This article was originally published in Teach magazine.

For most of the 18 years I’ve written this column, I’ve focused on how education will change. This time, I’m going to focus on why it must change, and it relates to the purposes of education.

There are two major schools of thought about the purpose of education, and for some strange reason, most people believe they are mutually exclusive. One school believes that education should primarily be devoted to the enlightenment of the individual, to equip them with the mental tools to enable them to appreciate the fine and important things of life, and to enable them to contribute to their society and the world. The other school believes that education should provide the individual with the skills they need to  get a good job and a vocation, so that they can support themselves, contribute to the economy, and enjoy the material things of life. Both are right, and they are actually mutually supportive, not mutually exclusive – but that’s a topic for another day.

For both purposes, education must change. Let’s look first at the enlightenment of the individual. The world around us is being driven largely by commercial interests. This has become such a normal part of our lives that we hardly even notice the daily bombardment of advertising, and the pervasive, subtle pressures to own something, or behave in a particular way. And there is nothing especially wrong with society because these pressures exist – this pressure has largely been responsible for the richness and luxury of our daily lives. Yet, there is more to life than just commercial offerings, and most commercial offerings are shallow, and lack deeper purpose. Moreover, commerce and society generally tends to emphasize novelty, and while, again, there’s nothing wrong with new things per se, there is much more to life than just the novel.

On their own, few people would delve deeper than today’s satisfactions – which is where education enters the picture. Education provides context, history, art, depth of understanding, and perspective that most people would not otherwise be exposed to. This is part of the traditional role of education as it fulfills part of the purpose of culture, which is the transmission of our society’s values.

But the world is changing, and at ever accelerating rates. And the shiny baubles that novelty and commerce provide are increasingly being designed to be “sticky” or addictive. If education is to capture the attention of children, and persuade them of the value of what we know, what we have, where we’ve come from, and who we are, then it must compete with the increasingly effective seductions of commercial offerings. Assuming that just because we can hold students captive for six hours a day, 180 days a year, for 12 years is enough to allow us to brainwash them into appreciating the riches or our society is, in my view, a short-sighted and foolish view. Instead, I believe that education must compete for attention, not just for enforced time, and the only way we can do that is to seduce students into a state of fascination with what the wider world has to offer. As I say when I’m invited to speak to groups of students, we adults have perpetrated a cruel hoax on you: we’ve convinced you that learning is an intolerably boring process that you have no choice but to endure, when the reality is that learning is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

We need to change that. Today’s students are, in my view, smarter, hipper, more skeptical, and less likely to believe propaganda than any other generation in history. They know that no matter what the school system tells them, the odds of them needing, wanting, or using most of the crap we teach them is vanishingly small once they leave their formal education. And yet, there are things that they will need to know that we’re not teaching them, and there are things they would love to know if we could present them in a way that doesn’t bore than pants off them. And as far as I can see, the only way we can seduce students into loving education is if we approach that education by appealing to those things that the individual students themselves are passionate about. We have to stop teaching the curriculum, and start teaching the individual – each individual, every single individual, and teach them as individuals, with unique interests and abilities. We have to stop teaching Mr. Smith’s grade 11 English class, Ms. Phansalkar’s grade 9 geometry class, or most of the groupings that assume that 25 kids are all the same simply because that makes education simple for us (and excruciatingly boring for them). And I don’t see any way that our current education system can achieve the level of interest or seduction necessary to compete with the enthralling, but shallow, offerings of commerce and society.

Now let me turn to the vocational aspects of education. And if anything, the need for change is even more compelling here.

We are all aware that countries like China and India, plus fast gaining countries like Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and Malaysia, are providing enormous competition for low-level and low-skilled jobs. What is not as well known is that these same countries are aiming for the best jobs that require the highest levels of education. They will not be satisfied with low-skilled jobs that don’t pay well and offer little opportunity. This means that our students will be competing with the best in the world in almost any field. Worse, they are starting at a big disadvantage: our school days are shorter, our school years are shorter, and our society no longer has the devotion to higher education that parents in developing countries have.

Some commentators and politicians contend that the way to deal with this issue is to lengthen school years and school days, pile on the homework, and really get “back to basics.” I think this is precisely the wrong answer, because it means making our education system even more boring than it already is. Moreover, we are headed into a world where creativity and innovative thinking will be more valuable than rote learning of any depth. Indeed, what’s the point of memorizing facts if you can command them with a wave of your search engine? Understanding and context, on the other hand, are critically important. Accordingly, if our kids are to compete with smart kids from around the world, our children will be better equipped if we focus on helping them identify their peculiar talents and abilities, and then develop them.

