Education is in a hurricane of disruption.

The industrial revolution education model that we’ve had for the last 100 years or so doesn’t work anymore and definitely won’t work in the near future.

This is not because we don’t have great teachers, wonderful students, well-intentioned parents and a society that sees the value in education, but because what we learned and had to know in the past is of little value to tomorrow’s children, but yet it continues to frame education moving forward.

Even though we are reticent to admit it we have long ago outsourced our basic remembering to calculators, electronic dictionaries, smart phones and other gadgets, which makes the need for the 3R’s (writing, arithmetic and reading) less necessary than they once were.

Add to this the certainty that our kids will have on average 6 careers and 14 jobs in their 120 years lives / 90 years work span, working in industries that haven’t yet been created, performing tasks and using skills that we can’t imagine today and we have an ever changing world ahead of us, much of which will be innovated and invented by today’s students.

The fundamental question in education now has to be “How do you teach people about stuff that hasn’t yet been thought of?”

In our regular catch up Clare Blake of 4BC and I chatted about some of the moving parts of the education system and what lies ahead for our students, teachers and parents.

We explored a changing classroom where the 3r’s are supplemented with the 3C’s of education – communication, collaboration and creative problem solving and a future landscape where human teachers monitor the real-time second by second learning of each student, using technology as electronic teachers aide to present the learning and adapt the teaching style to best suit the individual learner.

In this brave new world of life long learning, of constantly evolving and devolving skills, of careers and jobs rising and falling, in a near future world where data, knowledge and routine work are mostly provided by technology, the role of humans in the workplace and in life is up for debate.

Our ability to be ready for the world ahead has historically been provided to us by our K-12 education, but moving forward  readying our children with absolute certainty for their future will not be possible, so how will we prepare our kids for a world ahead that is so vastly unknown.

Perhaps the only way to do this, is for our education to evolve from a system that teaches us to answer the questions to a system that teaches us to question the answers.

Listen in to this segment now (19 mins) and then let me know your thoughts on the future of the education…