Chapter 1
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Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history.
—Thomas Frey
Like many of you, I've read lots of projections and scenarios about what the future might hold for education. So much is changing at such an amazing pace that it's hard to keep track of it all. This fact smacked me between the eyes when I read a New York Times article about dead people coming back to life:
Andy Kaufman and Redd Foxx to Tour, Years After Death, as Holograms
As comedians, Redd Foxx and Andy Kaufman could hardly be more different. Foxx, the pioneering nightclub performer and star of Sanford and Son, who died in 1991, was candid, socially conscious, and unapologetically obscene. Kaufman, the standup, sometime wrestler, and ‘Taxi’ costar, who died in 1984, was experimental, obtuse, playful, and perplexing.
But now these two comics will be united in a most unlikely way: Both are being turned into holograms to perform and tour again.
On Friday, Hologram USA, a technology company that specializes in these visual recreations of celebrities, announced that it would use the likenesses of Kaufman and Foxx and parts of their previously recorded routines to create hologram shows that will be presented across the country next year. (Itzkoff, 2015)
No, I am not making this up. But as I think about it, I should not have been that surprised. Ray Kurzweil predicted this blurring of reality and illusion in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), envisioning a future in which holograms appear so lifelike that the only way to determine whether the teacher at the front of the classroom is human is to reach out and feel either flesh or air.
As it happens, holograms have been passing as living humans for some time. The Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois, opened in 2005, features a presentation by an actor who, it turns out, is really a hologram. I was there a few years ago, and the illusion was so effective that it took me quite a while to realize that the figure I was watching wasn't a human after all.
Consider, too, the Cisco Connected Classroom at the University of Pennsylvania, as described by Ariel Schwartz (2013): "a floor-to-ceiling screen at the front of each connected room for the lecturer, two smaller 80-inch screens on each side to display notes and guests beaming in from elsewhere, and two mid-sized screens in the back to show students in the other classroom." Although there aren't any holograms per se, the life-size moving image of an instructor operating in real time and beamed in from another continent challenges traditional conceptions of classroom teaching. Returning to the idea of teacher holograms discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the future is closer than we think. Here's the first line from an article on Ray Kurzweil's website about robots possibly replacing teachers: "Researchers in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Cynthia Breazeal, PhD, have developed a powerful new ‘socially assistive’ robot called Tega that senses the affective (emotional/feeling) state of a learner, and based on those cues, creates a personalized motivational strategy" (Angelica, 2016).
Taking another step into the future, Ray Kurzweil posted an article to his website titled, "How to Animate a Digital Model of a Person from Images Collected from the Internet" (2015). What's next? Might we go to a theater to see John F. Kennedy debate Ronald Reagan? Surely we have libraries of videotape featuring the two presidents, so it's not at all a far-fetched possibility. And from there, how difficult would it be to bring portraits and pictures alive so that we can watch Abraham Lincoln discussing slavery with Christopher Columbus? If we can consider whether or not to use DNA extracted from fossils to bring dinosaurs that died 65 million years ago back to life, then creating holograms of long-deceased people using their DNA or that of their ancestors is not out of the question. Still, it all makes me very uncomfortable. Perhaps it would be a good topic to discuss during intermission at the Red Foxx and Andy Kaufman performance.
Much of the rapid pace of change that we're experiencing is due to the invention of and rapid spread of new ways to communicate. Today, for better and/or worse (actually, for better AND worse), we are almost always connected. For example, each day there are 100 billion e-mails sent and 300 billion Facebook posts made; last year, 200 billion tweets were sent. That's a lot of keystrokes! And according to The Atlantic magazine, 935,951,027 websites existed in September of 2015 (Lafrance, 2015). To put that in perspective, it would take 18 years to spend just one minute on each of those websites, excluding breaks for eating, sleeping, or walking the dog. My smartphone gives me access to the world's libraries and to millions of people. There is no doubt that the technology explosion has changed our lives for the better—but there is also no doubt that it has come at a cost.
