DESIGNING AN EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE

In thinking about a new design for a curriculum for the school of my dreams, where do I begin? Should I begin with a critique of the present, and then go on to suggest a curriculum that tries to avoid its inadequacies and failures? Should I instead begin with the kind of society towards which I think the world is headed? Or should I begin with the kind of world I would like my grandchildren to live? It occurs to me that any proposal for change would need to address all three of these considerations. No one of them can be considered in isolation from the other two.

In setting down my thoughts, the context I have in mind is my own country, although I fear that the same problems may be observed in many others. The intended audience of these remarks could include parents, teachers, students, employers or anybody else who is concerned about the current state of education.

Designing an education for the future only makes sense if one is incurably optimistic, even if in a minimal way: i.e., I assume that the human species as we currently know it will have the capacity to at least survive, if not actually overcome, the problems that I have identified. I have also assumed that we will do so with most of our moral resources and some of our cultural and natural resources intact, or at least in retrievable form. The reader who thinks that we are about to destroy ourselves and bequeath the planet to cockroaches, spiders, alligators and other forms of non-human life that have had a longer existence on the planet than ours, had better stop reading at this point.

Let me then attempt to begin with a few tentative generalizations about the state of knowledge about the world today that may give us clues about the world that today’s youngsters are likely to live in as adults. I ask you to accept them provisionally, as suggestive and plausible rather than proven truth.

• We seem to face greater uncertainty and feel less confident about what we know about the world and its futures than any earlier generation. This is particularly true of our economic and political futures.
• The growth of technology has given us great confidence that the experts who design it truly understand the ways the world works. We have allowed ourselves to grow ever more dependent on technology and technological solutions to our problems. Yet few of us understand the workings of most technologies that we use, and even the experts cannot agree about their effects on our societies and on nature in the long run.
• Nowadays no expert in any field or discipline is able to master and apply deep knowledge over more than a very narrow range of the field. Experts now know more and more about less and less.
• For the first time in human history, youngsters seem to know and experience many things that the adults associated with them – parents, teachers and other significant adults – do not know and have not experienced. Is this intergenerational gap real or only apparent? And what does it mean for education?
• For the first time in human history, we have more access to more information and knowledge than any previous generation, but have no greater capacity to make sense of what it all means; in many cases, we understand even less. Life often seems chaotic and absurd.
• In politics, advanced, prosperous democracies are seeing a decline in their rates of participation in political processes. Democracy is usually confined to the ritual of election every few years between periods of political hibernation. [A useful mnemonic: The essential P A R T of democracy (P - participation, A - accountability, R - responsiveness and responsibility, T - transparency) is often forgotten, or practiced only in name.] Participative politics is regarded as a waste of time. Civil society feels encouraged or forced to practice the politics of no politics. Public discourse is dominated by mechanisms where the requirements of commercial profit, instead of public understanding or enlightenment, determine the form and content of discussion.
• Knowledge and technology are no more seen as public goods, but as private goods allocated through a market. And markets are seen to be outside the realm of public control, when in reality they are frequently in the control of the major players in it, viz, the state and large corporations.

At the same time, we are in the midst of various crises that we will bequeath to the next generation, probably in more intractable forms.

• Global hunger and poverty at a time when there are even more rich people and more wealth than ever before;
• New forms of diseases that are resistant to currently available medicines;
• Depleting resources, deteriorating environments and unpredictable climate change;
• Unprecedented movements of people from villages to cities, and from the poor countries to the rich;
• And finally, the continuance of wars and violent conflicts between and within nations all over the world.

As a consequence of the changes outlined earlier, our ability as ordinary citizens to control, share and add to knowledge has in fact diminished even while we experience these problems. In none of these examples is there a concerted attempt to develop solutions in sight, or to implement the solutions that have already been conceived. Indeed in some of them, such as the disease epidemics, or international conflicts, we seem to be going backwards, because the older solutions are unable to cope with violence and disease that are now returning in new forms. Although we are now vastly better endowed with the technological and economic resources that can be devoted to mitigating, if not solving, of many of these problems, the political will to do so seems difficult to mobilize. The tendencies for self-delusion, prejudice and other forms of blindness seem as powerful as ever.

