All around the world we are faced with great challenges in education: what do we need to do to make formal education relevant for the real world of tomorrow? How can education help us move forward, from today’s world driven by fossil fuels to tomorrow’s decarbonised and digitalised world? We need to unlearn yesterday’s skillsets, mind-sets and behaviour. We need to abandon our old maps if we are to discover and explore the new world that we need to create to survive.
Education needs a radical overhaul: in content, delivery, assessment, accreditation and outcomes.
Rather than teaching where to go and how to arrive there, we need to teach our children how to drive and then they decide on the road they want to take and how to get there. All this is easier said than done. The implementation of radical changes in education needs to be done wisely and gradually. Most often the best education reforms are ruined if they are rushed. Reforms can only be successful if their design and implementation involves as many people as possible involved in the education process: teachers, students, parents, business organizations, civil society and the country at large.
Formal education has many inbuilt factors in it to make it fall behind the real world and relevant for yesterday rather than for tomorrow. Changes within formal education are much slower than the changes happening outside it and in the world. The world outside formal education is at least five times faster the rate of change in the classroom. So educational change needs a lot of support to succeed.
Obsolete education
We have now come to a point where the world has changed deeply and will continue to change, and we have to change our ways in all areas including education. We need education to save the planet from global warming and save humanity from future pandemics. We need education to equip all the people with the necessary skills and values for the new economy that must stop waging war on nature. Many of the skills used in a fossil fuel-based economy will be totally obsolete in a world based on green energy.
At the same time we need education to help us learn to manage our differences as people to live together and use the vast resources the world has to ensure that every person on this planet lives decently and with dignity. It is neither fair nor realistic to expect formal education to do all this on its own. First of all there are no teachers and students any longer; there are only lifelong learners. Those of us who are not willing to continue learning all their lives, die before they breathe their last. Education for life cannot be imprisoned within formal education institutions only. You cannot learn to navigate in the uncharted rough waters of the 21st century by staying in a sheltered room on dry land studying old atlases and navigation manuals without ever taking your boat and leaving the safe harbour and setting out to the open and rough sea.
We need to contaminate education with as much reality as possible and to contaminate reality with as much education as possible. All institutions and organizations need to become learning spaces to enable their people to continue growing and to develop the necessary competences to address the challenges of the ever emerging and changing realities of our fast-moving world.
We must change the relationship between formal education institutions and the world outside. They must go forward together and not against each other. Even in best performing formal education institutions, they provide only a third of the achievements of their students, the other two thirds come from family and society. So, we need to forge strong links between school and family, school and society and have not just school-based learning but also work based learning and social commitment.
Not a stand alone
Preparing children for formal exams only is preparing them for skills and information that probably they will hardly use. Real problem-solving skills and dealing with the challenges of daily living can only be nurtured if there is a creative and positive interaction between the world of schooling, society and work. So we need assessment processes that make sense and accreditation that recognises all the changes that digitalization is bringing with it.
The old African proverb: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ still applies. But today we are living in a global village where we have all become each other’s difficult neighbours with all different languages, cultures and interests creating a more conflictual world where we need to learn to live together and not destroy each other.
Once upon a time education prepared us for our preferred comfort zone. In today’s world we have all lost our comfort zones and have to learn to live in our discomfort zones. We also need to give more importance to values. Knowledge, skills, competences, ability to adapt and change, a growth mind-set are all important but we also need to develop our ethical behaviour and nurture the values of honesty and integrity.
The financial crisis, the diesel scandal …were brought about by highly educated and competent financial and engineering experts but they were morally bankrupt as they used their know-how to cheat people not to improve their lives. The main purpose of education should be to create much better world for all the people living on it, or at least prevent it from becoming worse.
Finally, education cannot be seen as a stand alone and magical solution to all the problems of the world. To address our global challenges we need to align policies across all sectors: financial, technological, economic, diplomatic, military … we cannot create conflicts and problems in every sector and then expect education to solve them. Sadly we still live in a world where wars and conflicts are still given top priority when it comes to budgets and spending while in many countries education is underfunded, especially for those who suffer from gender, ethnic and socio-economic disadvantages.