The Occupy movement is most significant not for what the protestors say, but rather that the movement is happening at all. It demonstrates significant unrest, and the greatest dissatisfaction with the capitalist system that we’ve witnessed since the fall of the Soviet Union. But where is it headed? That’s a much more worrisome question.

The fuel that powered the Vietnam war protests was the draft. There were many other issues – objections to the military-industrial complex, objections to American foreign policy, objections to the money misspent on the war, dislike and disagreement with McNamara and Johnson, even objections to war per se – but without the draft, the protests could not have been as sustained or as widespread as they were.

In the same way, the fuel that powers the Occupy movement is jobs – or rather, lack of jobs. In America, and most other developed countries, the official unemployment rate is high, but the true unemployment rate is obscenely so. In the U.S., for instance, the official rate is 9%. But if you include those who have stopped looking for work, and therefore are no longer counted in the official unemployment statistics, then add those who are underemployed, the true rate approaches 20%. And if you look at the rate for young men, particularly among minorities, it approaches 40%. There is immense frustration with the lack of opportunity, and the smug, self-righteous people who look at the protestors and sneer, “Get a job!” only reveal the vast depths of their ignorance.

It’s true there are many issues embraced by the Occupiers, but without the lack of jobs, the movement would never have developed into much of anything. Americans are not generally a jealous people. If people were prospering, the middle class was expanding, and young people were able to find jobs and start their careers, they wouldn’t really have cared what percentage of total wealth is held by the top 1% of income earners. What rankles is that the rich continue to get richer through a perceived manipulation of “the system”, while the vast majority of other people suffer economically. It leads to the belief that the game is fixed in favor of those who can afford to buy the politicians. Whether this is right or not may not matter – it’s the perception that’s important here. And that perception may be explosive.

But where is this movement going? What’s next?

The Future of Work

If the future holds more jobs, and greater prosperity for most workers, then the Occupy movement will collapse from lack of fuel, and be remembered as a strange fad that came and went, like pet rocks or hula hoops. That’s not the case, because the future of work is much bleaker than people, even most top economists realize.

There are two forces that are squeezing workers in all developed countries: foreign competition, and domestic automation. One is going to get much worse, and the other is going to get slightly better.

The one that will get slightly better, at least in manufacturing, is foreign competition. There have been headlines for decades about the offshoring of jobs. There was even a management cliché for it in the 1990s: “Emigrate, automate, or evaporate,” which meant move your factories offshore in order to take advantage of dramatically lower wages in developing countries; decrease the labor content of your products in order to reduce the advantage of cheap labor in developing countries, or go out of business. (As an aside, there’s actually a fourth option: innovate, but that’s another story.)

This happened because of the emergence of the global economy. A global marketplace implies a global labor pool. If workers in developing countries can do similar work, but at much lower wages, then the work will naturally gravitate to them, and away from workers in developed countries. This has been going on since the 1970s, and is a familiar tale. It makes headlines, and becomes the subject of learned papers by economists, and protests by industries and unions that want protection. And the offshoring of jobs will continue until there is a rough parity between those producing things offshore, using cheaper labor, and the cost of producing things at home, using more expensive labor.

One way this could happen is through wages falling in developed countries, and rising in developing countries. But wages tend to be sticky; not many people are willing to take a cut in pay. As a result, what has tended to happen instead is that workers here are let go, and their jobs disappear, even as the wages in places like China and India are, indeed, rising.

The mild good news here is that much of this adjustment has already happened. Indeed, there are a few reports of manufacturers moving production back to America as the cost of labor in China, for instance, has risen, and as governments, particularly in the southern American states, have reduced legal protections for workers, effectively lowering their cost. (Whether you view this as a good thing or not is a separate issue. Indeed, it’s a difficult issue: do we want good worker protection, but no jobs, or bad worker protection and some jobs?)

The other way for workers in developed countries to compete is through higher productivity, and many companies have survived and kept their production in America that way. Yet, even when they succeed, the number of jobs required goes down. Businesses survive, but only by shedding jobs, leaving a trail of unemployment in the wake.

