How will Education look like in 50 years' time?

Public Education was invented in the nineteenth century to produce the workforce needed by the industrial revolution, as brightly explained by Sir Ken Robinson:  

This model is no longer useful. As the Knowledge Society brings the Knowledge Economy, education must be able to help each person develop his or her particular talents and affinities, since talents produce knowledge, and knowledge is the resource. The education model based in standardized curricula and hierarchical learning methodology does not produce that each person develops its particular talents. I am afraid most people in the world actually do not work in what they like most and are most talented. And that, in terms of knowledge economy, is a monumental waste of resources.

The point is how can we generate an education model that can be personalized and yet scalable. Here’s a proposal.

Schools have two roles: instruction and formation. With instruction children learn things, with formation, they acquire habits and values. Learning is actually what gets the bigger part of the time spent at school. Habits and values are considered to be a consequence of learning. Why do we name “hard skills” those that come from instruction and “soft skills” those that come from values, if it is not that we praise more instruction than values? And, no time is spent at school in acknowledging the talents and affinities of each child.

The Internet is increasingly allowing instruction to be self-done.  Sugata Mitra has exprienced with children who teach each other using Online contents (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html) . Roger Schank has experienced with "learning by doing online" (MBA Online, La Salle at http://www.beslasalle.net/portal/masters/masters-mba-mbaol-online).  Salman Khan (The Khan Academy, www.khanacademy.org/) has introduced an interesting new paradigm called “flipping the classroom”. Children in classrooms are instructed by the teacher and do homework at home. Khan makes it the other way.

The methodology consists in making students get instructed at home through the Web, with lessons uploaded to YouTube. This allows students to “rewind and play” the lesson as many times as they want, until they get it. Or, to comment with other fellow students through social networking until they get it. In the classroom is where “homework”, that is, the repeated application of the concepts learned, happens with a one-to-one computer approach. The teacher monitorizes who is doing well and who is not, and makes the advantageous student help the handicapped one. Plus, there is team work to discuss matters and present conclusions. This makes students learn, think, and apply what they learned. And get used to work as a team.

I think with this approach you don´t need classes to be as long as they are now, liberating time that can be devoted to the “soft skills” part. This is where the teacher becomes a mentor rather than a teacher, helping each student to discover his or her talents and affinities. With the information raised from flipping the classroom, each student can be guided to those subjects more related to his or her affinities and talents. With this, the students in most classes will share talent and affinity, making the class something thrilling and challenging to both students and teacher. Mentoring then can be specialized by affinities, with teachers related to the subjects where affinity is shared by the students, making creativity part of the methodology of teaching.

This will help students when confronting what professional career they want to follow.

In Knowledge Society professional training will become an ongoing activity. But, instead of packaging knowledge under a college or post graduate degree, the student will be able to choose what subjects he or she should follow in order to better develop talents and affinities. Universities will provide accreditation of subjects. A personalized curriculum will be able to be made by each person, structured and poured in job searching engines, making it possible to match jobs, talents and affinities. Therefore, jobs will be given to people most talented and related to the soft and hard skills needed for the job, in a worldwide job market searching for specific knowledge jobs.

With the “flipping the classroom” paradigm, the fragmentation of college and the universal access to the Internet, students will be able to attend classes anywhere in the world (limited only by language, which can also be learned Online), making education more competitive, innovative and cheaper.

I think that in 50 years' time the way people are educated, search for a job and develop their professional career will be totally changed. Less and less people will have a permanent job in an organization. More opportunities – and more uncertainty – will be available as the Knowledge Society and the Knowledge Economy evolves, focusing in intangible assets rather than tangible ones.

It took a lot of guts to our forefathers to produce and make possible the Public Education paid by with taxation to educate a huge amount of people which, up to then, had no access to education. It will also require a lot of guts to change the actual paradigms which are no longer suitable for the present Society and Economy, due to the fear of uncertain results and the lobby that will be raised by incumbent members of the Education sector which might see a threat in the new order of things. But that is just what happened two hundred years ago when Public Education came to place.

The bottom line is that the new paradigm will have to fulfill the needs of Knowledge Society, that is, that each person may work where he or she is most talented and likes best working at. Only then will knowledge create the maximum value it may reach, since knowledge is the product of people interacting with other people, with nature and with things created by people.

Alfredo Barriga