Learning to Know in the Twenty-First Century

Victor OrdoñezUNESCO
Melbourne
30 March 1998

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The vast and diversity of the Asian context makes a discussion of learning to know in the future a difficult topic. Whereas in some areas, technology and prosperity have brought about a lifestyle that it truly symptomatic of the future, there are other areas-even within the wealthier countries-where poverty, remoteness, and other factors conspire to produce an environment that has not really changed from previous centuries. In fact, as resources and technology helps those who have these gallop ever more rapidly into the future, an increasing greater gap between them and those who have not is engendered, creating a disturbing, and disturbed, polarizing world.

In other words, the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer, not just in wealth, but in technology, and knowledge (which does not devaluate with currency meltdowns such as the region recently experienced). What concerns me, frankly, is the not just the gap between countries, between the Australias and the Indias of the region, but between the policy maker in Delhi and those in the desert hovels of Rajastan, between the university professor in Melbourne and the indigenous communities in the great central deserts of Australia. The journey between Delhi and Melbourne can be covered in eighteen hours, but the distance between the city sophisticate and the village dweller involves a much longer inner voyage.

Nevertheless, the irreversible trend towards globalization and increased interdependence and communication are pushing communities, at verifying stages and at varying speeds, towards a new and somewhat unpredictable future.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me confess to a dilemma I am facing, I do not find myself in the accustomed role of presenting and analyzing UNESCO data and statistics, aided by my usual computer graphics on a big screen. In addition, I am aware that this paper has been or will be distributed to each of you, and if I read this in its entirety, I will bore myself sooner that I will bore you, especially after the morning's avalanche of rich ideas and formidable speakers who set such a high standard - and especially since it is the siesta hour after lunch.

So I would like to spend our time together by simply underlining the three simple, even predictably obvious points I make in the paper, and then teasing out not so simple, complex implications and provocative policy options that these points suggest.

Learning to know in the twenty-first century must be anchored on a clear understanding of what one needs to know, how one gets to know, and who does the knowing or the learning. And these are my three points: The content of learning will be different. The process of learning will be different. The learner will be different.

The content of learning, or what to know, is changing rapidly. It can be said that half of what students learn today will be obsolete in the next five years, and half of what they need to know to succeed has not been invented or developed yet. It is not only changing rapidly as we move into the future, it is also expanding exponentially. Those responsible for determining educational content no have a fundamentally changed role: whereas before they were gatherers and classifiers of information, now--with multiple accessible sources of vast information surrounding the learner-they have to be the guides and sorters of information already gathered and classified. In the past the learner was in a desert of ignorance looking for the wellspring of information, but now the learner is in a veritable ocean of information all around them; correspondingly, the teacher is no longer the oasis of knowledge in the desert, he or she now finds himself/herself as a fellow passenger in the same boat, no longer as a source of information, but as a guide and help in sorting out and selecting and processing this information. The Delors report emphasizes, "Education must, as it were, simultaneously provide maps of a complex world in constant turmoil and the compass that will enable people to find their way in it . find and mark the reference points. keep the development of individuals and communities as its end in view."

In turn those who learn can no longer claim to absorb most of the available knowledge on general matters; omni-disciplinarity, as the Delors Commission points out, is a receding target no longer reachable in an information age; complementarity, competitiveness, and differentialization of work tasks demand that individuals focus on specialization and specific expertise. Nevertheless a balance is needed between the two; too narrow a specialist cuts himself or herself off from necessary wider communication and other knowledge areas, at the intersections of which the best advances in knowledge and research take place. Laurent Schwartz is quoted by the Delors report as saying, "Today a really well-trained mind needs a broad background and the opportunity to study a small number of subjects in depth. Both need to be encouraged during the whole of a person's education."

The challenge to us, and the curriculum makers worldwide, is to determine what should be included in that necessary broad background. We heard Minister Kemp this morning talk about the foundation skills, not just literacy and numeracy, but basic reasoning skills. Indeed, the Education for All movement has underlined how our global conscience relentlessly reminds us that the task of equitable access to these skills must be attended to, in a world where one out of five fellow human beings still do not have these basic skills.

But beyond foundation skills, what do we include? We tell children to go to school because it will be useful to prepare them for the future. But what if we have a wrong idea of the future? Looking at curriculum reform efforts, which are mostly reclassifying and rearranging old knowledge in familiar academic boxes or subjects, I get the impression that we think the future is merely an extension of the present. Nothing could be more dangerous and more wrong.