A commentator on the NBC Nightly News recently noted that a study of low-income parents in Philadelphia showed that "nearly half of children less than a year old used a mobile device each day, and by the age of two, that percentage jumped up to nearly 80 percent." Dr. Matilde Irigoyen of the Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia added that "by age four, most (of the children) owned their own personal device" (2015). Parents and caregivers frequently use technology to keep young children occupied. And as everyone working in a school knows, it doesn't get any easier as kids get older.
Albert Einstein once said, "I never think of the future. It will come soon enough." Educators don't have that luxury. We must anticipate what the future will hold in order to prepare our students for tomorrow, but predictions are always uncertain. Here are two notorious examples (Lewis, 2013): In 1962, Decca Records passed on signing the Beatles to a contract, with one executive commenting, "We don't like your boys' sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished." And in 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, "There's no chance that the iPhone will get any significant market share. No chance." (See these and other equally bad predictions.) Difficulty anticipating the future isn't limited to trying to determine what consumers will purchase. We have all seen the photo of President Harry Truman triumphantly displaying the newspaper proclaiming his loss to Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948, for example. More recently, the weekend before the national election in November 2012, Mitt Romney's campaign committee installed a $25,000 firework display in Boston Harbor in anticipation of Romney's election. According to a 2012 blog post by Eric Randall on the website of Boston magazine, Romney "and Paul Ryan seemed to truly believe the polls were ‘skewed’ to overestimate the numbers of minority and young voters that would show up to the election." For years I've been foolishly predicting that the St. Louis Rams—remember them?—would win more games than they would lose, and for years I've been proven wrong. (And don't get me started on those stocks that I was sure would increase in value!)
Perhaps Peter Drucker said it best: "Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window." But our students' futures are too important for us not to at least try to anticipate what they will need and how we can best serve them. Driving down that metaphorical dim road, I see six trends that will inform how we need to prepare our students to achieve success in tomorrow's real world. Three of these trends are contextual—that is, they are worldwide thrusts that will have a strong effect on education. The other three trends are education-specific—they reflect ways in which schools will change. Each of these trends will result in the Formative Five success skills playing a prominent role in future school curriculums.
Climate change will have a dramatic effect on how we live and work. Rising seas and more extreme weather will make it impossible to deny that it is happening, so conserving energy and protecting the planet will become immediate priorities. Unfortunately, much of the damage to Spaceship Earth has already been done, and it will take sustained effort by much of the world to halt it, let alone reverse it. The fragility of our ecosystem will result in much greater levels of environmental awareness and efforts by educators.
I do not anticipate the dystopia that James Kunstler predicts in his 2005 book, The Long Emergency, with skyscrapers abandoned because there's not enough power to operate the elevators. But there's no doubt that we will be forced to live differently—and, most likely, less comfortably. Potable water will become a scarce resource in many places, weather patterns will turn increasingly disruptive, and global disparities in wealth and comfort will grow larger and larger.
Writing for National Geographic, Tim Folger (2015) asserts that global warming projections from 2012 are actually too conservative. "Year by year, millimeter by millimeter, the seas are rising," he writes. "Fed by melting glaciers and ice sheets, and swollen by thermal expansion of water as the planet warms, the world's oceans now on average are about eight inches higher than a century ago. And this sea change is only getting started." Folger notes that eight of the world's ten largest cities are on seacoasts. Of course, rising sea levels will affect all of us, no matter where we live. At the same time, where we live will increasingly determine our quality of life. As Robert Kaplan puts it in his book The Revenge of Geography (2012), "The only enduring thing is a people's position on a map" (p. xviii).
According to the Conserve Energy Future website,
The population of the planet is reaching unsustainable levels as it faces shortage of resources like water, fuel, and food. Population explosion in less developed and developing countries is straining the already scarce resources. Intensive agriculture practiced to produce food damages the environment through use of chemical fertilizer, pesticides and insecticides. Overpopulation is one of the crucial current environmental problems.
