Here is a remarkable thought: Among the world’s children starting grade school this year, 65 percent will end up doing jobs that haven’t even been invented yet.
This projection, while impossible to prove, comes from a highly respected and responsible source, Cathy N. Davidson, a Duke University professor who is also the codirector of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions.1 And after all, once we get over the shock of that sheer number, the projection seems entirely plausible. Grade school students in the 1960s had no way of foreseeing that the hot spot in job creation and economic growth during the 1970s and ’80s would come from various aspects of the personal computing industry—an industry that didn’t exist in the Age of Woodstock. As recently as the 1980s, no one planned to make his or her living through the Internet, since the Internet existed nowhere but in the hushed and secret corridors of DARPA. Even more recently, how many kids, teachers, or parents realized that little Sally might end up working in advanced genomics, while Johnny became an entrepreneur in social media, Tabitha became an engineer in cloud computing, and Pedro designed apps for iPhones?
None of these developments was foreseeable ten or fifteen years before the fact, and given the tendency of change to feed on itself and keep accelerating, it’s a safe bet that a decade from today there will be even more surprises. No one is smart enough to know what will happen tomorrow—or, for that matter, in the next hour, minute, or nanosecond—let alone half a generation down the line.
The certainty of change, coupled with the complete uncertainty as to the precise nature of the change, has profound and complex implications for our approach to education. For me, though, the most basic takeaway is crystal clear: Since we can’t predict exactly what today’s young people will need to know in ten or twenty years, what we teach them is less important than how they learn to teach themselves.
Sure, kids need to have a grounding in basic math and science; they need to understand how language works so they can communicate effectively and with nuance; they should have some awareness of history and politics so as to feel at home in the world, and some conversance with art in order to appreciate the human thirst for the sublime. Beyond these fundamentals, however, the crucial task of education is to teach kids how to learn. To lead them to want to learn. To nurture curiosity, to encourage wonder, and to instill confidence so that later on they’ll have the tools for finding answers to the many questions we don’t yet know how to ask.
In these regards, conventional education, with its emphasis on rote memorization, artificially sequestered concepts, and one-size-fits-all curricula geared too narrowly toward testing, is clearly failing us. At a time when unprecedented change demands unprecedented flexibility, conventional education continues to be brittle. As our increasingly interconnected world cries out for more minds, more innovators, more of a spirit of inclusion, conventional education continues to discourage and exclude. At a time of stubborn and worldwide economic difficulties, the conventional educational establishment seems oddly blind (or tragically resistant) to readily available technology-based solutions for making education not only better but more affordable, accessible to far more people in far more places.
In the pages that follow, I would like to propose a different sort of future for education—a more inclusive and more creative future. My vision may strike some people as a peculiar mix of ideas, because some of what I’m suggesting is quite new and some of it is very old; some of it is based on technology that has only recently come into being, and some of it harkens back to bygone wisdom about how kids actually learn and grow. Yes, I am a firm believer in the transformative power of computers and the Internet. Paradoxically, though, I am urging us forward, in part, by suggesting a return to certain older models and methods that have been cast aside in the name of “progress.”