The world has changed, and schools, instead of leading the change, are lagging behind it, or even resisting it. You go to a bank today and it is dramatically different from a bank of twenty years ago, with ATM machines, computerized services, new promotional tie-ups, and so on. You go to a school today, and it is much the same as it was twenty years ago, with the same teaching styles, the same subjects, the same lesson plans, even the same examinations. Sooner or later, this must and will change, and this change will be brought about by you, for better or for worse.

The time has come for a fundamental rethinking of the way we classify and package essential learning content. The seemingly innocuous exercise of typology of learning content, whether it be in laying out minimum learning competencies in basic education or sorting out sub disciplines in an academic major for a university degree, determines much of what then is passed on as essential learning for the future. Somehow I have been conditioned to think of curriculum makers as a special breed of magician experts who have special skills deciding what should be taught and figuring out techniques and methods to teach these; I admire their daring, for they have to guess at a turbulent future. But because curriculum making has become such a specialized craft, there is a temptation to feed upon itself, and in the name of continuity, to keep packaging the same basic things, forgetting to raise the more difficult or more basic questions of whether the contents should be overhauled. As a result, curriculum making is more often an exercise in minor modification or some addition, but rarely of fundamental removal or replacement.

But laudable experiments are taking place in Asia on rethinking the "subjects" around which learning takes place. There are attempts to depart from putting all learning into the standard academic discipline "boxes" of literature, chemistry, biology, history, grammar, algebra, etc., and creating new curriculum "boxes:" whether by problem area (caring for the environment, tolerance and conflict avoidance, emerging menaces to health, population and sustainability, new work and lifestyles), or by increasing awareness of the students' awareness (about themselves, about their family and society, about their country, about their planet), or by work and interest orientation (manual dexterity, abstract thinking, creative expression).

The content of learning must of course include more than information. The Delors report discusses the need for scientific and technical knowledge, economic and commercial knowledge, and ethical and cultural knowledge. In a wider sense, knowledge is even more that; the most important thing to know is how to know, learning to learn. Thus what to know must include the tools for continuous lifelong learning. And it is not enough to have tools to acquire knowledge, one must also have the tools to analyze and organize that knowledge, then manage it, and finally put it to good use. Carl Sagan puts it this way, "Whether we will acquire the understanding and wisdom necessary to come to grips with the scientific revelations of the 20 th century will be the most profound challenge of the 21 st .

The process or pedagogy of learning will likewise undergo a dramatic transformation in the next century. First of all, the linear system of educational preparation for life in a closed system, followed by a productive work life without explicit focus on re-learning, must be replaced. Gone are the days when one studied to learn all that was needed, then worked, then rested or retired. This linear pattern is being replaced by a cyclical pattern where one studies, works, then goes back to study or to do other things, then changes jobs, interchanging study, work, and rest periods several times. I was just in the Pacific this week, and the groups of backpackers in the airports remind me that there are more and more who "retire" even before the work! And yet our educational syste still assumes that you have to go to school and get degrees first, then work afterwards, assembly line style, whereas what is needed is an open shelf of learning opportunities available anytime throughout life, supermarket style.

There is simply too much new knowledge to learn all the time to allow a schooling system to exercise a monopoly on learning. Learning should take place as much at work and at leisure as at school. Secondly, the information and communication technology breakthroughs have opened new ways of acquiring knowledge, and thus the knowledge process must be managed or facilitated quite differently, implying a paradigm shift in the role of the teacher, as I have already mentioned.

A corresponding paradigm shift is even more urgently needed of the school, which now no longer has the monopoly of being the only "knowledge store." Let me elaborate on the implications of this for educational institutions by drawing an analogy with shopping. In the old days, shopping meant going downtown to a big department store to buy things; nowadays shopping means going to the neighborhood mall, where, aside from the big stores, there are several specialized boutiques; in the future some shopping will mean staying at home and going through a virtual megamall on the internet, ordering for home delivery from a choice even wider than any mall can have. Only last week I did my first armchair shopping for some equipment and furniture for our office in Bangkok, taking advantage of immense choices using this virtual mode.