This is the past and present. The future will be different.

Increased productivity comes most notably through increased automation, and we’ve all experienced that, as when we go to the gas pump, swipe our credit card, and pump our own gas, all without an attendant. But automation is about to become supercharged.

The rate of change in computing speed and cost-effectiveness is not only accelerating, but the rate of acceleration is increasing. Some technology forecasters believe that computers will increase in power by 1,000 times over the next 10 years. With this growth in computing power available at steadily cheaper prices, automation is going to accelerate dramatically, eating its way up the workplace food chain. Only this time, it’s not going to be primarily blue-collar jobs that disappear – that’s pretty well already happened – but white-collar jobs that are hard hit. Indeed, anyone who uses a contemporary computer can experience this for themselves.

With the Macintosh laptop that I’m using to write this blog, I could (if I had the talent) write a new piece of music, score it, perform it with dozens of (computerized) instruments, record it and release it for sale. I could take videos with my iPhone, download them to my laptop, edit them, add titles and special effects, add in the music that I had created, and then publish the end result on YouTube. In effect, with these two tools, a laptop computer and a smartphone, I can replace composers, performers, and an entire movie making team – and that’s using today’s technology. Very shortly, I could make an entire movie, using technology to create photo-realistic virtual actors and background scenes, dub the voices myself, then change the sound of my voice using technology, and produce an entire movie without anyone else. True, it would be a terrible movie as I know nothing about directing, editing, or acting, and not much about composing or playing musical instruments – but that’s not the point. The point is that the tools we use are becoming so powerful that high-end jobs that used to require skilled people can now be done by ordinary folk.

Likewise, computers will move into medicine, performing research using Genetic Programming, and assisting doctors to do complex diagnoses using smart computers like IBM’s Watson; performing clerical work in almost every conceivable industry, and displacing millions of white collars workers along the way; drive cars, trucks, and trains unassisted; and almost any other kind of routine work. Indeed, computer intelligences and everyday robots will move towards replacing workers in any and every kind of repetitive work, leaving only creative, innovative, entrepreneurial work – and leaving millions, or even tens of millions of people unemployed.

What Happens When Too Many People Are Unemployed?

If you look at the Arab Spring from earlier this year, it wasn’t so much a yearning for the freedom to read newspapers not approved by dictators, or the desire to vote that was the driving force that caused people to revolt, but unemployment, especially among young men – leading the inability to create a life, to feed your children, or even to be able to afford to get married and start a family – that drove the revolutions, and inspired young men to face bullets and tanks. If you look at the protests in Europe, it’s not just the anger that a lazy, luxurious way of life is being taken away from Greek citizens, but a very real fear that they won’t be able to live that drives citizens to the barricades.

Unemployment, the specter of want, and the inability to make a decent living, to have a decent life, is historically a very potent, very scary force in geopolitics, and it’s with us now. The Occupy movement is not just about fairness, but driven by the fear and anger that there is no opportunity unless you are one of the privileged class that has a job. As the number of jobs lost to automation rises, so too will the number of people who will respond to the goad of fear and anger about their future.

Worse, it’s not just about finding a job – it’s also about keeping one. Jobs appear and disappear faster than at any time in history, and someone who is a valued employee and a rising star one day can be redundant and valueless the next. A person in that position can try to retrain and find new work, but they find themselves among the multitudes of people desperately seeking work. Without the in-demand skill that got them a job in the first place, they are reduced to the same pavement-pounding, resuming-producing, faith-sapping odyssey that afflicts so many out of work people today.

I’ve seen this coming for some time. In 1993, I wrote a book called Facing the Future. In that book I wrote the following passage:

It’s an overall decline in the need for work that concerns me, brought about by the increasing capabilities and sophistication of computers.

I seem to be very much in the minority on this view, and I may be dead wrong. The conventional view is that as jobs disappear from manufacturing and clerical work, for instance, the steadily rising productivity of workers using increasingly sophisticated automation will create a new prosperity that will increase demand and create new jobs. This is certainly reasonable, because it is precisely what has happened throughout history. But where, I wonder, will the new jobs appear? The conventional view is that new services will spring up, and that higher living standards will allow people to spend money on things they could never afford before, and that much of this will be for personal and personalized services.

