The future of education isn’t just about tablets in classrooms, ubiquitous connectivity, online dashboards, and other tech – it’s much more than that. We need to fundamentally rethink how we approach the field of learning, so it meets the needs of society in the coming decades.카지노사이트
Technology is changing life faster than ever and the pace of this change is accelerating. When you look at the change to the world in the last 10 years, it’s impossible to accurately predict how life will be in the year 2030. So if we accept that the role of education is to furnish our kids the best platform for a fulfilled and successful life when they graduate. So how do we arm our kids for a future we can’t imagine?
Education has long been rooted in what people have felt to be the most worthy, honorable, and useful subjects. We’ve prioritized them around what we assume society deems most useful, moving from religious teaching as a goal to best being ready for production in the industrial age. We therefore teach math, reading, and writing as the basic building blocks for survival, the best levers for our labor to produce value. We assume kids who can read can find out about personal finance and the near deadly effects of compound interest, we assume kids who know how can write, can probably write business style emails. For years now companies have complained about the poor skills students have when leaving school, and we’ve assumed the way forward is to ensure more people study at university and for longer.
It’s not just about tech in the classroom
What if the world changed such that we should rethink education and prepare kids for the modern world. What if we applied technology to teaching in new ways. I’m not talking about the obvious steps ─ I don’t mean kids should use tablets in class, that WiFi should be abundant, or that exam results are measured in real time. I’m not talking about dashboards online and direct email access to teachers, and social networking for schools. I’m not talking about adding technology to the existing system or even building new schools and procedures around technology. I’m talking about a fundamental, existential re-imagination of the very foundation of education 안전한카지노사이트
It’s staggering to me how much the world has changed and how little education has. We’re preparing the children of today for the needs and priorities of the industrial age. We’re teaching kids how to apply knowledge, how to function in a world with no dictionaries, smartphones, laptops or software. If we accept that kids today will graduate in a world we can’t even begin to understand, shouldn’t we be giving some thought as to how best to prepare them for that.
Getting to the core
A weird mental construct is to imagine people as an onion, consecutive layers built on the underlying layer. In our very most core are our values, the very essence of who we are, how we think, what’s important to us, our personality and our behavioral DNA. Are we introverted or extraverted, curious, creative, or resilient? On this layer our skills are formed. But, as an outer layer that we build on top of values, are we adaptable? Can we build relationships? Are we fast at learning, good at music, great at languages, can we see things from different points of view? Can we be agile? And around this we form knowledge, we learn facts, vocabulary, terminology; we remember process and formula and we know how to repeat things.
Current schooling seems like an outward in process, we prioritize knowledge above all else, we test knowledge in exams, we establish how good we are at memorizing vocabulary or mathematical processes. The best students in school are those who remember things from books and who can most easily recall information. Trendy schools now love the idea of teaching coding or mandarin. We presume that this is giving kids the best possible advantage, but what if in the modern age this isn’t needed anymore?
For kids growing up today, let alone tomorrow we’re living in a world where we outsource knowledge and skills to the Internet and devices. I’m not saying it’s a waste of time or pointless to have good handwriting, when we’re likely to be interacting with voices and keyboards, but I’m not sure it’s a priority to be perfect at it. Kids will struggle to communicate if they can’t spell at all, but when spell checkers auto translate, when software does voice to text, maybe it’s not something to take up the majority of time. Math and the logic it yields is essential, but perhaps we need to think more philosophically. There are questions: Do we need to teach kids to code when software will soon write itself, or should we be teaching kids to understand unmet needs to help direct the software of what problems to solve? Do kids need to speak French or other languages when Google translate will soon be perfect and instant.
Four new attributes
These are things to question, not changes to make easily. The future is less about what to remove and what to refocus on. If we really focus on building kids for the future, I believe there are four key attributes to develop. 카지노사이트 추천
Relationships: The reality the modern working world will for many not be as an employee in a company, but as a creator of value through relationships. I don’t need to know how to code, how to perfect Search Marketing or to write copy for a website. I just need to know the very best and the most trusted in each circle. Education for the future needs to focus on ways to ensure people can build lasting, human-oriented relationships.
Curiosity: When smartphones access everything the world has ever known, collectively, anywhere, and anytime, only curiosity limits our knowledge and depths of thought. It’s curiosity that fuels our interest and that forms the need for relationships with experts. If there is one attribute that we’re born with, that dies as we mature, and that we need to foster it through education, it’s our innate human thirst to know more. We must embrace this.
Creativity: Like curiosity each and every one of us is born creative, until schooling, friends, the need to get a proper job, or hit the ROI box in an excel spreadsheet dampen this down. Engineering helps us make anything, but it’s imagination that drives everything. The greatest lever of value we’ve ever known is the power of an idea. We need to give creativity and ideas paramount importance in education for the future.
Empathy: We need to know what it’s like to be different, how to relate to each other, how to exceed the expectations, hopes and ambitious of others. In a world more divided and polarized than ever, we need to build bridges and commonalities and this is out tool.
If we foster creativity, fuel curiosity and help people relate via relationships and empathy then we empower kids to be 100 percent reliant on themselves and nothing else. They’ll be adaptable to change in a world that we can’t yet foresee, agile and able to change fast; they will thrive regardless of the world.
The reality of the modern age is that I learn more in one year of a well curated Twitter feed than my entire masters degree at university, and it carries on giving back to me. I’ve better relationships from LinkedIn than I developed from University. We don’t need to change everything now, but we do need to start forgetting the assumptions we’ve made until now. The future is more uncertain than ever, but we need to make our kids as wide, as balanced, as agile, as self reliant as ever to help thrive in that world.