The future of education

To paraphrase Nelson Mandela, education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. The whole world has changed rapidly within the last century and especially within the last decade. Scientific and technological advances have enabled us to learn extraordinary things about the universe we live in. Ten year olds today know more about the universe than their grandparents knew at the age of thirty. So we are living in a very different world to that of our grandparents, yet our educational system is essentially the same as it was fifty years ago. This needs to change now. 

The education system must become engaging, interactive and flexible in order to maximise the intelligence potential of future generations. The reason why this is critical is because the future of our economy and our world will be dependent on human intelligence. We are living in a very exciting day and age. Just think of the extraordinary advances within robotics, artificial intelligence, medical science and renewable energy to reflect upon the exciting developments just around the corner. However, we also face a number of major challenges, principally in relation to the environment and overpopulation, amongst others. In order to combat these formidable challenges, we will need a generation who are equipped with diverse skills, the ability to think out of the box and an imaginative mindset. Currently, our education system is not accomplishing this as much as it could.

The current system, that which we inherited from the British empire, focuses heavily on rote-learning and conventional learning methods. The new system must be geared towards teaching children how to think rather than what to think. Our education system must allow children the opportunity to freely express their thoughts and opinions. Although a certain amount of rote-learning will always be necessary, our education system must encourage children to develop creative solutions to problems. One particular type of school that is excellent in encouraging this type of learning is the Montessori school. Many leaders of today’s cutting edge technology companies attended Montessori schools. Some notable examples would be Larry Page of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Montessori schools allow children the option to choose activities that stimulate creative intelligence. This is precisely the type of approach that all schools need to adopt. Tomorrow’s schools need to encourage children to develop lateral thinking, that is, out of the box thinking.

The scientific method has taught us is that many truths about our universe are counterintuitive to what we might have expected. Before Galileo and Kopernicus, many people would have laughed at the idea that the earth is round, rotates on its axis and rovolves around the Sun. People in Roman times would have been flabbergasted to know that our Sun is only one of about two hundred billion stars in the Milky way galaxy, and that there are billions of galaxies just like ours throughout the universe. Our universe is indeed vaster, more and more complex than we could ever have imagined.

In the ten thousand years or so that have passed since the agricultural revolution, we have built civilisations across the world, learned how to use electricity and put a man on the moon. And we’re only just beginning to figure it all out! We have many more challenges ahead of us. But the answers to many questions we face is often the opposite to what we might expect. The education system of the future must embrace out of the box thinking, encourage our children to ask questions and search hard for solutions that may not be immediately obvious. Galileo, Kopernicus, Newton, Einstein and Darwin would surely agree. No great discovery was ever made by following conventional rules!