I can see logic in this. New services do appear. There were no aerobic instructors, for example, in my grandfather’s day. But how much personal service can we use? Moreover, generally speaking, service jobs pay less than manufacturing jobs. As for being able to buy things that we couldn’t afford before, since manufacturing will increasingly be automated the higher demand for manufactured goods won’t necessarily generate more jobs.

This is not a problem that will burst on the scene in the next five to ten years. Humans are still capable of offering a flexibility, initiative, and creativity that machines cannot duplicate. But at some point, whether it’s twenty years away or one hundred, I’m afraid that the time will come when there will be very few jobs that computers can’t do better, faster, cheaper, and more reliably than humans. As that day approaches, we will be confronted with several problems.

In the first place, we will need a new economic system. Much as it grieves me to say so, free market capitalism may be dying, for it only pays those who are part of the production process. If virtually no one is part of this process, all the fruits of production will belong to those who own the machines – a recipe for the peon-and-aristocracy patterns of Third World economies. But where will the machine-owners find their customers? People can’t be consumers unless they have money to spend. …[1]

In the intervening 18 years, I’ve seen nothing to change my mind. We are, indeed, heading towards a world of aristocrats and peons. Indeed, that is precisely what the Occupy forces are demonstrating against, only they use a slightly different terminology: the 1% and the 99%. Same thing.

So where is this leading us? If I’m right, then even if the economy and employment picks up, and mollifies the Occupy protestors and their spiritual kin, the concerns will return again and again as the long-term rates of unemployment, especially among the young, continue to rise. And that way lies revolution.

What Should We Do About This?

If we lived in Naples in 79 A.D., and saw steam pouring out of the top of Mount Vesuvius, we would try to warn the residents to flee. We are in an analogous situation. This volcano won’t erupt in the next month or next year – but as things are trending, we need to take action, and soon, or we risk precisely the kind of revolution we witnessed in the Arab Spring earlier this year.

It’s no good trying to stem the tide of automation. That smacks of the 19^th century luddites smashing mechanized looms that they felt were stealing their jobs. Moreover, it would be like trying to hold back the tide, and about as successful. It is possible that politicians, under voter pressure, will seek to ban automation and the productivity increases that automation produces in order to preserve jobs. (This is also called “featherbedding”.) All that means is that countries that do not ban automation will see their relative productivity increase, their cost structure decrease, so that the jobs will migrate from here to there rather than being lost to automation.

Instead, politicians, economists, and anyone else interested in our future prosperity and stability should be taking a serious look at how to create new, better jobs that people can do best. These will largely be entrepreneurial, I suspect, and will all be creative, and focus on innovation. This also implies a complete revamp of our education system, away from rote learning and memorization, and towards creativity and individually customized education, to enable each person to emphasize the things they are best at.

None of this will happen quickly or easily. It requires a very different view of “job creation” and a very different understanding of the future of work. The “magic of the markets” won’t solve this problem. Capitalism, left to itself, will emphasize greater productivity through automation, leading to greater profits for the owners of the machines – until profits collapse because there aren’t enough consumers to by the goods and services industry produces. Capitalism will lead to a dead end.

This is not the conventional view, and many will decry my message as “socialist”, although I’ve said nothing at all about redistributing wealth. Some will pillory me for being alarmist, but without attempting to refute my reasoning. And some will just hide their heads in the sand and say “it can’t happen here.”

To this last group, I would suggest that they tell that to Moammar Gadhafi and Hosni Mubarak. They were sure it couldn’t happen there, either.

Libraries are cutting edge. Schools are not. Librarians move with the changes in technology. Teachers do not. And we need to ask ourselves why that is, because we spend a lot more on our schools than on our libraries.