Clearly, respect for the Earth will become an integral part of every child's education, and students will learn to understand how their actions can contribute to solving rather than exacerbating our environmental plight.
Implications for the Formative Five. Empathy and embracing diversity will be very important, because many of the steps necessary to protect our environment will require us to make personal sacrifices in order to help others. We will look beyond our borders and take actions that we know will cost us in some way—though because we are all on the same planet, helping others is ultimately helping ourselves as well. Students will also need to develop self-control in making decisions that require staving off immediate gratification in exchange for a better future—and because environmental change is a complex problem with no easy solutions, tenacity and resilience—grit—will be necessary to make progress.
As computer chips become ever smaller, faster, and more powerful, technology will become even more pervasive in our lives than it currently is. Ray Kurzweil "predicts that in the 2030s, human brains will be able to connect to the cloud, allowing us to send e-mails and photos directly to the brain and to back up our thoughts and memories. This will be possible, he says, via nanobots—tiny robots from DNA strands—swimming around in the capillaries of our brain" (Miles, 2015). Kurzweil refers here to an approaching singularity, with computers increasingly doing our problem solving for us with little human direction or intervention. (Bear in mind that intelligence is problem solving.) In a 2007 New York Times column titled "The Outsourced Brain," David Brooks makes the point succinctly: "I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized that the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less."
Of course, the ubiquity of computers has already significantly changed how we work: we've gone from counting on fingers to using the abacus, slide rule, and adding machine to mostly observing as computations are done for us. We might analyze the problem, frame the question, and press a few buttons, but we know that computers are more accurate and infinitely faster than people at solving complex mathematical equations. Actually, scratch that—why waste time pressing buttons when you can just ask Siri for the answer?
Incredibly, Siri is already yesterday's technology. Today's computers can do more than just hear us; they can now go as far as to read our facial expressions and infer our emotions. It won't be too long until we're greeted at the hospital emergency room by computers—perhaps even holograms—that ask us our symptoms, observe our expressions and body language, and refer us to a specialist, accordingly. Indeed, a company called Affectiva, founded by Rana el Kaliouby, is already developing such an artificial intelligence. According to an article in Fast Company magazine, the company's technology "is sophisticated enough to distinguish smirks from smiles, or unhappy frowns from the empathetic pursing of lips" (Segran, 2015). How many receptionists or aides will be replaced by this kind of automation? (See el Kaliouby's 2015 TED Talk video for more information on Affectiva's work.)
Already, as pointed out by David Rotman (2013) in the MIT Technology Review, technology has had a major effect on employment. From nearly half of Americans working in agriculture in 1900, only 2 percent did so in 2000. Additionally, "The proportion of Americans employed in manufacturing has dropped from 30 percent in the post-World War II years to around 10 percent today—partly because of increasing automation, especially during the 1980s."
That is likely just the beginning. Rotman continues: a "less dramatic change, but one with a potentially far larger impact on employment, is taking place in clerical work and professional services. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics—all made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and storage capacity—are automating many routine tasks." Claire Caine Miller captures the interplay between technology and jobs well in her New York Times article "As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up" (2014); similarly, in The Industries of the Future (2016), Alec Ross warns that "tomorrow's labor market will be increasingly characterized by competition between humans and robots" (p. 247).
Sometimes I wonder about the potential consequences of the driverless car. Once we are able to sit comfortably in an automobile for long journeys without having to focus on the road, will we still need motels? How might driverless cars affect the airline and railroad industries? And as labor becomes increasingly automated, what will we do with our free time? According to Thomas Frey (2014), by "2030 the average person in the U.S. … will spend most of [his or her] leisure time on an activity that hasn't been invented yet" (p. 52).
That many jobs will be eliminated is beyond question. A 2016 article in The Economist notes that "a study published in 2013 by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University stoked anxieties when it found that 47 percent of jobs in [the United States] were vulnerable to automation"—and that in poorer countries where jobs can more easily be automated, the percentages are even higher (e.g., 69 percent in India, 77 percent in China, and 85 percent in Ethiopia). As leadership guru Warren Bennis has memorably said, "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
Implications for the Formative Five: As we are freed more and more of mundane tasks and obligations, our ability to exert self-control and make wise choices will become ever more important. Increased opportunities to interact with those we do not know (only interacting online) mean that the attributes of integrity and embracing diversity will be particularly valuable.
