What is not changing in this ever-changing world of education? - Future trends and education

 

It was the lesson before Morning tea break and I was in a class of 11-year olds talking about anxiety and ways to use it to your advantage. One of the students had his arm in a cast but was valiantly completing all the tasks on the Google classroom. When the bell rang for the break, the kid came up to me and said, “Sir could you please tie my laces, its difficult to do with one hand.” I did and he went away with a happy smile.

Nothing unusual or out of ordinary in the incident, but will this be the same in the coming decades? Reading about the trends in education, one would tend to think that soon AI and the learning apps would make teachers redundant and schools a thing of past. I think, of all the trends, the impact of changing technology is going to be huge on education in general. Applying Rolfe’s model (Rolfe et al., 2001) I have penned the following thoughts.

What? …

A study conducted almost a decade ago (Benedikt Frey et al., 2013) had dire predictions about the future of almost half of US and a third of UK jobs with the advent of AI. This sent the policymakers running around to find a fix, however, in March 2018, another study commissioned by OECD (Nedelkoska & Quintini, 2018) came out dispelling the fears and putting the figures down to a much lower 10% and 12% respectively for USA and UK. The current figure is easily palatable and does not differ from what has been happening hitherto. Each generation has seen a change in employment market configuration due to changes in technology – remember a lamplighter or a typesetter?

So what? …

But then, what if both these predictions are far from the truth? Are we not playing blind man’s bluff with the future of humanity? Haven’t we always been doing just that? There is some solace in the 2018 report though – data that corroborates what schools and universities have been reiterating for centuries. The following table highlights that there is a clear correlation between education and employability.
(Nedelkoska & Quintini, 2018)
For centuries now, since the Industrial Revolution, the purpose of educational institutions has been to prepare a workforce. With automation, deeper learning will replace the need for basic knowledge acquiring. The learner, who is going to be the leader, will have to ask and answer difficult questions about the impact of economic, political and social developments. There will be more and more “why” questions rather than “how”.

Now what? …

The future moral debates that we must have, are already part of some modern systems of education. International Baccalaureate is one such organisation where students are encouraged to ask questions about the community impact of an issue. The programme makes the community as the center of its program from the Middle years (IBO.org, n.d.-b) right through to the Diploma (IBO.org, n.d.-a). The need of the hour is that we as the practitioners in the classroom and the governments across the globe take it upon ourselves to educate the learners of tomorrow with the skills of using their head, hand and most importantly their heart. The future is unpredictable, but it will definitely be better with people who think of each other rather than only themselves. We want more “citizens” and no “idiots” in the ancient Athenian sense of the words.
In NCEA curriculum, too, there are attempts at bringing the citizenship aspect into learning. An example is Level 2 Business Studies AS 90848 - Carry out, review and refine a business activity within a community context with guidance. The intention is to give students a taste of “social enterprise”, however, these kinds of flash in the pan efforts do not bring the desired outcome. It is left to the individual classroom practitioner and the schools to have a structured approach to ensure that AI doesn’t create AI (artificial and insensitive) humans. Some jobs have always been disappearing and they will continue to do so, but let us create and nurture a generation where humanity does not disappear.

References

Benedikt Frey, C., Osborne, M. A., Armstrong, S., Bostrom, N., Chinellato, E., Cummins, M., … Shanahan, M. (2013). THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENT: HOW SUSCEPTIBLE ARE JOBS TO COMPUTERISATION? *. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
IBO.org. (n.d.-a). Creativity, activity, service | International Baccalaureate® - International Baccalaureate®. Retrieved April 7, 2018, from http://www.ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/creativity-activity-and-service/
IBO.org. (n.d.-b). Project study in the MYP | International Baccalaureate® - International Baccalaureate®. Retrieved April 7, 2018, from http://www.ibo.org/programmes/middle-years-programme/curriculum/myp-projects/
Nedelkoska, L., & Quintini, G. (2018). Automation, skills use and training. OECD iLibrary. https://doi.org/10.1787/2E2F4EEA-EN

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., Jasper, M. (2001) Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reflective writing extract using Rolfe et al.’s (2001) model



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