Youth Participation: Education in the Future
The advent of the much heralded year 2000 provides a symbolic dividing line between many adults, including myself, who will have spent most of their lives in the 20 th century, and the youth, including yourselves, who will spend most of their lives in the exciting and as yet unpredictable 21 st century.
And this future carries which it the seeds of many positive benefits for mankind, especially those promised by technology in general and by the information and communication technology in particular, heralding a better quality of life for mankind. But these very same seeds contain in them elements by which they can be used, and are already being used, to further polarize societies, to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, both between countries and within countries, not only in terms of material wealth, but also in terms of power, information and knowledge. 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 an those who have not is engendered, creating and disturbing, and disturbed, world. It is in this context that education must be reshaped to be an instrument of equity rather than an instrument of polarization.
Volumes have already been written about the changes that will usher in the next century. Much has been said about the pace and sheer quantity of these changes, but not enough has been said about the nature and quality of these changes. Careful reflection points to the fact that changes upon us now are of a substantially different nature, more akin to the transformations at the beginning of the century and to the improvements of recent decades. To illustrate, it would have taken many of you weeks or months to get here a century ago, taking a trip that now takes only hours. And this was achieved not by developing and building better and better trains and ships (witness the Titanic), but by inventing airplanes. Similarly, today's mailing system will be improved, not by making postal bureaucracies more and more efficient, but replacing them with e-mail and electronic communications. And this will be true of other aspects of our life, as they are changed not by improvements of the same thing, but by replacements and transformations of what we are used to. As Odgen Nash once ironically put it, "The future is not what it used to be."
Education must undergo a similar transformation. If the future is fundamentally changing, and education is defined as a preparation for the future, then it too must fundamentally change. No sector should be more radical and forward looking, and yet in many societies the education sector is looked upon as the most conservative and resistant to change. Today's banking systems, with automatic cash machines, a multitude of products and tie-ins, are radically different from twenty years ago, but today's educational systems have hardly changed since my student days, with curricula, teaching methods, even examinations largely the same. In the same way that the bank's clients have been the driving force for their changes, so also the youth, which are education's clients, must mold itself into a force that changes the way education is conceptualized and delivered to meet tomorrow's needs. How to do just that is the task before you this week, and when you return to your countries.
One thing is clear about education in the future. Because of the knowledge explosion, information technology access, and the increasing complexities and expectations for future productive work, learning can no longer be confined to the formal educational system. Schools no longer have the monopoly of knowledge, which is now available in abundance all around us, and entire societies must be transformed into learning societies. In addition, even the best university schooling cannot hope to completely equip the learner with all he needs to know in the unpredictable future; the complexities of life in the future require that the individual continue to learn and develop throughout life if he or she is to succeed, or indeed to survive. So education in the future must be understood as beyond schooling, and beyond the schooling age.
What educators should realize. If educators are to take their responsibilities of reshaping educational systems fundamentally to meet future needs, a few imperatives of change must be recognized. From the trends already evident today, they must realize that for the 21 st century an effective learning system, or better an effective learning society, must be anchored on a clear understanding of what one needs to know, how one gets to know, and who will be doing the knowing or the learning.
The content of learning, or what to know, is not only changing rapidly as we move into the future, it is also expanding exponentially. Those responsible for determining educational content now 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 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.
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 than 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.
In the first instance this means the basic educational building blocks of literacy and numeracy. 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.
In the second instance it means rethinking 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. 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 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. 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. 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."
However, this new technology presents 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.
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. 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 o 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.
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.
Another basic concept that educators must accept is the reality that education is increasingly borderless. The primacy of the nation state is challenged on the one hand by increasingly powerful regional and sub-regional aggrupations and on the other hand by internal ethnic difference which fight over or at least celebrate inter-country differences. Multinational corporations are more aware of product differentiations than of national boundaries. Similarly education and research engender academic communities and discussion groups across boundaries. UNESCO statistics show that the number of students who study in foreign countries continues to grow dramatically. UNESCO's Associated Schools Network is anchored on exchanges among schools in different countries and focuses on international understanding and values. A greater willingness to share curricula, learning materials, and even teachers in now evident in a way unheard of before.