These problems are the symptoms and effects of various underlying factors that have at least three general features:
a) The factors appear to be increasing in number. For instance, hunger and poverty used to be regarded as a consequence of insufficient income and economic growth; but this view is already regarded as too simple. Much more than just low income is involved in keeping people hungry and poor– for instance, the access to education and health is also now recognized as a crucial factor in enabling people to overcome poverty, as is the ability to organize social action against their lack.
b) The factors appear to be increasingly interconnected. Poverty, for instance, has been found to be much less in societies that value their girls and women, suggesting a connection between gender equality and the capacity to escape poverty. It has been found that girls who receive some degree of even school education are better able, as adults, to look after the health of their children.
c) The changes in the variety and complexity of the problems appear to outpace our capacity to adapt to them. While the pace of change in many of these factors also seems to be increasing, our capacity to adapt to these more rapid changes, though quite considerable, may have remained limited by our evolution as a species.

The world our children will inherit is therefore likely to be more complex than ours, and with much greater dynamic interdependence between nations, institutions and communities, and also between nature, technology and human societies.

Of course, change has always been an accompaniment to human history, and has often been chaotic and even violent. But increasingly there is now a sense that the knowledge that is available to us, through our schools, universities and research centers, may be somehow failing to equip us to understand the world, and so may be becoming more rapidly obsolete. At no previous time has it been so uncertain and chaotic, with so many ramifications that cannot be entirely foreseen. The reliability and certainty of knowledge seems to have changed in inverse proportion to its quantity. Consequently, the human capacity to adapt and adjust to change has been under severe duress. There is enormous potential for confusion, both in our grasping facts about the world, and in making the moral and political judgments for creating a better world. This is already apparent in the degree of disagreement among experts about almost all the crises that I have mentioned.

What does all this mean for educators? Our task as educators of future generations needs to change in at least three respects.

Firstly, the thrust of our education must be redirected not at simply transmitting the knowledge of the past. Teachers need to nurture the capacity for acquiring new knowledge and applying it to new questions and new situations. Where the older ways of understanding are found to be inadequate, our children will need to evaluate their current mental pictures about the world, and re-construct new ones to function in the changed situations. They not only need to be able to acquire knowledge and understanding, but also judge its strengths and weaknesses, and improve upon them, or refashion them altogether. They not only need to think, but also think about how they think.

This is the intellectual or cognitive side of the educational enterprise. But it needs to be supplemented by an affective and an experiential side as well, with each side reinforcing and nurturing the other two.

More than ever before, we will – indeed, already do - need to look beyond the interests and achievements of our own nations or communities. We will also need to perceive how intimately our own futures are connected with those of others. This means that we need to broaden the range of our moral concerns and commitments, and not remain confined among those who look like us, or share our economic interests. We need to deliberately cultivate a compassionate cosmopolitanism that looks beyond our own local concerns without losing sight of them. We need to build what Noam Chomsky refers to as communities of common concern and action with people in societies, nations and cultures other than our own.

Finally, the history of the last hundred years should have made it amply clear how perilous to our own survival we have often been as a species. In order to survive and bequeath a livable world to future generations, our children will need to experience the difficult processes of collaboration, resolving conflicts and building peace and justice. But judging by the widespread prevalence of conflict and injustice of all kinds, we ourselves have largely failed to do so.

Schools as presently constituted are largely inadequate to cultivating these processes. Mark Twain's witticism: "Never let schooling interfere with your education" makes a very serious and valuable distinction. To bridge the yawning gap between schooling and education, not only do schools need to be redesigned as institutions, but the walls that separate them from the communities they serve ought to be broken down. This will not only allow students to play a more valuable role in the economic and cultural life of the community, but also allow competent and caring adults to play a more active role in the upbringing of youngsters in the community.

