A New or Transformed Education System?
Just as the future of work depends on the future of education, the future of education also depends on the future of work. While one is evolving, the other is struggling to catch up.
Our current education system was created to fulfill the needs of the Industrial Revolution. People had to learn to read and write in order to work in factories. As a result, we saw huge gains in knowledge, especially in literacy rates.
This was great for the industrial revolution. But now we are in the Age of Information. Rapid technology advances in AI and automatization have changed the workforce and will continue to do so. As Jack Ma, CEO from Alibaba describes, “we are shifting from competition for knowledge to competition for creativity. If we continue to learn and behave like machines then we will be replaced by them.”
Knowing that the current education system was designed to satisfy the needs of an evolved industry should make us rethink about education. We need to design an education system that can constantly address the new needs required by the workforce, looking into the future of our generations.
I went from teacher to baker to writer. Every teacher learns to work with what they have. We don't have a magic wand, but we have the creativity to turn “waste” into art materials.
Bakers are also transformer masters. Cake crumbs can be transformed into cake pops or cake cups. One recipe’s leftovers can become another recipe’s top ingredients.But there was one exception when it came to cakes. If we wanted a beautifully iced cake, we could not put a crumbled cake together. Period. We had to bake the cake from scratch to make sure it had the structure, before we put the icing on.
The challenge with education is, how do we go about the transformation of the education system, to support the future of work? Do we start from scratch or transform our current system?
Starting from Scratch
Should we start a new education system from scratch because it “no longer meets market demand”? Like baking a cake all over again, because the first one fell to the floor and there is no way of icing it all crumbled up. Should we build a new education system because it no longer prepares students with the skills they will need to enter the workforce.
Naval Ravikant, known as a philosopher CEO, believes “You never change a system by taking the existing thing and reworking it. You’re better off changing it just by creating something brand new."
Building from the ground up allows us to create a system with an architecture design that supports the fundamental change in work. A new system that builds on the diversity of human talent. Sir Ken Robinson said “The Answer is not to do better than what we’ve done before. We have to do something else.” He believed that schools are based on linear models of human development. He emphasized that the education system as a whole, not only schools and teachers, was designed to fill the needs of the industrial revolution.
We need an education system that values the diversity of human talent over the homogenization of ability.
Do we need a new or transformed system?
Transforming the Crumbs
The current education system is broken, but it is not irreparable. There are crumbs we can transform into Cake Pops, like a baker would do. While some believe we have to build new, Salman Khan Founder of Khan Academy believes in transforming what already exists. The idea behind Khan Academy is not to create a parallel system, but to try “to determine how we can play well with the existing system.”
We started using Khan Academy at home during the pandemic. It was our go-to tool when my kids asked for TV, but we wanted them to engage in meaningful content. Khan Academy became our tool to fill in the math learning gaps from the distance learning situation. My kids looked forward to playing with Khan Academy, but what they were really doing was learning math.
Watching my kids learn through these games made me excited for what was coming in the evolution of education. But it also made me hopeful that through these new technologies, we could reach schools that are struggling to provide quality education. Where there’s wifi, there’s an option.
Are we Baking a Cake or Making Cake Pops?
It is not about identifying whether the current education system is good or bad. It is about analyzing what innovations are happening in the future of work, identifying what the current and future needs of education will be, and deciding if we can use what exists or need to design new systems.
Taking what is working from the education system and upskilling stakeholders involved can lead us to creating a system that meets the demands of the future of work. However we need to understand that this is a process. The future of work is changed as technology advances. We need to view the Future of Education looking into the future and not towards past practices like we currently do. Education should also be evolving.
Even though the future of work is evolving, the future of education is struggling to catch up.
A new education system will evolve.
In the meantime, do we start from scratch or transform what we have?
