The current education system, as great as it once might have been (and that’s debatable), is no longer up to the heavy lifting of tomorrow’s employment and life landscapes.

It was custom-built for on an industrial revolution model of work and prepared students for a known world, where work and careers were set and teaching systematically towards known outcomes made perfect sense.

It was a world where we taught just in case, where the learner had to be self-sufficient and filled to the brim with lots of information, just in case they ever needed it.

In this world, rote learning, remembering and recalling were all important, but today and tomorrow we have to know the basics, what to look for and how to look for it and then trust that technology will fill us with just in time, just enough, just for me skills and knowledge top ups we need to carry out new tasks and daily life.

In this space children have to be given more than just the 3 R’s, we owe it to them to teach them the far more practical skills of being human – the 4 C’s Collaboration, Community, Creativity and Communication.

Many of todays blue and white-collar workers have already been made redundant by technology as we see the jobs that rely solely on the completion of repetitive tasks (bookkeepers, law clerks, drivers, shop assistants, cashiers etc) disappear.

When technology replaces all the mundane and the ordinary in the workplace all that is left is for us to say HI! (Human Interaction). In this new landscape humans will need to create, interpret, make sense of, imagine and do humans things that are not easily replicated by machines.

And this is where I picked up the conversation with ABC Nightlife’s Phil Clark in our semi regular catch up, exploring all things education and careers.

A really stimulating and thought-provoking discussion and one that we need far more of and thankfully  tonnes of callers agreed, so have a listen now and then continue the Future of Education debate here and elsewhere.

ABC Nightlife, Phil Clark (49 mins 29 secs)