Education 5.0 — Why We Need to Adjust the Education System
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Benjamin Franklin
From the beginning of a human’s birth, the brain and the behavior are set up in order to constantly learn and grow. Young beings are following this process with incredible effectiveness as well as efficiency and it seems that these individuals even do have fun doing so. Now, compare this behavior and mindset to individuals who are in the game of the designed framework of education quite some time already. It’s frightening how great the difference of observations between these two categories is.
Millions of kids do not know any purpose of going to school, except obligation. So where’s this tipping point of going from “hungry for knowledge” to “I’m tired of school”? Personally, I found this quite a difficult question to answer and it’s probably depending on a variety of variables. However, the model of education we are running is clearly a dinosaur. Today, almost any knowledge can easily be accessed from anywhere at any time of the day and this for a minimal cost. Thus, the reason for going to school got way more suspect. It’s a system invented by our ancestors and was designed and conceived for a different age. Today’s educational system was arranged in the intellectual culture of enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. The intellectual model of the mind stated that the real intelligence consists of capacity of deductive reasoning and knowledge of the classics, what we come to think as academic abilities. We got used to dividing people into academic and non-academic, smart people and non-smart people. As a consequence, people think you’re not brilliant as you don’t have any degree of some sort or even worse — many brilliant people think that they are not. According to my opinion, that’s one of the sources influencing a world we created, where appearance is higher priced than true substantial value. Therefore, we as a society have to face a remarkable vulnerability.
This leads me to conclude that teaching as a profession and education in general as a system must simply adapt to the new circumstances and changes in role. A role which requires a transition from “Curriculum Deliverer” to one of “Learning Coach”. The new function is to fuel the natural passion and genius of the student, rather than be the protectors of knowledge, forcing students down a pre-constructed road built for the masses. Students have to be encouraged to question the knowledge and methods taught by teachers and to find new innovative insights as an individual as well as a collective. I recognize that many teachers already see themselves fulfilling this particular role. But many teachers I have spoken to express their inability to fulfill this role not from a lack of desire, but because of the outdated and obsolete limitations of the systems in which they work. Where do these limitations come from and who’s responsible for making change harder? It’s quite obvious that we assume there’s a causal coherence… So I allow myself to ask a provocative question. What if this system is corrupt as many other industries and people are too?
It’s fair to say that the dramatic changes in the world of work and employment means that the foundation of a new world of education must have the values of sustainability and adaptability embedded at the very core.
We need to start/restart imagining concrete potential futures and a world we want ourselves as well as our kids and the generations to come to live in. Global interconnectivity, smart machines, and new and emerging media are just some of the drivers which are reshaping how we think about education as well as work and how we learn and develop the skills to work in the future. The concept of a “100 year life” becoming the norm and the majority of that spent studying and working means that learning will be a lot more important for the next generations. Most people will have a variety of different careers, requiring fundamental reeducating while the speed of innovation will constantly demand new skills and knowledge to keep the pace. Having said that, after defining specific future goals, we need to work on specific plans in order to achieve them and then finally make investments with purpose.
In this new social, business and economic landscape every industry falls into one of only three groups:
Right now, your industry falls into one of the following categories:
a) has been disrupted
b) is being disrupted or
c) is about to be disrupted.
No industry or business (and so won’t education) will escape this process which is merely part of the natural cycle of change. The good news is that disruption also represents an opportunity. An opportunity to consciously design the future economic and social landscape we want to see. So let’s take on responsibility and follow up with action!