So also universities used to be the only "knowledge store" in town. If you wanted to study anything, that's where you had to go. Nowadays, there is such a proliferation of seminars, non-degree courses, in-company training packages, in-service programs that learning takes place everywhere. In the future, the computer and the internet themselves will be gateways to even more diversified and specialized training. But if universities continue to act as if they had a monopoly of knowledge, that no one was good enough unless they had their degree, they would quickly become dinosaurs. They have to realize that they are merely one store, albeit the flagship store, in a megamall of information, and if students can get the same information, cheaper and better, in other stores, they will stop going to the flagship store. Companies and students are giving less and less attention to formal degrees, and more and more to short term courses, or even on-the-job training opportunities. UNESCO research has shown that in-service training is a better predictor of good teaching than pre-service qualifications.

Yet university planning strategies continue to be centered around new campus buildings or new degree offerings; university heads are still valued for their fund raising capability for these purposes. But envisioning a university of the future cannot just be designing new buildings or better degree programs. It must not continue to rest on its reputation as a flagship and just build a bigger and better "ship," when more and more people are opting to take faster and cheaper "planes," or modes of getting to where they want. Such a huge and overloaded ship will sooner or later collide with the iceberg of irrelevance and sink in great tragedy. (No reference to a popular movie nowadays intended.)

It must be stated that new processes of technology aided learning present a danger of reducing learning to information absorption, but social skills, ethical considerations, sound judgment and mental discipline must factor into the process of learning. For example, even quick computer assisted access to data cannot and must not substitute for the development of a learner's concentration, memory, and logical analytical skills. Nor can interaction with a computer or even an internet discussion group substitute for a social learning environment which nurtures interactive social and cultural skills.

Any discussion of pedagogy in the future involves the wholesome trend towards more interaction and dialogue and less rote memory and discipline in classrooms. While this is no doubt laudable, there are dangers: promoting individual initiative and self assertion at the expense of sacrificing teamwork and collaboration does not bode well for teaching how to live together in social cohesion; the spontaneousness free exchange of views without discipline does not foster ordered and concentrated minds that can master the mathematical and scientific competencies so needed for the future.

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The nature of the learner himself/herself, the who of learning, is changing in a way that needs further analysis. Perhaps even more important than the changes in content and process are the changes in the way the learner thinks, reacts, and responds behaviorally; this has not been getting the attention it deserves.

In the first place, if learners in the vastly different cultures of Asia think, react and behave differently, speak different languages and have different paradigms, then the culturally sensitive learning experiences in different areas must be structured differently.

And if cultures vary with place, they certainly vary with time. If future generations are raised in an environment substantially different from ours, it must be assumed that they will think, act, and be motivated in ways substantially different from us.

Leadership around the world is being transferred to the baby boom generation. But we must realize that today's teachers of this generation, raised on the rise of rock and roll, the advent of television, and student activism, are already facing the next generation, Generation X, raised quite differently on an internationalized pop culture of Spice Girls, MacDonalds and cable TV. And as Generation X become the teachers of the 21 st century, they will face a generation, call them the Nintendo Generation, raised in an environment quite different from even theirs, amidst quick response video games, virtual reality, and the fading of fading of geographical limitations.

The learner of the future will be from a generation raised in a environment of information overload, where instant gratification is the goal and quick response the norm, where global competitiveness engenders a me-first mentality, where messages are packaged in 30-second sound bites or video clips, and where sustained attention is replaced by successive MTV-type bombardment of images, where the printed word, and indeed the logical thought process, are replaced by the colorful image. We need to more carefully draw out the implications of this on how future generation will think, will be motivated, and thus will learn.

If you ask students who their favorite teachers are, who had the most influence on them, they would identify, not those who know the subject matter best, or those with the latest pedagogies, but those who knew them best, those who understood their problems, the way they thought, the ones who spoke their language, saw their dreams, listened to their music.

These implications will affect our thinking on the other two areas, what to learn and the how to learn, as well as our conclusions on when to learn. These will affect such practical debates as how much or how little to delay introducing academic content in pre-school early childhood programmes; how soon or how late to introduce vocational specialization in secondary or post basic education; and so on.

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Ladies and gentlemen, by the way of conclusion, let me summarize my main message for the teacher of the twenty-first century, and my main message for the policy maker of the future.

For the teacher, three simple words: Know your students. If you truly get jot know them, you will know what to teach, how to teach, and even when to teach. Most important, if you really get to know them, if you recognize that you have thirty or forty potential futures in the classroom in front of you, if you look into their bright eyes full of hopes for a brighter tomorrow, you will get to genuinely care for each of them. You cannot but be a better teacher. As the UNESCO Director General himself puts it, "Love is the only true pedagogy."