If one agrees with my description (elaborated above) of the world in which students are going to work and live, then it would seem that the current education system is doing a pretty poor job of equipping them for that world. This is partly because students are mostly being taught knowledge and skills that were useful in the world that is past. They have an education system that does very little to help them connect with the world that they encounter in their own lives. On the all too rare occasions when they do, it is despite, and not because of, their education system. Even less does it prepare students to understand the world that impinges on their lives from outside in the shape of economic and cultural influences conveyed through the media and entertainment and news. The curriculum assumes, moreover, that the world can be understood mostly through the tools of science and mathematics, and literature and the social sciences have a minimal role to play in making sense of the world. The requirements for the study of human societies are minimal for science students, as if they somehow needed to be less aware of the ways societies and individuals play a role in changing the world. The whole curriculum is infused with a bias towards positivism and behaviourism.

The assumptions about human learning underlying the curriculum are similarly obsolete and out of touch with current understandings. This is reflected in an assessment system that emphasizes recall over understanding, and examinations over concrete demonstrations of understanding. It is also evident in teaching methods that pay no attention to the diversity of learning styles among individual learners, or to the social ecology of learning, or to the effects that learning has on the mind, and then on action. Instead, they rely on standardized processes of teaching and testing for the sake of administrative convenience or economic savings. The process of learning among youngsters is treated as if it is little different from the mass production of commodities.

It is therefore of the utmost importance and urgency that as educators, we should ask ourselves: How could we cultivate these skills and dispositions required for the kind of world that their students are likely to live?

There is clearly a need a different kind of curriculum, and therefore a different understanding of pedagogy. Such a curriculum would aim to develop skills of critical and analytical inquiry, of creative problem-solving, of thoughtful evaluation of actions and ideas. Such a curriculum would be based on certain principles, foster certain values, inculcate attitudes, develop abilities and encourage practices that underlie and facilitate the bridging of social and cultural differences.

The principles underlying the curriculum would include the recognition firstly that human universals underlie diversity; and secondly, that human diversity and differences are valuable both in themselves, as well as being resouces for survival and flourishing.

The values underlying the curriculum must include care for each other and for the planet; compassion, responsibility and respect for other beings, despite their differences; and the equality of the dignity and worth of all human beings.

Such a curriculum must encourage attitudes such as friendly and respectful curiosity, empathy, commitment and willingness to collaborate.

The abilities to be developed in such a curriculum must include seeking patterns, links and relationships between different perspectives; comparing and contrasting across differences, and seeking universals; exploring critically and empathetically beliefs and perspectives students do not share; respecting people who are different and treating them with dignity; and building understanding across cultural and social differences.

Finally, such a curriculum would also foster practices such as communication and dialogue with others who are different; collaborating across human differences towards common goals; resolving conflicts and building reconciliation and peace; and serving the community (adding to its long term social capital), whether local or global.

In order to form connections with the real world, such a curriculum would stimulate curiosity about the world by organizing itself around stimulating questions or themes about real-world issues and problems. It would encourage the student to pursue his or her own inquiry, and would regard the standard disciplines of natural and human sciences, mathematics, language and literature as windows into the ways human beings have thought about the world and organized their understanding of it.

The role of literature and language in such a curriculum would encourage students to develop cultural self-confidence by a study, first, of their own culture, their own history and society, by using their own cultural knowledge, but always placing these studies in a global context, so that the student sees his/her own culture as one that has developed in relation with others, and capable of influencing other cultures as much as being influenced by them. Secondly, the study of another language and literature other than the students' own would provide a basis for the nurture and enrichment of cultural intelligence. I should add that “cultural self-confidence” is not intended as code for cultural exclusivism, arrogance, superiority, or jingoism. Instead, it is the ability to see the students' own culture (that culture with which they identify) as a distinctive voice in the choir of civilizations. There may be parts of the song where the voice is silent, but it is not thereby rendered less important or valuable as a result. The “global context” is where they can hear the entire choir.

