When I was in the eighth grade, my class was asked to go to the computer room (remember those?) and log onto an online service. This service asked us many questions; in other words, it forced us to plan out our high school courses and decide what we wanted to be for the rest of our lives. As a 13 year-old boy, all I wanted to do was leave school and go home, where I had video games and sodas. On that day, I was not prepared to plan out my future.
Disgruntled and confused, I asked my teacher, “Why do I have to plan everything now?” She answered with something that has stuck with me to this day, “This is how it’s always been done.”
Whether you’re a fan of education or not, the methods by which it is administered have changed over the years. Unfortunately for all involved, these methods are not changing fast enough. In this blog post, I want to take a look at a brief history of education. Specifically, how it incrementally changed over time, and why it needs a complete overhaul in the 21st century.
The Past
As any child who came home with boatloads of homework may have once thought to themselves, “I wish there was no school.” This child would be in for a rude surprise. Before education, there existed ways to teach children and give them experience: beatings. Suppressing a child’s playfulness and curiosity through beating them into submission was the tried and true approach. Thankfully for us, at least, ideas of public education were developing throughout Europe by the early 16th century. Towards the end of the 17th century, Germany had become the leader in schooling development, and Massachusetts became the first colony to mandate schooling.
Schooling was, at first, a place to create better workers—this is important in our discussion of the future of education. The vital teachings in school were: punctuality, following orders, long hours of tedious work, and subpar reading and writing skills. Moving forward, schooling transitioned into creating better soldiers and citizens. Teaching history, the us versus them approach, combined with the monotonous “skills” of workers created breeding grounds of centralized ideas and nationalistic attitudes. In other words, school was a factory.
Instilled in children who partook in schooling were robotic priorities of memorization and repetition. There was no creativity, no play, no fun. The needs of the many—the adults—outweighed the needs of the few—the children. Moreover, the archaic practices that preceded early education, namely, beatings, found their way into school settings. Not only were children subjected to barren ideas, rudimentary skills, and hollow lifestyles, they were also beaten into submission should they rebel or fall out of order.
The Present
Towards the 19th and 20th centuries, schooling became more akin to what modern folk are accustomed to. Curriculums expanded to fit more; knowledge widened, changed, and spread; the number of hours increased; beatings lessened; even the place of school expanded—from just the classroom into the bedroom, the dining table, the living room (in the form of homework).
What didn’t change, however, was the factory-structured layout of schools and curriculums. The slow moving, myopic, uncreative, and uncaring environments that cared not about the futures of the students, but about the success of the students at the present moment. Prescience and/or creativity was nowhere to be found. Students who successfully managed to abide by educational standards lived close-to-mediocre lives; those that didn’t, or weren’t able to, conform to the structure of this quasi-education became household names or household dwellers.
Education wasn’t, and isn’t, a place of learning, it is a place of worship. To go against any of its teachings is blasphemous; to think you know better is sacrilegious; to attempt to spark different ideas is heresy.
Translating this Biblical preaching-of-sorts back into Gen Z colloquial language, education has not updated for the times we live in. 21st century education consists of minor adjustments to “adapt” to the modern world. Bringing in iPads, introducing coding assignments, and more are some of the ways that leaders in education institutions attempt to devise future-oriented learning and skill development. It’s all a facade.
I took coding classes in Grade 10 and 11. I learned the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. After that, any advancements were stagnated by boring lectures that left me uninspired and stressful assignments that forced me to find…other…ways to complete them. Instead of being obsessed with the material and focused on the task, I was annoyed at the constant, gibberish-filled lectures which resulted in me asking my classmates for favours. This experience of schools trying to adapt to the times and failing isn’t n-of-1. My friends in the class experienced the same mental dread every time we walked into the class; students before and after me, the same; those in other schools (if their school even had programming courses) agreed with my hatred of these skill developments. Whether you interpret this as simply a Gen Z complaining or a passionate student who is upset at the frameworks designed (and not updated), you have to admit something: there is a direct problem with modern education, and it’s not changing anytime soon.
The Future
What do students need to succeed in the 21st century? How should public schools adapt to the ever-changing world circumstances and job marketplace? Futurism, creativity, passion, and a top-down refresh are essential innovations that must take place. Let’s knock these out one by one.
Futurism is straight-forward. Historians understand the past and can see how the dots connected. Futurists see how the dots are connecting and use this knowledge to frame possible futures. These skills overlap, but are very different. Futurists are needed to help curriculums update and advance—not incrementally, exponentially. Advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, genetic modification, space exploration, nanotechnology, and more (the list is practically endless) require starkly different skillsets and mindsets than those needed a century or even a decade ago. It also means people will be living longer, are more likely to work more than two jobs, and will be in more competition for work with a rising world population.
For some reason, and this is the main problem, curriculums are stagnant. If you are a parent, your child is being failed by modern education systems which refuse to innovate their methods of teaching. If you are a high school or college/university student, you are not being properly prepared to enter a world which is undergoing constant metamorphosis. Futurists cannot predict the future, let’s be clear. The value they create are insights into the possible state of the world in the next five, ten, twenty, and fifty years. With this knowledge and understanding, students can shape their careers and lives in a much more confident, detailed, and successful manner.
Even though they are different, creativity and passion can be coupled together because they achieve the same thing. These facets help shape the frameworks of future educational institutions, teaching styles, curriculums, etc. Passion is necessary because leaders need to care about the work they are doing—duh. Creativity is vital because there is no one-size-fits-all formula for education anymore. There have been talks to use AI to understand the individual student, construct a curriculum around them, and go from there. This is one solution; to reiterate, we need many solutions.
Lastly, education is in dire need of a top-down refresh. Everything needs to be changed in order to succeed. Applying more paint on an otherwise crumbly, scratched wall does nothing. In order for the wall to evolve, the entire thing needs to be torn down and replaced with a newer, better version. Analogy aside, old mindsets, ideas, and preferences are corrupting the education system from the inside-out. Especially since 2007, the world has been changing quite rapidly. Keeping up with the times does not seem to be in the agenda of leaders these days. Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and future generations will not benefit from archaic curriculums and run-of-the-mill teaching styles. Instead, they will be stagnated, confused, and frustrated because they are unprepared to face the needs of their lifetimes. To keep our species moving forward, to keep our children happy, healthy, and educated, we must diverge from factory education, or education 1.0, and move towards education 2.0.
P.S.
If you are a leader, politician, parent, or student, or alumni, and you find yourself offended, confused, outraged, or anxious at what I’ve written, my condolence rests upon the fact that I am simply stating the blunt truth of the matter. Education is not keeping up with the pace of technological and scientific change, thus we are failing and stagnating future generations.
If you need anecdotal evidence on why schooling needs to change, forever, please ask any current student, in public or private education, how their year/semester/week/day of school has gone. If they respond with anything other than, “It was great! I learned a lot, and if you want, I’d love to talk about it with you because it’s very interesting and important.,” that is a problem that must be addressed sooner rather than later.