Now let me make the obvious amendments: Not every library and librarian rides the cutting edge of technology, and not every school is stuck in the 19^th century. But if you had to make a generalization about each of these two pillars of our culture, that would be the one to make, because it’s largely true. And this is ironic, because these two institutions should, theoretically, complement and support each other as sources of knowledge, understanding, even wisdom in our society.

Why is this so? Why have they moved in such divergent fashions when they have so much in common? Well, first of all, libraries are affected by something very like market forces. In a world where a computer may cost a few hundred dollars, and where I or almost anyone else can perform the research that we need online, without ever venturing into a reference library, and where kids and younger adults live and play in cyberspace as easily as they breathe, then what is the role of a library? When people can buy and download books into an iPad or smartphone, and carry an entire library’s worth of books in a laptop in a backpack or briefcase, what is the role of a library? When cyberspace provides places for people with like interest to congregate, discuss, and network, no matter where they live, what is the role of a library? When you can consult experts, either live or through their video, audio, and published works, from wherever you are, what is the role of a library? When traditional print media are under siege by cybermedia, and you can read any newspaper or magazine from anywhere you want, what is the role of a library?

Nobody forces you to go to a library; you go because you want something and they have it, whether for pleasure or for serious intent. As a result, libraries have to operate at the cutting edge of technology, because otherwise they will loose their relevance, and patrons will stop coming through their doors. And librarians have long since not only realized this, but embraced it, seeing in technology new, and more powerful tools that can help them to help library users.

There is no such force acting on schools. Students are required by law to go to public school (or find an acceptable and sometimes expensive or labour-intensive equivalent), so schools have an effective monopoly – which they abuse by forcing students to endure years of agonizing boredom. It is well-intentioned boredom, and possibly useful-at-times boredom, but boredom notwithstanding.

Next, for the most part, except in major cities, libraries are lightly administrated and not terribly politicized. Most community libraries have a volunteer board that steers and assists them. There is usually a head librarian who acts as an executive, but there are not layers of administration heaped on top of the basic operations. There is no “ministry of libraries”, and about the most political aspect of libraries is their funding, and whether it’s too much or not enough.

Public schools, on the other hand, are top-heavy in administrators. They have principals and vice-principals, each of whom must adhere to ever-thickening books of rules about what they can and cannot do, plus the many things they absolutely must do. Teachers have forms to fill out to convince the education bureaucrats that they are complying with the prescribed teaching plans and teaching the prescribed material. Each district has a board that administers the buildings, the staffs, the budgets, and the pedagogy. And every state or province has a secretariat or ministry, usually a very big one, to make sure that everyone else is doing just the right things at just the right moments. (And an obvious comment: clearly the sheer size of our education system, and the importance of its task require that there be administration; but private schools seem to function perfectly well with a much, much lighter load.) All of this mass of people making sure that other people are doing just the right things, and only just the right things means that change is very difficult. It is a dead weight on the progressiveness of schools.

Next, libraries don’t usually attract a lot of political attention. Those who don’t like them typically just don’t go there. They don’t argue that what’s being done in libraries is undermining our rights or our government, or spreading unhealthy lifestyles or propaganda. Schools, unfortunately, have become highly politicized, and everybody disagrees about what should be done, and how, which tends to exacerbate the paralysis.

And whereas people who don’t like libraries probably never liked them, and probably never went to them, everyone had to go to school. And everyone who went to school as a kid thinks they know what’s going on in our schools, and that it’s really pretty simple stuff that anyone could do, if they weren’t occupied doing more important things. Couple this with the widely held misperception that teachers have a cushy number, knocking off work at 3, taking extended holidays at Christmas and in the Spring, and enjoying Summers off, and it’s clear to anyone that teachers don’t work very much or very hard. Nobody complains about “librarian’s hours,” because people mostly don’t care, even when libraries are publicly funded. Of course, that this perception of teachers and teaching is mostly wrong doesn’t get much attention.

Then there’s the union issue. Librarians in big cities tend to be unionized, but with smaller community centers, this isn’t usually the case. And while there is clearly a valid and legitimate reason for teachers’ unions, they have, in the main, tended to block and fight changes in the way schools operate. They must feel threatened by such changes, although I’m not sure why. But the result is that they act like lead boots, further adding to the difficulties that prevent schools from changing.

