The world is rapidly becoming a different place, with globalization and modernization imposing huge challenges to individuals and societies. I am currently at the Global Education & Skills Forum in Dubai and this is one of the recurring themes. Schools need to prepare students to live and work in a world in which most people will need to collaborate with people of diverse cultural origins, and appreciate different ideas, perspectives and values; a world in which people need to decide how to trust and collaborate across such differences, often bridging space and time through technology; and a world in which their lives will be affected by issues that transcend national boundaries. Schools today need to help students develop autonomy and identity that takes into account the reality of national and global pluralism, equipping them to join others in life, work and citizenship.
Learning in an ever changing world
These days, we no longer know exactly how things will unfold, often we are surprised and need to learn from the extraordinary, and sometimes we make mistakes along the way. And it will often be the mistakes and failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would last for a lifetime of their students. Today, schools need to prepare students for more rapid economic and social change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve social problems that we don’t yet know will arise. 21st century skills help people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. And at the aggregate level, they provide communities, institutions and infrastructure with the needed flexibility, intelligence and responsiveness to economic and social change.
Preparing students for the life
How do we foster motivated, engaged learners who are prepared to conquer the unforeseen challenges of tomorrow, not to speak of those of today? Those are the kind of issues the Global Education and Skills Forum will explore. The dilemma for educators is that routine cognitive skills, the skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test, are also the skills that are easiest to digitize, automate and outsource. There is no question that state-of-the-art knowledge and skills in a discipline will always remain important. Innovative or creative people generally have specialized skills in a field of knowledge or a practice. And as much as ‘learning to learn’ skills are important, we always learn by learning something.
Because that is the main differentiator today, global education today needs to be much more about ways of thinking, involving creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making; about ways of working, including communication and collaboration; about tools for working, including the capacity to recognize and exploit the potential of new technologies; and, last but not least, about the social and emotional skills that help us live and work together.
Making connections and being curious are crucial to learning
Conventionally our approach to problems was breaking them down into manageable bits and pieces, and then to teach students the techniques to solve them. But today we create value by synthesizing the disparate bits. This is about curiosity, open-mindedness, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, which requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in other fields than our own.
What the world needs are ‘versatilists’
The world is also no longer divided into specialists and generalist. Specialists generally have deep skills and narrow scope, giving them expertise that is recognized by peers but not valued outside their domain. Generalists have broad scope but shallow skills. What counts today are the ‘versatilists’ who are able to apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles. They are capable not only of constantly adapting but also of constantly learning and growing, of positioning themselves and repositioning themselves in a fast changing world.
The more content knowledge we can search and access, the more important becomes the capacity to make sense of this content.The capacity of individuals to question or seek to improve the accepted knowledge and practices of their time becomes more important. In the past, you could tell students to look into an encyclopedia when they needed some information, and you could tell them that they could generally rely on what they found to be true. Today, literacy is about managing non-linear information structures and building your own mental representation of information as you find your own way through hypertext on the internet. It is about dealing with ambiguity, interpreting and resolving conflicting pieces of information that we find somewhere on the web.
Innovation is a group effort
Perhaps most importantly, in today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements.
Our proprietary knowledge today will be a commodity available to everyone else tomorrow. Because technology has enabled us to act on our imaginations in ways that we could never before, value is less and less created vertically through command and control. Everyone can create value anywhere in the world,- but increasingly so horizontally by whom we connect and work with. Success will be with those who master the new forms of collaboration.
Expressed differently, schools need to shift from a world with knowledge stacked up somewhere and depreciating rapidly in value towards a world in which the enriching power of communication and collaborative flows is increasing. And they will need to help the next generation to better reconcile resilience – managing in an imbalanced world – with greater sustainability – putting the world back into balance.