Education at 2030
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What we now know about cognition should be enough to cause a revolution in education. But first schools need to stop seeing themselves as a place where citizens go to be shaped, and start seeing their primary function as the teaching of autonomous individuals.
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We learn much more when we experiment with things. We learn much more when we control our own learning process. The people responsible for education curricula ought to spend less time on WHAT to teach and more on HOW to teach it.
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We need to stop thinking of school as a physical space and start seeing it as a time for discovering, a time in which any situation can be converted into a moment of learning.
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Schools will be able to change only when we stop rating them according to short-term results (PISA reports etc), and begin to measure their success based on long-term criteria such as the ability of pupils to go on to function as autonomous individuals in the world.
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We can’t change the education system without experimenting, without applying scientific methods to the new theories on cognition to learn what works and what doesn’t, this is the way we will end up designing a new and more efficient education and schooling model.
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Just as with food and clothes, education became industrialised in order to reach everybody. But today the technology exists to be able to apply techniques and processes of mass customisation to this industrialised education in order to make it more suitable to each individual.
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School should educate pupils for life, and that doesn’t just mean simply filling pupils with content, but providing the training for skills such as socialisation and critical thinking. As the ancient Greeks said, it’s not about filling vessels, but lighting fires.
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Every school’s motif should be like this one announcing a development in education application: “We design experiences that make learning irresistible”.
From our book: 30 ideas for 2030
