to learn’.
“It’s like we’re being produced to be test takers. We’re missing the pieces on how to be people.” - Aaron, twelve year old
What’s the origin of today’s school?
We can trace our current schools to the late eighteenth century where they were set up to train children at scale to be ready to work in factories and obey orders. Hence the idea of a one size fits all classroom with teachers simulating the role of masters. The factory model of schooling was designed to make education orderly and available for free to everyone in society so as to boost industrial productivity. While this model has outlived its purpose, it certainly helped the world back then as access to education was limited only to the wealthy. In the late nineteenth century hundred years later, as the scientific revolution was underway, countries across the world setup committees to decide what students should learn and for how long. This exercise led to the creation of a twelve year school with disciplines, grades, assessments and a standard curriculum like physics, chemistry and economics. This system served its purpose to help students understand what was needed: basic mental models of how each discipline worked in order to be ready for a linear and orderly career. This was a hundred years ago, and while the world has gotten way more complex since then, our schools have unfortunately not changed to prepare children for that complexity.
“We have raised a generation of kids who have more of everything, but we’ve forgotten to give them the thing they need the most to succeed: the mental and moral qualities that make them human” - Thrivers, Michele Borba
What’s the future of school?
As Winston Churchill once said ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’. The pandemic has thrown the century-old school system into chaos and exposed how our current teaching and learning experience is out of sync with what’s needed for the real world. With a tidal wave of technology sweeping the planet like in the first industrial revolution, there has never been a bigger moment than now to rethink the school of the future. From ‘preK to grey’, education has become one of the most important topics of discussion from every household dinner table to every prime minister's cabinet.
While we think of ways to educate our children to fortify them against this new era of technology, it’s the same technology that can be leveraged to improve the current teaching and learning process. The opportunity we have is to use technology to help children build stronger human capability, so that they can better navigate the same world of technology. The internet will make every form of content available to children so the role of a teacher will move from being a sage on stage to being a guide on side coach. Unlike in the industrial revolution, today’s citizens will not need to be factory workers mindlessly taking orders, but instead be self learners and independent thinkers capable of knowing how to connect the right dots. Pedagogy will need to evolve from being curriculum centric to problem centric. As an example, in addition to knowing the laws of physics, chemistry and economics in isolation, children will need to simulate the design of an electric scooter for a segment of society as a starting point, so as to then figure out which mental models of these disciplines have to be learnt, interconnected and applied to pass the simulation. In a globally meshed world, schools will not be left behind. Technology will enable data to be captured and transferred on every child’s competency map, giving children the opportunity to use this competency map to seek guidance and explore their unique talents beyond teachers with the broader community of parents and industry. Access to this community will also enable the school to tap into many resources including new teachers, mentors, curriculum and experiences. The school of the 21st century will be a networked entity acting as a gateway to help children explore and unleash their potential by segregating them not based on their age but on how they solve problems.
As an education enthusiast all of this brings alive the child in me and makes me very excited and hopeful about the future. I now want to go back to being in school again!