The end result of all this is that we have one of the critically important foundations of our society and economy – our school systems – mostly stuck in the 19^th century, whereas our libraries are racing forward into the second decade of the 21^st century, and stretching towards the third.

It’s not good enough, and it needs to change. But who has the courage, the will, and the authority to change it? That may turn out to be the critical question for the 21^st century.

© Copyright, IF Research, September 2011.

The following article was first published in Teach magazine.

A recent government publication highlighted all the marvelous things that individual teachers and school boards were doing with technology in my region. It was both uplifting, and disquieting. It was uplifting because I could see that there were entrepreneurial, creative people working in education to drag the education system into the 21st century. It was disquieting because these innovations were disjointed, unrelated to each other, and were not doing much to change the average outcomes for the vast majority of students. Indeed, the process of highlighting the projects merely underscored what could be done – but what, largely, wasn’t being done.

There has, recently, been a steadily rising chorus of voices, especially outside of the pedagogical community, commenting on how much better we could be doing with today’s education. These range from Sir Ken Robinson, a U.K. consultant, author, and iconoclast, to Why Don’t Students Like School?, a book psychologist Daniel T. Willingham, to a series in The Toronto Star by science journalist Alanna Mitchell that surveys what’s happening in education around the world. My favourite quote from The Star series is from the first article. In it, French neuroscientist Bruno della Chiesa was cited as having asked the French education minister about an international movement to link research into how the brain functions (and therefore, how people, especially children, learn best) with the field of education. The minister’s reply? “The brain? What does the brain have to do with education?”

Our education system, as I’ve said before, is based on the 19th century mass production model. This was natural. Universal education came about because the Industrial Revolution was creating factories that needed workers who were literate. Therefore, business pushed governments into creating and funding universal education to produce such workers, and it was done pretty much in the style of the factories that future workers were being trained to fill: You take 25 students (more or less) and put them in the 1st grade workstation and process them through the 1st grade curriculum. Then you move them through the 2nd grade workstation, process them through the 2nd grade curriculum, and so on. Moreover, you have them sit still and listen for six hours a day, five days a week, 180 days a year. The process is, itself, completely contrary to the natural inclination of children, with the result that we bore them to tears before they get much past grade 2 or 3.

This is changing, but very slowly, and changing primarily in superficial ways. Moreover, we are not, as a rule, using the things we know now about how the mind works, how different people learn with different strategies, how different people need different emotional and psychological needs to support optimal learning, and much more. We are, fundamentally, following an outdated model of the most effective ways to teach children.

Yet, our understanding of humans is growing with remarkable speed. We can look at brains as they function, tell whether someone is engaged or bored, identify strategies that are likely to produce superior results, and even begin to understand the relationships between genetics and environment that shape personalities, intellects, and brain function. But what we know now will pale in comparison to what we know by the time today’s grade 1 students finish their formal schooling. Moreover, not using this research would make about as much sense as medical researchers unlocking the secrets of, say, cancer, but society refusing to make use of such findings. Clearly, we want to take advantage the things we learn about how the human brain functions – and how learners can be helped to learn better, and develop better intellectual gifts.

So my question is: What needs to happen for us to adopt superior methods of education students? And who can help us as we seek to take advantage of our rapidly gathering understanding of brains, and how they learn? The answer, if you think about it, is that there are lots of things that can be done, and lots of people to do them. Let’s start at the top.

• Teachers – Teachers are the front line in education. You are the ones that have to make fine theories work in real world classrooms. Therefore, you must lead this revolution, much as doctors would have to lead a revolution in cancer treatment, not researchers. But to do this well, you need to know about the work that’s being done. Accordingly, we need two things. First, you must seek out such knowledge, particularly case studies of real students in real classrooms, and push to have it presented at conferences and PD days. And second, we, as a society, must make sure you have both the time and the resources to study new developments before asking you to implement it.

