To start, she gave us the research on our learners....
Who are the millennials?
- Greater sense of entitlement and narcissism
- Obesity on the rise
- Always connected socially (hyper-connected? connected yet lonely?)
- Media savvy
- Entrepreneurial
- Facing greater inequality
- Living in greater diversity (immigration, multiculturalism)
- Exposure to online pornography
Next, she shared challenging findings on what the future holds for them...
"The scale of the disruptions that will happen in our lifetimes will result in human beings needing to reset their intuitions, retake what we believe is common sense. We are hard wired to believe the future will be like the immediate past." - No Ordinary Disruption (Dobbs, Manyika, Woetzel)
"We have only just begun the process of discovering and inventing new organizational forms that will inhabit the 21st century. We need the courage to let go of the old world, to relinquish most of what we have cherished, to abandon our interpretations of what does and doesn't work." - Margaret Wheaton
Six key drivers of change:
The Future (Gore)
- A more globalized economy (must return back to culture and identity)
- Planet-wide electronic communications and developments in robotics
- A new political economy in which influence and initative is shifting from west to east
- Unsustainable population growth and resource depletion (move from 7-9 billion)
- Advances in biological, biochemical and material sciences that enable human beings to reshape the fabric of life (changes the direction of our own evolution - what kind of humans can live in that society and make wise choices?)
- Radically unstable relationship between human civilisation and the earth's ecological system (if every country in the world lived up to their promise to reduce carbon emissions, we would still not be able to reduce the earth's temperature)
*Educators can't look the other way, and thus, neither can the systems. We must address these issues. We must ask, "What is learning for?" Consider where we are headed. Watch this.*
Finally she suggested Four Levels of Learning Challenges that need to be addressed in education for a successful future. Children must learn how to:
1. Global
- live within the earth's renewable resources - infinite growth is an impossibility
- live alongside other cultures respectfully
2. National/Local
- reinvent democracies that are participative and authentic
- acquire creative, collaborative, entrepreneurial and metacognitive skills to 'learn a living' (earning and learning will become symbiotic - must become independent and develop soft skills: leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability, loving to learn and re-learn)
- adapt to, and shape, automated working environments with co-workers who are robots (see "Robots will steal your job but that's ok" by Pistono, "The Second Machine Age" by Brynjolfsson & McAfee or Google, 'Nao' in Japan)
3. Interpersonal (with others)
- acquire empathy, insight and respect in diverse and digitized societies
- develop sexual identities that do no harm, but enhance and humanise
- care for and nurture others beyond the family
- lead, collaborate and follow
4. Intrapersonal (you alone)
- cope with increasing levels of technological enhancement (how will we cope?)
- take responsibility for personal health and fitness over a long life (self-induced disease through ignorance)
- apprehend and create beauty
- acquire self-knowledge (counter cultural idea - being hyper connected almost removes the capacity to be alone, silent and OK with that)
Does this connect with the emerging trends? Will they take us where we need to go? Perhaps a few more ideas need to be added:
- Personalised Learning: develop intention and interiority
- Connected Learning: think global, and act local.
- Integrated Learning: develop empathy, compassion and wisdom.
"When an old culture is dying the new culture is born from a few people who are not afraid to be insecure." - Rudolf Bahro
