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- How to adapt education to its purpose, from both the supply and demand perspectives?
- The transition from learning facts to learning skills represents a challenge, but also an opportunity for change
- Additionally, the role of the teacher transforms into that of a coach, mentor, and catalyst for change
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The pandemic marked the beginning of an era in which we will live with constant changes. Although many of us believe that this is just a temporary period, more and more factors indicate that our future will be permeated by economic, climatic, existential, and many other crises. There are many causes for such a state, and some of the key ones are the exponential growth of technologies combined with the increasingly rapid creation of new knowledge and the lack of our mental capacity to quickly and significantly adapt to constant, complex, and unpredictable changes in the environment. So what should we do?
Albert Einstein believed that we cannot solve a problem using the same way of thinking we used when we created it. For this, it is necessary to equip people with new ways of thinking, skills, and abilities for life and work, so that they can live healthily in the present, and especially in the future, and successfully, sustainably, and balanced progress.
Therefore, today in schools and educational institutions around the world, questions are being raised about how to adapt education to its purpose, from both the supply and demand perspectives. On the supply side, the problem is quality, methodology, and quantity. There is a global shortage of qualified teachers, and those who are in the profession are often not well trained to create modern curricula, which are filled with outdated methods of learning and assessing students. Regarding demand, students are often insufficiently qualified in the fundamental social skills necessary for later life and are poorly prepared for rapid adaptation to a more flexible and changing environment. The transition from learning facts to learning skills and acquiring the abilities necessary for constant adaptation to a changing, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment is a question that is often raised, representing both a challenge and an opportunity for change.
It is not surprising that connecting every school and every student with resources using the Internet is a great ambition for many. Whether through technology companies using solutions to connect remote areas or governments investing in fixed and mobile broadband infrastructure, the ability for every person to access global information is crucial for our personal and social digital transformation. Although internet connectivity plays an important role, the information it offers needs to be integrated with innovative educational techniques that enable the holistic development of students and the building of responsible citizens.
Although ‘stemization’ of education and the development of skills focused on digital technologies are heavily promoted today, an increasing number of experts warn that this is not enough. Namely, alongside the development of left-brain skills in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), it is essential to simultaneously develop right-brain skills related to the fields of humanity, ethics, creativity, and imagination (HECI), as only their combination can achieve appropriate personal progress and sustainable and balanced development of society and the economy. Additionally, to achieve broad success, all approaches and teaching methodologies must be sustainable, replicable, and scalable.
It is estimated that the pandemic accelerated personal and social digital transformation by about seven times and made it completely normal for us to communicate remotely over the Internet. In this sense, the delivery of education is also facing digital disruption by using practices and methods that we have not previously used in education, all to completely revolutionize the experience of acquiring skills.
If we can give every student, i.e., pupil – child, teenager, adult, professional, and retiree – access to the best content, whether through MOOCs (e.g., Coursera, EdX) or YouTube, then we no longer depend on a teacher who transmits standardized knowledge mostly in the same way as a hundred years ago. With such a form of educational revolution, we would enable every person in the world to access the same and best content in a simple, affordable, and personalized way. Although I believe that children at the beginning of their education must be ensured learning with the support of teachers, it is certainly necessary to devise innovative ways in which children learn and how teachers teach, with the entire educational system focused on the development of skills needed in the future.
Innovative learning must be based on practical projects, not on pure content acquisition, as this better prepares us for the real world, and the role of the teacher transforms into that of a coach, mentor, and catalyst for change. All knowledge is available on the Internet, and the primary role of the teacher should be to filter, guide, and convey information in a simple, intuitive, and meaningful way. Whether online in the cloud or physically in classrooms, many see this role of the teacher as addressing the imbalance of supply and demand. The reality in the next decade will be hybrid learning, but significant changes in learning through innovative methods, methodologies, and learning tools are yet to come to life.
Moreover, education has become an iterative process (like design thinking) as we have already entered a world where education does not stop after graduation, but is a lifelong activity in which skills and knowledge are updated and upgraded both formally and informally throughout one’s working life. Evaluating learning solely through intelligence quotient (IQ) is no longer sufficient; rather, the valuation of what has been learned should include emotional intelligence (EQ) and learning from taking risks, innovation, and entrepreneurship. If we want to have a smooth transition from education to work, we certainly need to align education with the future of work.
Finally, in some educational institutions, new approaches are in development or even in practice, but by 2025, few believe we will change the entire system at the national or even global level. However, it is certain that during this period, some new educational institutions will rise that will use new ways of learning, innovative methodologies, and tools, thus changing education in a similar way to how Montessori changed preschool education.
These future leaders of education around the world, including in Croatia, are already testing, improving, and creating new and more modern ways of education. I believe that in the next three to seven years, education as a sector will undergo complete digital disruption and experience its renaissance.
