What will become of public education in a world where human beings no longer work for a living?
The educational system we have in place today exists for precisely that purpose: to prepare children for a life in the workforce. It puts emphasis on those cognitive and behavioral skills that will make them better employees. More than that is available, to be sure, but cultivating workplace competence is the centerpiece of the system. What will take its place?
To begin, the days of 30 kids sitting quietly, listening to an adult at the front of the room, will end. That model is itself part of industrial-era worker training; a more dynamic, interactive model will take its place, with more than one adult in the room and older children helping with younger children. We’ll discuss that another time; our question here is, what will we be teaching? What will we need every child to know, in that labor-free future?
Some things that exist in our current curriculum will remain, but will be repurposed. For instance, Math and Science aren’t going anywhere; even though machines will do almost all of our math for us, and science will be ubiquitous and no longer considered opinion, we’ll keep math and science – teaching our children not so much their utility as their beauty.
Art and Music, long considered expendable, will reassert themselves as indispensable. Our children will still study their mother tongue, and reading skills will be as important as ever – but there will be more emphasis on Literature, starting much earlier. And other tongues will likewise still be taught, also much earlier.
History will remain, and will be deeper than before. And the teaching of it will be more about the How and the Why than the When and the Where.
Vocational training will disappear, because vocations themselves will have disappeared. The building of things and the fixing of things will be replaced by hands-on creation exercises sprinkled through other subjects.
And for all this, we haven’t gotten to the new centerpiece of the system.
Today, we’ve begun teaching kids Personal Finance. That’s the start of where we’ll need to go with education in general – teaching our children not to be good workers, but good citizens, good people. Responsible people.
Beyond Personal Finance, then, is Personal Responsibility. Today, our society is all about what we don’t owe one another; tomorrow, we’ll talk to our kids about what we do owe each other. That’s part of a greater curriculum: Personal Development.
Personal Development will include a wide array of sub-topics, including:
Decision-Making. Most of the stumbles in our personal lives are the result of poor choices. We often turn our attention to self-help books, counselors and coaches to correct these tendencies in adulthood, after much such stumbling. We’ll make it better for our kids by giving them this help much earlier.
Critical Thinking. We teach our children Critical Thinking here and there – as part of science classes, six-week concentrations on Philosophy, and so on – but we don’t teach it as a way of life. That’s going to change; Critical Thinking will be an out-front subject, and embedded in most other subjects.
Self-Awareness. Few adults today actively seek to deepen their own self-awareness; lack of it, in fact, accounts for most of the wrongheadedness in personal behavior. We’ll set this right by helping our kids pay attention to their own thoughts and feelings, and teach them how to respond to themselves.
Diversity. We’ll head off bigotry, racism, misogyny and other dysfunctions by exposing our children to those who are different when they are very young, teaching them to understand and appreciate and take delight in the differences.
Empathy. We’re all born with some capacity for empathy – some more than others. We can’t increase or decrease that natural capacity, but we can give guidance in how to actively seek to understand the feelings of others, and can teach a wide array of appropriate responses, to equip our kids to demonstrate empathy effectively, whatever their capacity for feeling it.
Another chopping-block subject in recent years has been Civics. I myself grew up with Civics classes, and am glad I did. But those classes weren’t particularly deep or comprehensive. In the future, we won’t be socially organized around Gross National Product; we’ll be socially organized around optimizing the human experience. What will that require, in terms of explaining our society to our children and teaching them its workings?
Civics: Citizenship. In a society based on work, good citizenship means putting in an honest day’s effort for an honest day’s pay, obeying the law, and honoring one’s civic duty to vote. What will citizenship in a work-free society entail? With putting in a good day’s work off the table, the emphasis will shift from economic contribution to the community to personal investment in the community. We will teach our kids to choose and devote to improvement and enrichment projects as a matter of civic responsibility. There will still be laws, and we will still encourage our children to obey them; but both the motivation and opportunity for criminal behavior will be far lower.
Voting will still happen, and it will be more direct, providing a pay-off for training in good decision-making.
Civics: Government. Technology will enable more direct participation in governmental processes. In addition to teaching our kids better decision-making, we must therefore also teach them more about governmental process, as well as how to research policy issues thoroughly in order to vote wisely. We will be more and more governed by machines, which is fine, but the decisions feeding into that governance will still originate with us – and not so much in a representative system, as occurs today, but a more individual one.
Civics: Community. Community – living together well – will become the central focus of society and culture. The sharing of positive experiences, comfort in the negative ones, mutual respect and support and encouragement will all be part of a broad curriculum to cultivate in our children an understanding of exactly how and why we can enjoy a multiplicity of lifestyles and pluralities, and – perhaps more importantly - why such efforts didn’t work well in the past. Equipped with this understanding, they can grow to become citizens who bolster that multiplicity in adulthood.
Finally, there will be some brand new subjects that never existed before.
AI and Robots. If AI and robots enable the world of tomorrow, and if our partnership with them liberates us in the ways detailed above, then we all need to have a firm understanding of exactly what they are and how they work, and the ways in which our collaboration with them is engineered. It won’t be enough to master the widgetry, as kids do today with their cell phones and video consoles; we need to develop perceptions of AI/robots at least as deep as those we have of our pets. AI and robots won’t just be offering us information; they will have behaviors, and we will need to teach our children to understand those behaviors, understand where they come from, to watch for them, and to respond well.
Positive Psychology. If our future society’s emphasis is to be well-being, and if well-being is no longer defined by material possessions and wealth, then we need to bundle all those attributes that do define it into the learning experiences of our kids. A new one in our society today is positive psychology – the understanding that positive thought and attitude and experience have a beneficial impact on personal health, cognitive function, and behavioral success. This may be more a teaching style than an actual subject to be taught, but it will make its way into our schools, one way or another.
The Future. Last but certainly not least, our educational system will look to the future, and train our children to do the same. We will teach our children about societal change, technological change, and our perpetual growth as a species. We will encourage them to be comfortable with that change, to realize that the world in the next generation will be very different from the world they are experiencing. We will teach them that they themselves will be the agents of that difference, with a responsibility to accept their co-evolution with the machine and a duty to keep the ongoing changes in society in step with that evolution. And we will teach them to look to the horizon, not with our own unease and foreboding, but with eagerness and anticipation and joy, and the well-justified hope that what lies ahead will be more wondrous than the world they have in hand...
Comentarios