• Principals and administrators – You need to be the fomenters of change, pushing ministries and school boards to source and present such information, and making sure teachers have straightforward, effective access to it. You are the facilitators of this process, and, with the teachers, must become the champions of the things that can realistically work in the classroom. This is a tough balancing act between fine theory and real practice, but there’s no one in a better position to do it than you.

• School boards and ministries of education – It’s your job to sift through the research, find the approaches that look most promising, and make it available to schools. This means appointing people to seek out the wide varieties of research that are emerging, consult with researchers to find out which ones have been tried in real world environments, and which show the most promise. Perhaps most important, it’s vitally important that approaches be realistic, and have been tried in ordinary schools, not showcase schools with massive resources. And even new approaches that have worked elsewhere need to be introduced slowly, on a small scale, and proven before they are rolled out, willy-nilly.

• Teachers’ Colleges – The world is changing, and your job is to prepare those who want to be teachers with the latest research, an understanding of what works best in pedagogy, and how to apply it in a real world classroom. What’s even more important, you are going to have to keep changing your curriculum as new research appears. Many teachers’ colleges are doing this now, but it’s crucial that they stay abreast of what’s happening.

• Secretaries and Ministers of Education – Your job is two-fold. First, you need to take the political flak that always accompanies change, to defuse it, and to harness it into constructive dialog so that schools don’t become war zones between opposing views on high-minded pedagogical theories. And second, you need to push the system to change. Every social system resists change; stasis is easier, and people – all people – are inherently lazy. Therefore, for the good of your jurisdiction, and to secure its future, you have to make sure that change happens. Push your bureaucracy. Support their initiatives. And make everyone in the system accountable for converting new ideas into practical classroom realities. Oh, and one more thing; don’t interfere when people are doing their jobs right, no matter how politically attractive it may be to do so.

• Parents – You are not the experts on this, but you represent the users of the education system. It’s up to you to push for better education for your kids, and to work with teachers to make it happen. This means being supportive when new things are tried, but also unwilling to accept 19th century answers in a 21st century world. And here’s a clue: if you’re kids are bored, and hate school, then there’s something radically wrong with their school. Find out what the alternatives are, and start a conversation about how schools can improve.

• Voters – Change takes time, but has to start somewhere. Don’t just block change with knee-jerk reactions of “Schools were tougher in my day.” In our day, we didn’t understand 10% of how the brain works, or how students learn, that we do now. You’re paying a hefty tax bill to educate students. Make sure the education system is giving you value for money.

Our education system needs to be changed, but cautiously, and in the right directions. This is going to take sustained, careful effort, and what some might think is hopeless cooperation between the different participants in the education system. I believe we have no choice; the old models won’t work with today’s hipper, sharper, Internet-saavy kids. If we don’t change the system, today’s students will increasingly tune out the system as irrelevant, and we will lose an enormous opportunity that will benefit all of us.

© Copyright, IF Research, September 2010.

But there are two major drawbacks of in-person lecturing: it imposes a de facto geographic monopoly on education, and a one-size-fits-all mentality on teachers and students alike. Let’s look at the geographic monopoly first, and then segue into differentiated instruction for each student.

If Socrates were available to lecture (or dialog) on philosophy at a public school, but not in your area, you might have to settle for Joe Schmoe just because he happened to teach at your school. Indeed, with a few exceptions, virtually all teaching and lecturing is determined by a geographic monopoly: you’re stuck with the teachers who happen to be available. Until very recently, there have only been two ways to change that: lure the best teacher to your area, or go elsewhere to be with the teacher you want.

Having students taught by whoever is available locally may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing, but mostly it’s a mixture. Like many people, I had a few dud teachers, a large number of good teachers, a goodly number of excellent teachers, and one life-changing teacher in my public school education. But does it have to be that way any more? Do students need to settle for the teachers available in their local schools?

