Future Education and Learning in Ireland and Across the World

Future education needs to keep up with how fast the world is evolving.

In terms of education, humanity has made enormous strides in recent centuries. At the start of the industrial age 99% of all humans were illiterate – today it is 14% and falling. There is a very obvious and direct correlation between education and prosperity – the better educated a people are, the more they produce. Ireland has one of the highest productivity-per person numbers on earth. The Irish education system has played a key part in making this happen.

Education is the ultimate renewable resource and it keeps on appreciating. A candle doesn’t reduce when it shares its flame, rather the more it is shared the more its light grows. Similarly, the more knowledge is shared the more it grows. It is the ultimate renewable resource.

Modern Education

Our modern education system is in serious need of an evolution. It hasn’t changed much in over a century. It was first invented to provide the factory workers who were needed to power the industrial age. Yet the robotic skills needed for an industrial-age factory worker are very different to those of a highly adaptable modern worker.

Now, critical thinking, problem solving and creativity are all essential. Modern education is too focused on memorising facts – the education of the future needs to create students who are highly practical and adaptable problem solvers. Adaptability is the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions and is the master key to whether a species survives and thrives.

Put simply, highly adaptable species pass the test of time while those unable to adapt go extinct. 99% of all species that have ever walked the earth are extinct – the fossil record is littered with the bones of those who were unable to adapt to a changing environment. In evolutionary theory, ‘overspecialisation’ is a major cause of extinction because an overspecialised lifeform is unable to adapt to a changing environment.

Overspecialisation

Overspecialisation is also widely recognised as a serious problem in modern education. It is a system which creates specialists who know more and more about less, and cannot see the big picture. That’s not to say specialist knowledge is not extremely important – it clearly is. However to make the most impact, specialist knowledge needs to be built on a solid foundation of universal general knowledge.

Someone with only one skill is by definition overspecialised and runs the risk of been replaced by technology. Humans have an innate curiosity to explore. However our desire for knowledge is often diminished by the modern education system as students are usually forced to specialise in one field and rarely cross into another.

If we study the records of the finest minds the world has ever seen, we can observe they were virtually all polymaths. They were people who studied anything they could get their hands on and didn’t limit themselves to any one field of study. A polymath is defined as a person of wide learning and is the polar opposite of the specialists created by modern universities.

Big ideas come from understanding the bigger picture. And, by making connections that aren’t confined to some highly specialised subfield. With the advent of the internet, it has never been easier to access a wide and evergrowing store of knowledge to study the wisdom of the world. So what needs to be improved so that the education system can go from good to great?

Real World Teachers

The first step is to hire ‘real world teachers.’

These are people with practical experience who can teach students critical life-skills that they can use for the rest of their lives. We find ourselves in the ludicrous situation where a student can spend 20 years in education and yet learn absolutely nothing about the practical skills of life, such as solving problems, making money, dealing with conflict, thinking skills etc.

Education needs to prepare students to excel in the real world, not just the classroom. Yet due to a lack of practical education, it’s all too common for the more academic students who get As and Bs to go work for the more practical guys who got Cs and Ds.

In the real world, we use the internet to answer questions every day. Yet if a student in an exam used their mobile phone to search the internet for an answer they would be disqualified – a bizarre state of affairs that bears little resemblance to the real world.. The ultimate test of intelligence is the ability to solve problems, not regurgitate information. And with the explosion of the internet, memory is becoming less and less important.

Most of the jobs of the future haven’t even been invented yet. We need to create highly practical and adaptable problem solvers who will excel in an ever-changing world. The hallmark of genius minds is they pursue challenges that inspire them, and they seek solutions to major problems.

The skill of problem solving is perhaps the most valuable of all skills, yet modern students can spend a lifetime without learning how to actually solve a problem. Our species faces many big challenges and many more will arise over time. We need to develop a generation of problem solvers.

Counter Overspecialisation in Future Education

The second step is to counter overspecialisation early by teaching students the universal ‘laws of nature.’ Most of the world’s academics are specialists who live in an ivory, completely insulated from the real world. They are perfectly qualified for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and masters of a politically correct syllabus created by people with little real-world experience.

It will be of enormous benefit to both teacher and student alike to teach nature’s universal laws. An exceptional education needs a healthy balance of both specialised and universal knowledge. Teaching students the universal laws of nature and how they apply on all scales of existence gives a superb ‘overview effect.’

It introduces students to hundreds of diverse subjects that they wouldn’t otherwise have learned. This will feed the innate curiosity in students and rapidly broaden their minds. The source of the great technology, inventions and breakthroughs of the future will come from the exact same place as the past – from those who understand and apply nature’s universal laws. One invention can change the world – in fact it’s the only thing that ever has.

Future Lifelong Learning

The final idea is to develop a global culture of lifelong learning. The Internet has led to an explosion in the amount of information available to humanity. However its true power as an educator hasn’t yet been fully harnessed.

A global online training centre could be established by the world’s leading governments to train people on an A-Z of work and life skills. Once built, this online school could be made available to the world at zero cost. Billions of those in the third world could be educated at huge benefit and no cost to their government.

While those in the western world take education for granted, the reality is many in the world struggle to gain a decent education. Providing a global school for free would help push the entire human race forward. There is no reason someone couldn’t learn advanced skills like computer programming, engineering, and medicine on this online school in addition to more basic necessities such as reading, writing and mathematics.

It would also be possible to actually pay students to learn to give them an income in addition to (or in replacement of) social welfare. There is a dignity and purpose to being a student that’s not found on the unemployment lines.