Page 13 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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The purpose of school has historically been to prepare young people to find their place in society. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the outcome of that purpose was to encourage young people to be polite, honest, hard-working and do as they were told, following the social norms of their time. Schools in the last two centuries were the perfect institution for encouraging these dispositions that the workforce and society required. Students and adults who stepped outside of these norms were dealt with harshly and were socially isolated if they did not change their ways.
However, in this decade and across many countries, social norms have been turned upside down and inside out. Workplaces have become far more sophisticated and the capabilities that modern workers require, are radically different from those required in 1980. Every day we must learn a vast range of new skills, knowledge and understanding just to keep up, let alone keep ahead of the play, and most of that learning is not taking place in schools.
Globally, governments are responding to this shift by taking a 19th and 20th-century approach to curriculum design and intent with out-dated thematic topics and mandated, standardised testing for reading, writing and mathematics. The increasing level of frustration for teachers is the disconnect between the capabilities young people now require and their government’s focus on students being required to remember knowledge for exams that they could access from their phones in moments, should they be allowed to take them into those exams. Their world is YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat and we give them school uniforms, textbooks and meaningless tests.
Meanwhile, just over the horizon, a storm is brewing that will radically change the very essence of what school has been for the past 200 years. To bring schools in line with the changes in society, we will need to be aware of just how our lives have changed and hat changes are on the horizon.
The expectations placed on our schools to change in the next 10-15 years will be considerable, and if countries choose not to make these changes they will become backwaters of the post-modern era. The critical nature of understanding our identity, the development of the competencies, and being able to learn efficiently, sees a shift in the end-point of learning to one of innovation and ingenuity rather than remembering content and processes. In the past, these outcomes were achieved by the minority and they have now become the expected outcomes of all learner- educators. Innovation and ingenuity in our school systems needs to draw on the creativity of our young people to contribute to and lead this brave new world, and to do this, we as their educators, will need to make substantive changes to our beliefs and our practice.
How 20:80 Became 80:20
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Introduction: Learning 101 8 TheHistoricalPurposeofSchool
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Last century, the focus on learning by rote, to read, write and do mathematics9, provided the perfect distribution curve of ‘intelligence’. This distribution curve allowed 20% of people to be deemed sufficiently intelligent to go on to university to learn how to tell the other 80% what to do, how to do it and then judge how well it was done. Reading, writing and rote-learned mathematics were the definers of how intelligence was perceived, convincing the other 80% of students to accept low-paid, menial jobs and blame themselves for their situation because they did not work hard enough at school.
8 The chapter summary video can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JCrpBCnd1M if you are reading the book otherwise click on the video icon at the top of the page
9 Mathematics is a conceptual language for communicating the underlying beauty of the universe we inhabit. Education systems have sadly reduced this to rote learning of processes where the student must get the right answer.