But there’s another threat that is, perhaps, even more worrying than rising competition from smart kids abroad, and that is automation. Most people are familiar with Moore’s Law, coined (and repeatedly reframed) by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel. In economic terms, Moore’s Law states that computers will double in speed, and halve in price, every 18 months. Yet, it turns out that Moore’s Law is wrong because it’s too conservative. Moore’s Law posits an exponential growth rate – which means a constant rate of change (i.e., doubling every 18 months). But computers are evolving faster than that, and not only is the rate of change accelerating, but the rate of acceleration is increasing. As a result, a rough estimate indicates that computers will become about 1,000 times faster and more cost-effective over the next 10 years. And, as we develop new, more effective tools and techniques to harness this power, it means that automation will become dramatically more powerful in the next decade.

Automation has been increasing in power for millennia, since the invention of fire and the wheel. It really started to accelerate with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. Now it is moving at a rate that may be beyond our comprehension.

In the past, automation has led to a steadily rising standard of living, as well as new, better paying jobs that offer more opportunity. And so it still does. However, the major difference now is that automation is changing things so fast that the skills we develop at the beginning of our careers may not be enough to allow us to make a living for more than a few years – and eventually a few months – before they become obsolete. We are being thrown out of work at ever-faster rates, and if we are to hope to continue to work, we will need to constantly upgrade our abilities.

To some extent, the effects of both of these developments – foreign competition and domestic automation – are already evident. Whereas when I and my peers left our formal educations, we had a choice of jobs available to us, today students finish a university education, and spend years looking for anything more than menial labour. Worse, the next 10 years are going to make this seem like a happy outcome. Within the next 10 years, we will face an employment crisis that will shake the foundations of our society, our political system, and our economy. And the only answer is education, and education for adults as well as young people.

But it can’t be the same old education. It has to be education that emphasizes our human talents and abilities, our creativity and our ability to improvise and innovate. Skills training in most fields, with a few exceptions, will become obsolete at faster and faster rates. We will, instead, need to fall back on those things that are uniquely human, like art, teamwork, leadership, empathy, understanding, creativity, ingenuity, and all of the deeper aspects of human life and society. Computers, robots, and cheaper competition from abroad will take everything else.

And for those who say that the way to combat these things is by protecting domestic jobs, and halting the use of automation, let me say that like King Canute, you might as well try to stop the tide from coming in. Such efforts are not only doomed to fail, they will also make it even harder for us to succeed by diverting our attention and efforts away from the real task for tomorrow’s education: helping us to blossom into self-actualization, to become the best people we can be.

Do we have the wit to see the problems that are racing towards us? And do we have the will do to something about them? Those are the questions that will determine why we need to change education.

© Copyright, IF Research, September 2010.

by futurist Richard Worzel, C.F.A.

I’ve been a free trader all my adult life. I studied international trade in university, watched it develop with the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement in the early 1970s, and have seen the amazing consequences of globalization, which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of desolate poverty. Moreover, it makes sense: free trade is merely an extension of occupational specialization, so that just as it makes sense for the cobbler to make shoes and sell them to the farmer in exchange for food, it makes sense for countries to do what they do best, and trade with each other.

Of course, freer trade (because we don’t really have free trade) has a downside. It creates winners and losers. Some folks do very well out of free trade, including consumers who get cheaper goods, plus those who are capable of competing and finding new markets. Some folks lose their jobs, as those jobs migrate to other places where the wages are lower, or there’s a natural advantage. I remember hearing one labor leader, who represented workers at GM when those workers were on strike, saying in a radio interview that “We’re not going to let workers in other countries take our jobs just because they’re willing to work for lower wages.” I thought to myself: here’s somebody who’s really out of touch with reality: why should you be able to keep a job if there’s someone else who can do it as well, but for less money? Of course, if you have the job and are losing it, you will naturally object that it’s unfair. But I can’t see as you can make a reasonable case to anyone not related to you that you are entitled to that job.

But my purpose here is not to defend free trade, but, perversely, to warn about one of its unintended consequences. The fundamental (and correct) premise of free trade is that it destroys older jobs, and creates new jobs that offer better pay and working conditions. But it does that only if workers have the ability to fill more demanding jobs that require more thought and higher levels of education. Otherwise, workers wind up competing by cutting their wages or taking poorer, less rewarding service jobs.Generally speaking, this means that free trade benefits developed countries because they usually have better levels of education than developing countries. It also benefits developing countries because less remunerative jobs migrate to countries where those jobs are not only welcome, but a distinct improvement on what those people had available before. Hence, both sides are better off.

