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Schools did not knowingly carry out this highly prejudicial process, but the outcome conveniently met the then purpose of school, to ‘prepare young people to contribute to the community or society they were to live in’. The schooling process established a set of beliefs, which in turn created the required 20:80 ratio of smart to not-so-smart people that were needed by the workforce. The 19th and 20th-century social paradigm encouraged people to be polite, honest, hard-working and conform to socially mediated norms and behaviours, as well as do as they were told without question. In these two centuries, schools were the perfect vehicle for providing the social and workplace dispositions that the workforce and society desired.
Well into this century, that need for a 20:80 ratio of ‘smart’ to ‘not-so-smart’ has become completely reversed to become 80:20. Low-paid menial jobs that required minimal thinking have mostly been, or are becoming, automated, replaced by automation, robots, AI or 3D printers. We now need about 80% of people to be able to be competent, independent, lifelong learners that can adapt quickly to changing societal and workplace trends, demands and expectations, as well as have the capacity to learn and be innovative and ingenious along with being technologically literate. This emerging paradigm shift now calls into question numerous aspects of what schools have historically taught, as well as how useful those bodies of knowledge now are.
There have been numerous surveys10 of what the employment sector now requires, in a world where knowledge is available Just- In-Time and technology has eliminated many of the low- level menial jobs!
Unbelievably, no employer is asking for cursive script or neat handwriting of any form. Nor do they want a potential employee to know a brief history of the Romans or Egyptians, and yes, education is not just about pandering to employers’ needs.
Resource 1: The Top 10 Employability Skills
There is some knowledge we simply need to know, but virtually no one needs to remember random, arcane facts about an ancient culture or rote-learned mathematical processes without any real understanding of the underlying concepts, as almost all of us are carrying around the most extraordinary compendium of knowledge and tools that we can access in seconds, courtesy of our phone. So, what are the capabilities required in this century?
Our ability to adapt to changing environmental and social conditions is critical to our survival, and how we adapt our education system to meet the needs of society relies on us identifying what the actual problems are, that we are facing. These issues then need to be addressed both on a practical and a political level.
A good example of ensuring we identify what the actual problems are, comes from the experience of the scientists who were attempting to eradicate mosquitoes that carried Dengue fever and malaria. With a bit of additional knowledge, some strategic thinking and the identification of the actual problem, the result was a change in how they approached creating a solution to the problem.
10 Exeter University. (2015). StemNet Top 10 Employability Skills. Retrieved from http://www.exeter.ac.uk/ambassadors/HESTEM/resources/General/STEMNET%20Employability%20skills%20guide.pdf