Traditionally, we go to school and then work because our family, and by extension society, needs our labor for its survival and growth. In hunter-gathering societies, children were taught to forage, navigate, track and hunt, so that we could obtain more food for our tribe. In an agrarian village, children were taught to farm and raise animals for the same reasons. Then, human societies realized that if we divided up our work and had individuals specialize in different parts of the production, society would prosper a lot more than having the individuals or families doing every part of the production on our own. Trades and crafts proliferated. After industrialization, mass education schooled children on basic language, mathematics and vocational skills to work in factories. Our current educational system is still mostly based on that last era. In our service and technology-oriented age, young people are encouraged to further specialize in a modern profession for a well-paying and stable job, but compared to past generations, professional middle-class jobs are not a guarantee of a good living standard anymore, and are increasingly threatened by automation and artificial intelligence. Increasingly, younger generations find themselves locked out of the economic prosperity and growth previous generations had enjoyed before them.
It’s high time we rethink education and work for the 21st century.
Early education for the future
Education, particularly early education, determines our collective future, and thus ought to be valued and prioritized in all societies. To keep up with our fast-changing digital age, the goal of early education should move from memorization and vocational skill development to ensuring that children’s physiological, safety, love and esteem needs are met, then give them the chances to pursue personalized growth as well as learn group deliberation and cooperation.
On educating future generations, Scandinavian countries remain the forerunners, scoring high in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results with shorter school days and without stressing out students or harming their self-esteems. It starts with an emphasize in socialization rather than individual performance: “Every child born in Denmark,” for example, “is guaranteed a place in daycare from six months to six years of age where the emphasis is on playing and socialising — formal education doesn’t begin until age eight or nine… ‘In the first few years,’ said [author Kay Xander] Mellish, ‘children learn the basic rules for functioning as a society. They learn how to sit at a table at lunch time, wait until it is their turn to be served, and feed themselves. In the playground, they spend most of their time in ‘free play’, in which they make up rules for their own games,” writer Karen Gardiner notes.
Nordic nations also tailor education to the individuals to achieve learning outcomes but not grades. In Finland, “individual teachers… decide how the curriculum is taught, including how much technology should feature in their classrooms” [1:14]. “There are regular exams in Finland but the results of these tests are not published and shared… We just use the information that we evaluate ourselves” [4:15], ABC News Australia reports ▶️.
How do the Scandinavian countries provide such high quality education? First, they equalize the school system. “In Finland, schools are not allowed to raise private funds or to charge fees from parents. All schools are equitably funded from taxation” [3:27]. As a result, parents do not have to compete or be financially well-off to get their children into “good schools” — all schools as equally good. Secondly, they invest in the teachers, who are paid well. In Finland, for instance, every teacher needs to have a master’s degree. Nordic teachers also need to excel at pedagogy, or the theory and practice of learning, a requirement that’s less common in other parts of the world.
Lastly, early education of the future needs to consider digital literacy. Estonia is leading in this regard, for it “has made internet access available to all students… [and] digital literacy a key competency required in its educational outcomes,” writer Kevin Dickinson discovers.
General education for the future
Job markets in our day and age change faster than all other periods in human history combined. Entire professions can disappear (e.g., drivers or financial accounts manager) while new jobs no one had ever dreamed of materialize (e.g., influencers, AI engineers). And this rapid change will only accelerate. It is hard to justify parents expecting their children to follow a certain career path — who knows what jobs will be in high demand in even a few years?
As content creator Prince Ea points out, instead of fitting students into pre-existing molds, the future of education should empower students to “think creatively, innovatively, critically, independently with the ability to connect”. To prepare new generations for their futures, on top of subjects already taught at schools, which have generally not be updated since era of industrialization, societies need to consider adding subjects that are more relevant to our time, including:
- At least 2 languages, not only because bilingual brains are “more healthy, complex and actively engaged,” according to Ted-Ed, but also because studying foreign languages will increase students’ understanding and empathy for different cultures.
- Emotional health, mental health, human psychology, standing up to bullying (more in World > Bullying Basics).
- Personal finances within world economics.
- Technology basics such as cybersecurity, programming, design thinking, agile methodology, and startup skills.
- Reasoning basics such as logic, statistics, and critical thinking.
- Game theory, group deliberation and cooperation.
- Environmentalism.
- With a foundation of group cooperation and digital literacy in early education, higher education should also emphasize civic participation to prepare future citizens in the building of the next-generation democracy. As U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts cautions: “We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is even more vital.”
Higher and lifelong education
In recent years, there are calls to reform college admissions. Writer Frank Bruni, for example, reflects on how college admissions create “competitive frenzy” that jeopardizes students’ mental health, encourages the prioritization of personal achievements over caring for others, and results in universities to admit “emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions.” In the near future, we may also need to review the role algorithms and AI play in grading and higher education admissions, for it can lead to inequality.
Also, in our fast-evolving time, education “will not be a commodity that people acquire by attending school for 12, 16, or 20-plus years. Increasingly, it will be a lifelong endeavor. People of all ages and education levels will need to continue their educations for as long as they plan to work,” observes journalist Alan Gottlieb. That’s why, he argues, “[w]e need to reorient our thinking about how people of all ages learn, what they learn, and where they learn.”
Read about other relationships in the 21st century:
- Self
- Romance / Sex
- Family
- Friends
- Work
- Communities
- Social status
- Consumer groups / Economies
- Political Systems
- Memes / Ideologies / Religions
- Humanity
- Environment / World
- Universe / Beyond Our Universe
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