Life is irritatingly chaotic.
It is utterly unpredictable. No-one, least of all me, could have foreseen that 40-some years after I first learned to write my name, I would be able to pen an article which you could then read on a tiny computer that can also make telephone calls.
Not only that, but you could, with just a touch of a digital button, share that article onto all kinds of other virtual platforms, reaching squillions of people in seconds and making the article the most viral in the history of Substack…..obviously.
When I was in school, certainly no-one there foresaw, nor could possibly foresee, the rise of cloud computing, virtual meetings, digital media and what it would all do to revolutionize just about every facet of our lives. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that my teachers utterly failed to instruct me in app development, blockchain technology, or how to ‘zoom my room’.
Jobs in cybersecurity, 3D printing, digital marketing, or producing podcasts simply didn’t exist and no-one could have prepared me for them with any sort of specificity.
But, of course, that’s not what education is for.
In this little four-day miniseries on the role of education in building our next chapter, I want to start with a little exploration of what education could be for. And by education, I don’t necessarily mean only formal ‘schooling’, but that is certainly one key piece of the puzzle, and I will mostly focus on that today (we’ll go further afield in other posts.)
To start with, I am generally of the opinion that education is one of the most fundamental pillars and developmental tools at our disposal as humans. I am in agreement with H. G. Wells, when he said: “Human history, is a race between education and catastrophe.”
I believe this is true for what we understand about how the ‘outer’ world (environment and society) works, but I also think it’s true based on what we understand about the part of the world that is ours alone to experience - our inner selves, and sense of personal well-being. Based on the percentage of people who struggle with anxiety or depression and related challenges, and especially the number of young people who are now suffering in this respect, we are inching (or sprinting) closer to catastrophe on that score.
The late (and definitely great) Sir Ken Robinson is someone I have followed for several years after first hearing a TED talk by him about creativity and education. (Links to his talks and books are at the end of the article).
He also talks about education needing to reveal our two worlds - the world around us and the talents within us. In other words education is as much about getting to know ourselves and our capabilities (and what we enjoy most among those capabilities) as it is about expanding our world view.
Sir Ken suggests that there are four basic purposes of education:
Personal: Expanding our consciousness, and understanding ourselves and our emotional lives, outlooks, and values
Cultural: Understanding both our own and other cultures, and living respectfully among them
Economic: We have to be able to support ourselves within an economy that offers evolving options for employment. Sir Ken argues for breaking down the barrier between academic and vocational learning and between school and work, so that this world can be more accessible to students of all interests and talents.
Social: This is about being an active and compassionate participant in communities and as a citizen.
He then goes onto say that our conventional curriculum tends to separate what we need to know into ‘subjects’, which as I alluded to yesterday as well, might be too narrow for best engaging us in how life tends to operate. For me at least, curriculum organized this way tends to prevent our natural curiosity from straying into areas and questions we might find more interesting than simply ‘subjects’ as we narrowly define them.
So, it might be better, (argues Ken Robinson) to think of meeting the four purposes above, by focusing on eight core competencies. In his words, these are:
Curiosity - the ability to ask questions and explore how the world works
Creativity - the ability to generate new ideas and to apply them in practice
Criticism - the ability to analyze information and ideas and to form reasoned arguments and judgments
Communication - the ability to express thoughts and feelings clearly and confidently in a range of media and forms
Collaboration - the ability to work constructively with others
Compassion - the ability to empathize with others and to act accordingly
Composure - the ability to connect with the inner life of feeling and develop a sense of personal harmony and balance
Citizenship - the ability to engage constructively with society and to participate in the processes that sustain it
In short, these elements of education are about human flourishing, and the purpose of education itself is to create the conditions under which we can all take part in that process - personally and societally - and thrive.
In order to achieve this though, we need a reboot of the education system. This is not to criticize the system or the teachers who tirelessly share their skills and inspire as many students as possible. It’s just that the problems we solved yesterday are not the same ones we have now. And the opportunities we have now are wildly different than what we prepared for in the past.
So, in order to equip kids (and ourselves, in an ongoing environment of learning), we have to be bold in reimagining how we educate. Luckily ‘imagination’ is something we humans do well.
More tomorrow.
The sources I have pulled from for this post are below:
‘Imagine If….Creating a Future For Us All’ Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson
‘Creative Schools’ Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica
TED talk: ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?, 2006
I have never listened to that TED talk but I think I should. Love the competencies as you’ve described them here - they are sorely lacking in our world today, seems to me. As to how to make that shift - well, that would be an interesting challenge to solve, especially in today’s educational climate. :(