Post #7: Education in the year 2043... or beyond

 

Image: Screenshot from NBC's "The Good Place" depicting comedic ways to earn or lose "good people" points

Facer and Sandford's (2010) article, "The next 25 years?: future scenarios and future directions for education and technology" present three possible future-world scenarios with two potential educational implications in each scenario.  The first scenario, titled "Trust Yourself" centers around a very individualized world where each person is focused on their individual responsibilities and is not tied to a collective group.  In this scenario, education is "highly personalized" and "individuals are able to choose" from a variety of educational settings.  The second scenario, titled "Loyalty Points", describes a world dictated by "rewards and benefits" where people have very clearly defined roles and responsibilities within the system. In this scenario, education would provide a means for identifying where a person fits in society, allowing individuals to pursue a particular role which would maximize their contributions to the whole. The final scenario, titled "Only Connect" centers around "interdependence" of all people and things. In this system, education is "embedded indistinguishably in society, economy, and community."

It is difficult to choose which scenario seems a most likely future and which is most viable to occur in 25 years - they each have features that seem possible and/or beneficial.  I am a big fan of the NBC comedy television show "The Good Place" (highly recommend if you're looking for something new to binge-watch on Netflix).  The creator of this show, Michael Schur, explains on the show's podcast that he wanted to depict the afterlife from an ethical perspective as opposed to a religious one.  In this world, humans gain and lose points based on their actions and time on Earth which are then calculated when a person dies, determining whether they are sent to "the good place" or "the bad place".  It was this connection which first caused me to believe that scenario two, "Loyalty Points", could be feasible.  Having a defined role within society where you are able to contribute to a certain sector, gaining "points" for your positive contributions and "good" reputation, seems realistic.  Vocational schools already exist and could become more prevalent in this type of a future, where a child's skills are analyzed and roles are assigned at an early age. This is a recurring societal-theme of many science-fiction and/or apocalyptic setting books, tv shows, or movies like "Divergent", "The Giver", "City of Ember" or even "The Handmaid's Tale".  In these depictions, education is specialized to develop children for their future societal roles.

I think in the future "formal" education where children spend a minimum of 18 years in a classroom could be obsolete entirely, though I doubt this would happen in the next 25 years.  Facer and Sandford note that "in the near future, the capacity to connect to a network and be constantly connencted" is possible.  Children already constantly question their education, especially in elementary school and even more in middle and high school, demanding to know a lesson's future relevance and discounting or discrediting it if a teacher can't provide a satisfactory rationale. If you can "Google" anything and knowledge is always at your fingertips, is a classroom-based education necessary?  It is this reason, in particular, why I find that scenario two is realistic.  Teachers often note that their formal teacher training and "education degree" provided little to prepare them for the actual roles, responsibilities, and demands of being a teacher, which is perhaps why student teaching is a required component of certification programs.  Lawyers learn all about past court cases and types of law during law-school, but receive more relevant job preparation during internships and over the course of the first few years at a firm.  People need real-world, on-the-job training to fully understand.  Often you'll hear people comment that the best way to learn a new language is to spend time in that language-speaking country to be fully immersed, instead of sitting through language classes.  It could be helpful to provide children exposure to a wide variety of real-world experiences and have them "intern" at different places for several weeks at a time to actually learn about the world, developing their skills, instead of taking a field-trip or two each year to barely achieve this goal. Montessori schools provide a type of hands-on multi-disciplinary exposure for children, but a more drastic type of experiential, exposure-based education is possible in the future. "Virtual" field-trips are nice to those who aren't able to have first-hand exposure, so this type of education could be rooted in virtual and/or augmented reality if really having child-school internships aren't completely possible.

Facer and Sandford also mention that "Working and living alongside machines [will become] increasingly normal and our understanding of what we mean by 'machines' may change as non-human entities are more radically embedded into human bodies, and machines become semi-autonomous actors in social networks." Machines are becoming so developed that it is possible that traditional "teachers" could be replaced with computers.  Major pushes are being made towards individualized and personal education (specifically targeted in Facer and Sandford's scenario one), and one way teachers achieve this is through "blended learning" and "flipped classroom" models where children are assigned material to learn and complete on their own at their own pace, often through the use of a computer or other internet-capable device. Artificial intelligence could become so developed that "machine-teachers" could evaluate a child's skills and assign appropriate content more rapidly than a human-teacher could.  This would make distance-learning even more possible, since your "machine-teacher" could assign work digitally that would be sent to an individual's device.

I think the most important future of education centers around Facer and Sandford's idea of "interdependence" learning.  Computers all people to connect across the world, having a major impact on social and economic interactions between countries, so learning with an international lens will be even more important.