In the social sciences, such a curriculum would build awareness and respect for human dignity and diversity by studying different ways in which humans have expressed themselves in different situations, and exploring ways in which humans have accepted or transcended the limitations imposed by their own history, geography, biology or culture. It would encourage the exploration of human universals by the opportunities in all disciplines, especially in the natural sciences and mathematics, for exploring the unities underlying human and natural diversity. Throughout such a curriculum, opportunities would be designed for students to reflect on how they learn, and to connect the perspectives of different disciplines. It would also have structured opportunities for experiential learning, especially through community service activities.

I have so far outlined the kind of curriculum that I believe would enable students to prepare for a future that will demand dealing with diversity and continuous learning throughout life. But what kind of teaching would support such a curriculum? This could then suggest ways in which the training of teachers itself would need to change to accommodate the kind of curriculum I have outlined above.

The style of pedagogy that would support such a curriculum would recognize that knowledge is not just expressible in language in statements about the world, but also embodied in artifacts and performance. As teachers, they would need to recognize the diverse and plural nature of knowledge. Knowledge is after all meaningless without human beings. If human beings are already so diverse, then knowledge must be even more so, and so must the ways by which knowledge is made. Teachers would also acknowledge that there is more to be valued in knowledge than truth. There is also beauty, usefulness, compassion and balance. There is more in knowledge than can be expressed in just words, that shows itself in the execution of a perfect dance maneuver, or a creative scientific experiment, an elegant mathematical proof, or an expressive performance of the ud. This is the kind of knowledge that Michael Polanyi referred to as tacit knowledge.

The pedagogy that I have attempted to describe would draw on a balanced selection of local and global knowledge from the real world, and organize the knowledge around significant themes and issues. It would help students to choose appropriate concepts, metaphors and theories to build understanding, and apply and test that understanding on a real problem. It would equip the student to correct and improve on current understanding through reflective evaluation of the results of testing. It would also flexibly apply relevant knowledge and skills to make sense of new situations. It would allow the student to demonstrate understanding through performances and artifacts.

This teaching would create a range of activities allowing learners scope for individual as well as collaborative inquiry, and also allow some scope for inquiry that is trans-disciplinary, to enable students to experience apply skills learnt in one disciplines to other areas of learning, and to explore the different perspectives of each discipline. Above all, this teaching would provide opportunities for reflecting on the learning process to evaluate one’s learning, to discuss one’s learning with other learners, and to collaborate in build learning communities within the school.

What kind of a teacher would foster this kind of practice? One answer was given some time ago by Resit Galip, a former Turkish Minister of Education in a speech at Istanbul University in 1933:

“The teacher is not a machine for giving lectures, but is a resource to the students - one who inspires them to investigate and question, one who guides them and one who is able to sustain their enthusiasm for study and research. The real teacher is himself a life-long student."

How far is the teaching profession from Galip's ideal? The conditions impelling a movement towards this goal are clearly absent in India, as well as in many other countries, including - most poignantly - in Turkey itself. Students are generally hungry to learn, but are served such poor fare that their appetite for learning vanishes quite rapidly early in their school life, and is replaced with a hunger for grades. They are taught to abhor mistakes or failure, which are among the best stimulants for learning, and encouraged to think of earning grades as a measure of learning. The content of much of what they learn is unrelated to the world they live in, and exams are generally not designed to promote or test for understanding.

For all these reasons, any attempt at redesigning a school curriculum must be accompanied, if not actually preceded, by the re-education of teachers. But although they do realize that the lack of good teachers is a problem, the systematic re-education of teachers is far from the minds of those who control educational policy in most countries.