As much as it pains me, I'm afraid that members of our species will continue to discriminate among one another. I would like to believe otherwise, but history is my guide—and recently, some of the responses to the Syrian refugee crisis and to terrorist acts by a few Muslims portend increased fear and discrimination throughout the West. And despite the United States' status as a melting pot, many Americans continue to struggle with diversity issues—unsurprisingly, given our history with slavery.
This legacy begins in 1619, when the first slaves were brought to North America from Africa. (In 2015, Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie published a powerful video showing the paths of these forced journeys, which encompassed 20,528 slave ships over 315 years.) Indeed, from its very founding, the United States relied on slavery for much of its economy. Though it is rarely noted in history books, the founders paid a lot of attention to slavery when devising the Constitution. (Joseph Ellis's 2015 book The Quartet provides a wonderful summary of the deliberations and tensions between the northern and southern states during this "second American Revolution.")
In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that "at the onset of the Civil War," the "stolen bodies" of black slaves "were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies—cotton—was America's primary export" (p. 101). Although things have gotten much better, we have much more to do: Type racial conflict into Google's search engine and you'll get about 71,000,000 links. (Ferguson shooting results in about 34,200,000 links.) Our country will become even more diverse: according to estimates by the U.S. Census, "International migration will soon surpass natural increases (births minus deaths) as the principal driver of America's growth" (McGovern, 2016, p. 21). Looking ahead, it's clear that the speed and ease of communications technology will create exponentially more intersections among people of different races, religions, economic statuses, and beliefs.
Both technology and climate change will have enormous implications on diversity because disparities in living conditions will vary among groups even more in the future than they do today. Perhaps, generations from now, race will be a relic of the past. It's likely that practically all humans will one day be a salmagundi of different races. Even then, however, I fear that mankind will find other characteristics on the basis of which to discriminate.
Implications for the Formative Five: Interacting with others who are different than we are—whether in real time or online—will be virtually unavoidable, so empathy and embracing diversity will be even more central in the future than they are today. These same interactions will also require us to act with integrity to foster trust among one another.
Here are three predictions of changes related to education that I believe will have a profound effect on schools in the future—and that will point to the increasing importance of the Formative Five in curriculum and instruction.
In the future, appreciating the "whole child" will be the norm. Maslow was correct when he noted that we all need to have our basic needs met before we can fully focus on learning. Before we can help students with their self-actualization, we must meet their basic needs for safety, love, belonging, and esteem. Although meeting these needs is primarily the job of parents, we'd be naïve to think that it isn't part of our job as educators to address them. Consequently, I believe that future schools will provide more services intended to address the prerequisite needs of students.
Beyond ensuring students' health and safety, we will be emphasizing the Formative Five success skills more in the future. As we increasingly delegate lower-level tasks to machines, we will turn our focus to teaching students how to solve complex challenges by managing themselves (e.g., through integrity, self-control, and grit) and their relationships (e.g., by employing empathy and embracing diversity).
Higher-level problem solving, starting with determining the questions to be solved and the data to be used, will become more of a curricular and instructional focus in the future. I envision these areas being routinely assessed and discussed on students' report cards. (Having said this, and despite the high value that I place on the Formative Five, I am skeptical of the use of standardized testing to measure them well.)
A myriad of school options for every student may seem inconceivable in a world where, historically, most students are assigned to schools according to where they live. But just as choices have proliferated in our everyday life, so too will they become increasingly central to education. Consider that it wasn't that long ago that the U.S. Postal Service was the only option for mailing a package, that we had just the three or four television channels to choose from, and that we had to hail cabs either by home phone or by standing on the corner. Even when our actual choices aren't that much greater, such as among commercial airline companies, we have access to more granular data and, consequently, more control of the process. (Remember when you had to call a travel agent to book a flight?)
