The KO Insights Brighter Future Series: The Brighter Future of Education

In A Future So Bright, I wrote about the opportunity for a brighter future for education. It’s critical to ensuring we meet United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, which aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”

These insights arise from my work with a wide variety of stakeholders in education at all levels, since I’ve been working with and speaking for clients like UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association), IECA (Independent Educational Consultants Association), and a whole host of other educational organizations and associations this past year, and have several more educational entities slated for next year. Amidst the backdrop of the pandemic — what it introduced in terms of disruption to education in particular and the learning loss it brought on — it seems more important than ever to dig into this as a part of our commitment at KO Insights to improving human experience at scale.

But we also cannot talk about the future of education without talking about the future of work, because intelligent automation and other market forces will continue to increase demand for reskilling and upskilling of people in many job roles, including professionals like law researchers, journalists, and more. Even exploring this topic against the backdrop of the Great Resignation, we must keep a long-range view on the trends shaping jobs and work. And we cannot talk about the future of work without talking about the future of money, because we need to understand what the future of value might look like, and the opportunities for unlinking survival from jobs, and decentralizing value.

In addition, the key points when it comes to education overall are:

1. Invest in educating girls worldwide
2. Actively work to remove racism from education
3. Re-imagine the delivery methods to redress education loss from COVID-19
4. Keep trying to improve the learning opportunity with technology
5. Develop more adaptive curricula
6. Teach critical media literacy and digital literacy
7. Teach young people the human skills they need for the future workplace

In short:
We must create a technology policy of education for all.

Even though we may not be able to see the fullness of the emerging frontier for learning and teaching opportunities, it is vital that we dream and think big of what might be possible in the future when access to information is so readily available. It’s important for us to continue our commitment to building knowledge economies by supporting policies of education for all, research and development of tools to improve learning, continuing to curate our data infrastructure, and taking action against the climate crisis.

We need to continue our work in designing and using technology learning tools that incorporate the latest research about how learners learn best, and be committed to helping our next generations fully realize their potential.

Preparing Young People for a Shifting Landscape

As we look at the future of education itself, it is also important that educators continue their commitment to nudging young people’s mindsets towards an adaptable, entrepreneurial, evolving mindset.

We must reclaim education as an opportunity for empowerment, rather than rote learning of information disconnected from its application, and systems of testing that disproportionately disadvantage students with atypical learning needs.

We must be committed to exploring new methods for learning that incorporate principles from other disciplines such as improvisation, empathy, and connection-building to provide foundational skills that will continue to serve us well in the future.

We need to not only teach students how to code, but also about computational thinking and systems design, because the future will likely revolve around technology, and we need everyone to be able to contribute to it.

We must champion teaching young people to be critical thinkers by helping them to digest information from multiple angles. This includes both media literacy and digital literacy.

We need to create opportunities right now for students to learn these skills by having access to mentors in their local community who can help guide them through projects that will teach them problem-solving, creative thinking or how to work together in teams.

We need to start teaching young people the human skills they need for future workplaces now by encouraging them to develop principles of active listening and empathy.

Commitment to Lifelong Learning

All this demands a commitment to lifelong learning for teachers, administrators, librarians, and innovative thinkers in education. We must continue to build on the work being done so that all students have access to technology tools that will enhance their learning (including universal broadband), whether it’s through helping schools train teachers or providing opportunities for continuing education for today’s educators.

The skillsets our students develop through learning today will become the foundation of their lives in adulthood.

Maintaining Adult Adaptability

And speaking of learning into adulthood, we must start thinking now about ways we can maintain multiple career paths and the flexibility to adapt to new roles as an increasing number of job functions become automated.

Finally, we must not forget that the most powerful tool we have to prevent learning loss is an equitable education for all.

We must continue our commitment to building knowledge economies by supporting policies of education for all, research and development of tools to improve learning, continuing to curate our data infrastructure, and taking action against climate change.

As we do all this work, let’s not forget that education is a way to create opportunity and unlock potential for human beings to create a better world.