My last word is for the policy maker. I realize most of you are not teachers, or are no longer teachers, but I realize we have in this one room of ministers and key officials from sixty two countries, the potential to sow a message and reap the proverbial hundredfold of Open up your education systems. Liberate yourselves from the a watershed for education in the region. To you my message is: restrictive conventions and paradigms of the past. Learn from the innovations of your fellow administrators from around the region who are gathered here. Learn from the lessons of the past experiences of your own educational systems.

I would like to end with a capsuled summary of the lessons from the history of education in the Asia Pacific expressed, not in the complex UN-speak or UNESCO jargon, or even in the elegant style of a keynote address, but rather in the simple language of a children's poem, written by a UNICEF colleague, which you might call, "Schools of Many Colors":

 

Once upon a time, the people built and lived all their lives with these green schools of theirs,

Green as the landscape and the mountains they had grown accustomed to.

Children learned to be children and to prepare themselves for adolescence,

adolescents learned to be adolescents and to prepare themselves for adulthood,

adults learned to be adults, husbands and wives, parents, and members of their group and their society.

They cultivated the language of the body, the art of observing and touching,listening and speaking.

They learned while playing and while working, from folktales and dances, from the advice of the elderly.

The curriculum was life and learning a life-long commitment.

And then, one day, the blue-eyed men came with their blue schools, blue as the ocean that had brought them there.

reading and writing

spelling

mathematics

science

history and geography

subjects and homework

uniforms and schedules

multiple choice tests

exams and certificates.

 

Children learned how to become adolescents,

adolescents learned how to become adults,

adults were not supposed to learn any more

and forgot to keep on learning.

Common knowledge was denied in the classroom,

playing, singing and dancing were labeled "extra-curricular"

the written word was placed in shrine

wisdom was declared the property of teachers and books.

The ties between education and life

between the schools and the community

became thinner and thinner.

A sophisticated term - 'informal education' -

was invented for something as simple as life learning

and learning for life - until then the realm of the obvious -

came to entail complicated curriculum planning,

search for relevance and 'life skills' packages.

 

The blue schools, with their blue power, began to spread all over,

like the lakes and the rivers

and soon someone started to speak of the "Blue System".

Blue became synonymous with good, modern, advanced.

The green schools were frowned upon and hidden behind the green

bushes, the green mountains, the green jungle.

They began to be called "traditional"

and "traditional" meant bad, backward, savage.

Green and blue proved very hard to mix.

And although many green children started to go to the blue schools

and were forced to learn in the new blue language they did not

understand

no one could stop them from learning in their green homes and communities

their green values and their green curriculum that was useful for life..

 

With time, inevitably, with so much green in and around them,

blue schools began to look a little green, a little greenish.

Green schools, inevitably, also changed for good and for bad.

Some disappeared, some survived, some remained unchanged, tied to the past,

some evolved with time, open to the present and to the future.

 

The Blue System, with its formal garments and circumspect manners

made soon evident it inadequacies and problems

and new words were necessary in order to name them:

literacy

functional illiteracy

repetition

drop-out

inefficiency

low quality

poor learning achievement

exclusion

inequity

 

Curiously enough,

blue schools

with their long checklist of weaknesses and vices

began to be called "traditional schools"...

just as they had once called the green schools!

And so great confusion arose

and nobody could understand anything anymore.

 

Someone proposed a brilliant idea:

red schools!

non-green, non-blue:

red!

Another type of school:

active

flexible

relevant

learner centered

problem-solving-oriented

community-based.

 

Some, enthusiastically, went even further:

another system!

a Red System!

Many welcomed the idea

and dedicated themselves vehemently to building the new red

non-green

non-blue

schools.

But after some time

non-blue innovators started to realize

that they needed to build thousands, millions of red schools.

And that it would take them a thousand, a million years.

And that green schools and blue schools

paid little attention to red schools.

And that red schools

were in fact blue and green in many aspects

because green and blue were not simply colors

but mentalities, values and cultures

long-entrenched in people's minds and in people's histories.

 

And so renovators and innovators came to the conclusion

that red had to be spread all over

not in a separate Red School System

but in all schools, green and blue,

taking the best of both

working with children, youth and adults

in community meetings and government assemblies

using songs and poems

formal documents and comic strips

newspapers and fliers

television and radio

at home, at the workplace, in the church.

 

They have initiated the painting

and the pink schools that are starting to result and to blossom

make the green and the blue behind them look much brighter.

 

 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twenty-first century.