Re-examining Success. David Hughes J.
and is now considered to be less than five years.
By 2009, a new generation of defining ideas had arrived. A production called The Future Internet: Service Web 3.0 tried to predict the direction of Web 3.0. It was both prescient and partially correct in its predictions. We miss the significance of accelerating technologies in our lives and education systems at our peril. What once were significant points in the landscape of our daily lives are now half forgotten memories. Who now remembers Myspace or Friends Reunited or even video shops? The educational knowledge of our children may, by the time they leave school, be completely redundant.
Current government thinking and the challenge facing us
Since 2010, in the UK under a Conservative government wedded to a policy of austerity, there is neither the concern, the appetite, nor the finances to address the issue of preparing pupils for the world of the future. As Michael Gove stated so starkly, ‘we’ve heard enough from experts!’ (Mance, 2016), thereby disengaging education from discussions of the future or even from a culture of reflection and development. The current interest is focused narrowly on outcomes, not processes.
These examples of technological and societal change are cited in some detail to illustrate the pace of change and the impact it is having on our lives and society. Such rapid changes in relevant knowledge and experience are not reflected in the curriculum nor the subsequent examination content or format. Only knowledge that can be tested in a formal written examination is deemed worthy of testing, thereby limiting the pupils’ capacity to show the true range of their knowledge, understanding and abilities.
More disturbing is the fact that many of these and other technical developments have taken place in a timespan shorter than the school career of an individual pupil. What once was known as Moore’s Law (Moore, 1965), which was an observation about the capacity and capability of transistors to double every two years, is no longer keeping up with the pace of technological progress. Exponential technological growth is reducing a ‘generation of change’ to a year. The event horizon warned of by Elon Musk (Holley, 2018) and others, when artificial intelligence becomes autonomous and is able to self-replicate and even seek to eliminate the irrationality of human beings, may not be so far away.
How then can we prepare pupils for a world that we cannot at present define, but which seems to be reinventing itself every five to ten years?
Consider the following questions in relation to your own school, or one with which you are familiar.
1.With which skills for the future do you think your pupils are best prepared, and which areas are they poorly prepared for?
2.How well developed are your relationships with local employers and enterprises to ensure your pupils gain insights into the world of work through site visits and more extended work experience?
3.Do local employers provide ‘real-life’ learning/problem-solving opportunities, rather than class-based ‘simulations’ to enliven your curriculum?
4.Are there professional development opportunities available to you as a teacher/member of the leadership team to experience the current world of work, through either secondments or shorter visits to local or national employers?
5.Has funding for careers/employment development for both teachers and pupils increased, decreased or stayed the same over the past five years? What impact has this had on morale, curriculum relevance and teacher competence?
Summary
• The heavy hand of government, and the generally conservative nature of educational systems, means that the curriculum diet and skills development on offer in state schools are increasingly irrelevant and redundant.
• Taken with the examination system deficiencies discussed in the previous chapter, the inevitable conclusion is that we are educating the next generation for the life led by the last generation.
• Attempts to address these deficiencies, such as adding new components to an outmoded curriculum, are irrelevant.
• We need to completely review the purpose and processes the curriculum is designed to service if we are not to fail our young people.
Further reading
Wesch, M (2007) The Machine is Us/ing Us. [online] Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g (accessed 11 September 2019).
Mike Wesch’s seminal explanation of the relationship between technological innovation and human interaction was much lauded when it was first published.
On the positive side, he outlined the great enabling force of the internet as a democratic tool. He developed his presentation, which was the ultimate manifestation of Marshall McLuhan’s point about the medium being the message (McLuhan, 1964) at a time when the internet was in rapid transition. It was transforming from a tool that was so technologically sophisticated that it could only be accessed by technocrats speaking the native language of Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML), into a form of communication requiring no specific skills other than a keyboard and access to the internet.
This was the democratisation of the internet, insofar as the content of the web was no longer defined by those who could speak HTML; everyone could find a voice online through Web 2.0. The simplification of using the web and the growth of social media gave everyone access to the ‘global village’ (McLuhan, 1964), with social media hubs creating communities for social, political or economic interaction and education.
Wesch was very perceptive in seeing the direction of travel of the internet and anticipating some of the darker aspects of Web 2.0 and also Web 3.0. He could see Web 2.0 becoming a Tower of Babel in which all opinions contended for supremacy. When everyone can transmit an opinion, how do we differentiate between verifiable fact and unsubstantiated, but deeply ingrained opinion? Do we now live in a ‘post truth’ world in which the argument is won by the strength of feeling with which an opinion is expressed, rather than its veracity?
Equally sinister was the use of the internet by business. In a world in which your every online keystroke can be monitored, you provide your unique profile for the commercial world who can match their products to your desires. Alternatively, they may match your desires to their products by subtle manipulation and this may extend to material, economic and political wants and needs.
Web 3.0 is sometimes referred to as the ‘semantic web’ and the ‘internet of things’ and Wesch could see the creation of the internet leviathan that was not only responding to human users but using meta data, a quantity and quality of data previously unavailable, to anticipate needs in advance of their human expression. Projecting this development forward, we see the internet operating as a functioning brain, accumulating data and experience to be able to anticipate and execute actions. This is the genesis of artificial intelligence (AI).
To this extent, the term ‘disruptive technology’ is fully warranted as previous patterns of human interaction and social, economic, employment and political discourse are overtaken by developments online that shape the pattern of the future.
This is the backdrop against which young people will learn and live. This is why merely replicating existing redundant patterns of education is not tenable.
Robinson, K (2010) Changing Education Paradigms. TED Talk. [online] Available at: www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms (accessed 11 September 2019).
This is possibly the most erudite and articulate exposition of the deficiencies that need to be addressed in the education system in the twenty-first century. Again, like Wesch’s work, the medium in