I predict that a marketplace will arise that will enable families to select where and how their children should be educated. Up until recently, school choices have been available mostly to those who can afford them. Magnet and charter schools have begun to make choice more affordable (though chiefly in and around larger cities so far)—the number of charter schools has increased by 47 percent since 2007, and more than 6,400 of them were in operation in 2013 (Karp, 2013)—and I believe that the possibilities will only expand. It isn't hard to conceive that families will one day be able to select from a menu of educational options that includes their local public schools as well as charter, independent, religious, and for-profit choices.
Online learning opportunities are also bound to expand, allowing students living anywhere access to a mind-boggling number of courses. The Khan Academy is on the vanguard of this expansion, and I'm sure that a profusion of similar offerings will arise in time. It also won't be long until K–12 educators feel the effects of the massive, open, and online courses (MOOCs) that have already taken hold in the world of higher education: enrollment in post-secondary MOOCs doubled from 2011 to 2015, with 35 million students taking at least one. (I must note that I do not advocate using MOOCs especially with elementary-age students.)
A greater appreciation of what is required to be a successful adult coupled with more detailed data on students' specific needs will lead to more and more parents choosing "customized learning environments" for their children. I put the term in quotes because I don't believe that schools will truly be customized, but rather that different schools will have different focuses—and will market themselves accordingly. Dollars, whether in the form of tax revenues or tuition payments, are inextricably attached to students, so working to stand out in a competitive K–12 environment will be increasingly important. This shift to a more market-oriented approach will have profound repercussions on the way schools are organized and the behaviors that students and staffs are expected to value.
Consider, as an analogy, the restaurant business. Highly successful restaurants serve excellent-tasting food, sure, but that's only a part of the reason why they do well. Highly successful restaurants offer a narrow range of plates so they can focus on execution—and, more important, on providing customers with a pleasurable experience. Restaurateur Danny Meyer makes the point well in his book Setting the Table (2008):
You may think, as I once did, that I'm primarily in the business of serving good food. Actually, though, food is secondary to something that matters even more. In the end, what's most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple, and it's that hard. (p. 3)
Similarly, I predict that in addition to providing a good education, schools of the future will pay more attention than they do today to creating positive relationships among their consumers (students) and customers (parents). (In fact, I refer to Meyer's point often in the principal preparation program in which I teach.)
In the future, internet connectivity will be a given, and students will routinely work with handheld devices. Increased reliance upon screens in classrooms will make human interactions even more important than they are today. Teachers will find themselves working to develop teams within their classrooms to design activities that require students to interact "in the flesh." At the same time, students will find themselves interacting much more often with peers who live in other cities and countries. The working definition of a "classroom" will change as teachers routinely create settings for children from a range of backgrounds, living on different continents, to collaborate on solving common problems.
Of course, simply interacting with peers from different places and backgrounds won't automatically help students learn to respect and appreciate one another. Rather, skilled teachers will need to consciously work to develop these attitudes in their students, which will require them to adopt a new kind of mindset. As Carole Basile, dean of the College of Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, puts it: "The expectations of a teacher have to shift. We would have developmental expectations for teachers and they would work in teams with groups of kids alongside socio-emotional experts" (personal communication, December 8, 2015).
Though the challenges confronting us may differ in many ways, their complexity requires collaborative solutions, with people of all kinds working together. Margaret Mead's famous quote—"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has"—is increasingly valid. These citizens may not live in the same neighborhood or even on the same continent, but they can be united in seeking solutions to common problems. Empathy, self-control, integrity, and embracing diversity will be key success skills as tomorrow's students and adults work and learn with and from others—and to solve all of the problems we will inevitably confront, we will need lots and lots of grit.
I fully expect—and encourage!—people wiser than I to disagree about my predictions. Of one point, however, I am certain: the Formative Five success skills will only become more important in schools as the years progress.