With today’s students looking at a lifespan of 150 years, a work-span of 80 years and the reality of at least 6 careers and 14 jobs in this time, asking a child today what they want to be when they grow up is useless.

Today’s kids will be and do so many things and many of those “things” have not yet even been dreamed of.

So how do we prepare and educate our kids today, for tomorrow’s challenges?

This was the topic for my segment on Channel 9’s Weekend Today show yesterday, as we pondered #Education2050 .

We chatted about the Classroom of 2050, the reality of it being large, physical, digital, centralised and decentralised depending on topic and lesson, having a mulch-disciplinary approach to education, having multiple teachers and being  loaded with ubiquitous technology monitoring and supporting the teacher and the student and how Robots would not be dominant players in tomorrow’s education scene and how teachers will always be central and imperative.

Given all of this future physical resourcing, how do we prepare our kids mentally for the challenges ahead and my take is the  only way to do is to unshackle them from the need to always be right, the need to always get it right and quarantine them from absolute certainty and rigidity.

The future will abound with increasing uncertainty and the question of “Why not” will rise as we discover that we can innovate, can change and can evolve at rates previously not thought possible, but we can’t create and live in these new worlds with old world attitudes and learning.

We have to place less emphasis on the 3R”s (writing, arithmetic and reading) that served an industrial revolution education system so well and instead understand that our kids have to be capable of creating their jobs not just getting them and the only way to give them these skills is to imbue them with the 3C’s – Communication , Collaboration and Creative problem solving skills, which will serve them as  a foundation from which to innovate, to engage with the world in all of its forms and places, to listen to the world and have the world listen to them and understand that the answers to today’s questions may not be in what they already know, but rather in what they may yet discover.

Watch the segment now and then let me know your thoughts on Education 2050.