But what happens when the students in developing countries are better educated than those in developed countries? In the past, this would have sounded nonsensical; education is expensive, and so is more likely to be available in rich countries. Yet, this pattern is changing, partly because of our own laziness, and partly because of our conviction that we are naturally superior, and hence naturally deserve higher paying jobs.

A recent column in The Economist newsmagazine, published on June 11th, 2009, and entitled “The Underworked American,” described the development of just this kind of situation. American children, the Lexington columnist said, do substantially less work – and presumably learn less – than their counterparts in Europe and Asia. Our children go to school fewer days a year – about 180 days compared to up to 220 days. Over a 12-year primary and secondary school career, this means that American children “lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year” compared to their future competitors abroad. They also have school days that are two or more hours shorter, and far less homework. And the same is true in Canada as well, which tends to mirror the patterns of its largest trading partner.

It has been known for many years that post-secondary education in North America is the finest in the world, but that secondary and primary school education lag behind other countries, including most of the emerging Asian countries. And there are other indications that things are going wrong as well.

Indicators of trouble

The first indicator is that graduate schools largely could not function without foreign students filling their classes. In many graduate schools, including most of the best, foreign students fill the majority of spaces. Interestingly, when I recount that to American audiences, their almost knee-jerk reaction is that we should get those foreigners out of there, and make room for American students. I gently point out to them that the reason there are so many foreign grad students is that there often aren’t enough Americans to fill the classes – there aren’t enough Americans who go to the trouble to work through grad school, and those that do apply, may not be as well prepared as their foreign counterparts.

The other, and in some ways more worrying, indicator is the steady rise of cheating at the undergraduate level. I was at a party the other night, and met a very bright young women. She has a graduate degree, and has started her own business, but is finding it tough to make ends meet. This isn’t unusual: the early days of any new enterprise can be tough. What caught my attention is that she said that she could make a very good living off the Internet by writing essays for undergraduate students who are too lazy or too ignorant to write their own. And this is only one example. Anyone who wants to look can find lots of descriptions of how colleges and universities are struggling to cope with widespread cheating. In other words, while education is clearly the currency of the future, we are systematically cheating ourselves, first with inferior primary and secondary education, and then by looking for ways of ducking the hard work of post-secondary education.

“Yellow Peril”?

I was recently a panelist in a discussion about the problems of North American education on a public-affairs program called “The Agenda.” One of the panelists had written a book about the short-comings of the American education system, and his thesis was that while we are the best at the world in holding football rallies, our education is going to relegate us to second-class status (this is my summation of his work, not his). We also had panelists who had grown up in other countries, one in India, and one in China, and they both agreed that school children worked much harder there than they do here. And there was a representative from a teachers’ union, who was brought in from another city by a remote hook-up. I was there as a futurist who writes about education (I’m a columnist for Teach magazine).

After the moderator introduced the topic, and spent some time talking with the author, the gentleman from China, the woman from India, and me, asking us all what we thought, he turned to the woman from the teachers’ union. That was when things became decidedly sticky. She was most insistent that there was nothing wrong with our education system, it was the finest in the world, and that we were all preaching a racist doctrine that amounted to scaring people about the coming “Yellow Peril,” meaning a metaphoric invasion of Asians. The author and I just looked at each other in disbelief, then he commented that we weren’t talking about a yellow peril, but an intellectual peril, where we were rendering ourselves uncompetitive in a world where education standards were rising. She wasn’t having any part of it; it was all lies, foul lies, and we should be ashamed of ourselves.

At that point we ran out of time, which ended the discussion, but off-camera, the host apologized to us for the unreasonable attitude of the union representative. I took it as yet another sign confirming my concerns about education and our future.

So the bottom line is this: Free trade is good for a country and a people if they are prepared to step up to more challenging, and more rewarding, work that requires better education and deeper thought and insight. Instead, we are trying to see how little work we can do. We idolize Homer Simpson instead of the author of the Iliad, and look for short-cuts instead of digging in to see much we can learn. In the short run we can get away with this. Eventually, it will mean a long slide into (relative) poverty, with our children and grandchildren having more and more difficulty finding meaningful work.

Free trade doesn’t work for the ignorant.

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© Copyright, IF Research, June 2009.