15th Century technology

Of course, teachers don’t do teach based only on their own knowledge any more: they use teaching materials to supplement their talents. The classic example is the textbook, which is written by experts, and contains examples, problems, exercises, illustrations, and charts that would be well beyond most teachers’ abilities to prepare on behalf of their students in the prep time available. In this way, we are already using technology (albeit based on movable type, a 15th century technology) to buttress the capabilities of local teachers. And this has worked extremely well: the education delivered by teachers today averages out to be the best in history. I say that it “averages out” as the best in history because there have been select individuals, such as the children of royalty or the aristocracy, who have been tutored intensively by brilliant teachers that may have obtained better results. Today’s result is different: we deliver consistently high quality education to virtually everybody. It’s just that not everybody profits from it fully or equally.

But this brings me to my central point: Why should we stop with the technology of the 15th century to supplement and support the abilities of teachers? And why shouldn’t every student have available the intensive, one-on-one experience with the best possible teachers to enable their learning? We now have the ability to do just that, and the cost is declining to the point where it is competitive with traditional lecturing.

In an earlier column I wrote that the best way to teach a given subject to a specific student depended on who was doing the teaching, who was doing the learning, and the material being taught. Let’s work with that concept and do what Einstein called a gedanken (thought) experiment about what we could do if we so chose.

A thought experiment in education

We know that every individual represents a unique mix of emotional and intellectual intelligence. As well, different people learn best with different learning strategies, notably visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. In our experiment, therefore, let’s assume we can customize an approach for every student that optimizes their ability to understand and absorb a given subject matter. I’m a visual learner, for example, and have to see something before I can really absorb it. Listening doesn’t work anywhere near as well for me, which explains why I always took copious notes in any class I attended: it allowed me to see what the lecturer was saying. And I enjoy a high level of abstraction that starts with the familiar and concrete, but then draws inferences that takes me beyond the everyday into wider generalizations and hypotheses. There’s something about glimpsing distant vistas of knowledge that grabs and motivates me (which also explains why the work I do as a futurist so fascinates me). So, if I were the student, we would clearly focus on visual instruction, and lead the subject matter into abstraction, generalization, and inference.

Next, we also know, whether we acknowledge it or not, that different teachers reach different students with greater or lesser success. My daughter, for example, is a real down-to-earth person, very different from me (which made it very difficult for me to help her with her homework). She had a teacher in primary school who was known as an excellent teacher, but, like me, loved intellectual abstractions. My daughter and her teacher also had very different emotional strategies for socialization as she tends towards the intimate and personal, and he prefers to be aloof and detached. The result was that the two of them struggled to communicate, and at times had difficulty even being polite to each other. Each one felt the other was being deliberately obtuse or obstructive whereas it was clearly a case of the wrong teacher with the wrong student.

Great teachers usually find a way to reach even those students that are very different from them, yet even great teachers occasionally get students they can’t reach. Accordingly, we would want to match the student with the teacher, so that social styles, learning strategies, and the other intangible things that happen in the head and heart match up, making it easier for teachers to teach, and students to learn. Imagine, for example, having a classroom of students who just got it when you were teaching, or imagine having only teachers that really spoke to you in all of your studies. That’s the experience we would aim for with all students and all teachers in our thought experiment.

Teaching strategies should change according to the material

Next, teaching strategies should change according to the material being taught. To a certain extent, we already do this. We use photographs, illustrations, charts, aural demonstrations (e.g., singing & language pronunciation), class trips, hands-on experiments, physical examples, recordings, videos, and so forth, to convey different ideas and subjects. Some things, like woodworking, dance, drama, or tennis, can best be learned kinesthetically, by actually doing them, and that’s how we teach them. So using different teaching methods and media are the areas where we have ventured farthest in today’s education – but we can now go much farther. Today’s electronic media can offer means of conveying knowledge and, more importantly, understanding far more broadly and more potently than printed texts or class trips ever could. They are capable of being dynamic, immersive, multi-sensory, and hyper-extensible. All you need do is look dispassionately at what’s happening in computer and online gaming to see the potential for Game Based Learning in education. You don’t have to like or approve of Grand Theft Auto to see the potential for this medium.

Which brings me to actualization: How could we change what we do have into what we could have? That’s where I’ll start next time.