What student should realize. In the context of all this, perhaps the first realization that dawns on the student of the future is that he or she is his or her own best teacher. Whereas the teacher and indeed other members of a truly learning society will always be on hand as guides and facilitators, and actual task of learning, of sorting out from the ocean of information around them that which is useful and needed, will have to be undertaken by the student. And because it is easy to be overwhelmed, and indeed to receive an "imbalanced diet" of inputs, it would be well for the student to take heed of the warning signals drawn up by an important independent Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century, chaired by former UE Chairman Jacques Delors.
Let me quote the Commission's decryption of the "tensions" that must be balanced by teachers and students as they fashion the directions of their educational efforts:
- The tension between the global and the local: people need gradually to become world citizens without losing their roots and while continuing to play an active part in the life of their nation and their local community.
- The tension between the universal and the individual: we cannot ignore the promises of globalization not its risks, not the least of which is the risk of forgetting the unique character of individual human rights; it is for them to choose their own future and achieve their full potential within the carefully tended wealth of their traditions and their own cultures which, unless we are careful, can be endangered.
- The tension between tradition and modernity, which is part of the same problem: how is it possible to adapt to change without turning one's back on the past, how can autonomy be acquired in complementarity with the free development of others. This is the spirit in which the challenges of the new information technologies must be met.
- The tensions between long-term and short-term consideration it is sustained by the predominance of the ephemeral and the instantaneous, in a world where an over-abundance of transient information and emotions continually keeps the spotlight on immediate problems. Public opinion cries out for quick answers and ready solutions, whereas many problems call for a patient, concerted, negotiated strategy of reform.
- The tension between, on the one hand, the need for competition, and on the other, the concern for equality of opportunity: the pressures of competition have caused many of those in positions of authority to lose sight of their mission, which is to give each human being the means to take full advantage of every opportunity. This has led us to rethink and update the concept of lifelong education so as to reconcile three forces: competition, which provides incentives; co-operation, which gives strength; and solidarity, which unites.
- The tension between the extraordinary expansion of knowledge and human beings' capacity to assimilate it: the Commission was unable to resist the temptation to add some new subjects for study, such as self-knowledge, ways to ensure physical and psychological well-being or ways to an improved understanding of the natural environment and to preserving it better.
- Lastly - another perennial factor - the tension between the spiritual and the material: often without realizing it, the world has a longing, often unexpressed, for an ideal and for values that we shall term 'moral'. It is thus education's noble task to encourage each and every one, acting in accordance with their traditions and convictions and paying full respect to pluralism, to lift their minds and spirits to the plane of the universal and, in some measure, to transcend themselves. It is no exaggeration on the Commission's part to say that the survival of humanity depends thereon.
Maintaining the balances between these tensions will help students avoid a narrow understanding of the nature and value of education. Too many official declarations and conference reduce the contribution of education to utilitarian ends, as if its primary role were merely to provide skills training or even civics, it is the development and thus the empowerment of the total human person, male or female. The Delors Commission summarizes such a holistic understanding of education by citing four pillars upon which true learning must be founded: Learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together.
I must make a final but important point. Although it is important for the youth of today to realize the elements or a sound education for themselves in the future, it is equally important for the youth to realize their roles and responsibilities for the education of others in a learning society. Eventually the youth will take over the leadership of communities, societies and nations, and it is my hope that the next generation will take far more seriously the duty and responsibility to assure Education for All in a just and equitable society. But even as youth, much can be done, especially in societies where the youth are generally more educated, energetic and open-minded, and where opportunities exist or can easily be created by which the youth can truly be a driving force to evolve a total learning equitable society, and to reach the unreached so that the benefits of knowledge and learning can bring all societies, and not just the privileged few, into the 21 st century.
I began this presentation talking about the promise and the perils of the future. The youth will play the key role in determining which takes predominance; and the youth will be well served if, as they fashion the next century, they have education as a primary instrument in their tool kit for shaping this future.
