THE ORIGINAL PIECE
This is the note I wrote for the 2016-17 Annual Report of Centre for Learning Resources as its Director. I hope you will find it interesting. (To see the full Annual Report, please click here).
A senior IT industry official, while speaking recently to a group of university students, laid out a vision of how banks would look ten years from now. Most of the jobs that we currently see in the industry would be gone, replaced by a new set which he described in considerable detail.
I thought he was absolutely correct about the kind of jobs that would be gone. And mistaken in even attempting to predict what the replacement jobs would look like in ten years.
We just don't know.
Toys R Us, the storied toy store, beloved of generations of parents, just filed for bankruptcy. People still buy toys – they just don't need the skills Toys R Us employees have. They order from Amazon instead.
A generation ago, we would hear of the demise of a particular business model once in several decades. Today, it happens in a few years.
A Kodak engineer invented the world's first digital camera in 1975. Kodak commissioned a study of the impact of film-less photography in 1981 and chose to do nothing to move away from film. As late as 2007, they had fallen far enough in public perception that they released a marketing video claiming they, too, were on the digital bandwagon. In 2012, they filed for bankruptcy. From 1975 to 2012, it took 37 years for the reckoning to come for being stuck in the past.
Engineers at Xerox invented the world's first computer with a window-based graphical user interface in 1973, a full decade before Apple would do so. But Xerox was so blinded by what it was already doing that it could see little potential in the new invention. Devastated by the oversight, it went to the edge of bankruptcy in 2000 and has flirted with it ever since, breaking up into two in 2016. It took four decades for the lack of insight to come home to roost.
M Pesa, a money transfer service, was launched by a mobile phone service provider in Kenya in 2007, and by 2011 had already demonstrated that traditional banks were not needed for efficient payments. In 2015, Reserve Bank of India issued eleven licences for “Payment Banks” to entities not one of which was a traditional bank. In 2017, a bare ten years since the M Pesa revolution in Kenya, it is universally agreed that banks' profitable payments business is dead.
Uber was founded in 2009. In eight short years, it has upended traditional taxi services in 633 cities around the world, caused consternation among regulators and survived thousands of efforts to shut it down. When City of London announced a few days ago that Uber's licence would not be renewed, more than 500,000 people signed a petition protesting the decision. Even if Uber fails to keep its London service alive, it will not be replaced by traditional taxis, just other more culturally-attuned app-based operators.
And when Elon Musk, who has given the venerable Toyota a run for its money by using disruptive technology in automobiles, implores governments around the world to set up task forces to pay attention to what Artificial Intelligence may do to our society, it is time to sit up and pay attention.
Not just business models, social models are shifting at increasingly rapid speeds. Relationships are being mediated through digital channels, opinions are being formed and un-formed with completely new types of inputs, and cultural values have far shorter lives than we have been used to.
It is in this world that our politicians, bureaucrats, social activists and the occasional educationist are seeking to define what our children should learn. They have been quarreling over which centuries should get space in our children's minds. Depending upon the prejudice, the bias, the preference, it could be anywhere from 10th century BC to 20th century AD.
But not the 21st century AD.
21st century AD is the century of not-knowing, the century of shifting sands, the century of uncertainty and ambiguity. This is the century of creating knowledge, not receiving knowledge. It asks for fluidity, movement, understanding and dialogue.
What kind of knowledge will prepare our children for this century? The honest truth is that, like much else, we do not know.
But it may actually be easier to answer the related question: What kind of education will prepare them for it?
It seems to me that this question will require educators to think about two seemingly contradictory impulses.
On the one hand, there is the urgent need to develop skills to engage with change. The importance of the faculties of presence, critical reflection, creative inquiry, and rejection of dogma has long been talked about among educators but, perhaps because the pace of change was so glacial, its need has never before been so acute. Today, however, we are at a point where every child who grows up without these skills will be at grave danger of being, at best, irrelevant to the world around him and, at worst, fodder for increasingly sophisticated schemes for subjugation of the mind. The need today is to create a new education based on the science of attention, inquiry and presence.
On the other hand, in a world that provides so little by way of moorings, there is a deep psychological and social need for meaningful anchors. An education that cannot provide insights into morally validating and emotionally satisfying bases for living is not just incomplete, but dangerous for coherence and well-being of our communities. Education today requires the fostering of a sense of dialogue, of interdependence, of dedication to others. While, traditionally, organised religions were tasked with this responsibility, they have clearly failed to create a more just and coherent society. The need today is to create a new education based on the religion of togetherness, respect and larger purpose.
While the first tends to valorise the abilities that reside in the individual, the second requires careful, loving attention to our context and surroundings. Tensions between them have played out throughout our history, but never before has there been a greater need to do both together.
The stark challenges before humanity may provide the perfect opportunity for us to move beyond this long-standing debate. It can be done, but it requires of us impulses more worthy than colonisation of young minds.
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Returning to the question
I wrote this piece for the annual report of Centre for Learning Resources in 2017, after listening to an IT industry leader describe the jobs that would disappear from banking over the coming decade and the new jobs that would replace them. I agreed that many existing jobs would disappear. What I questioned was the confidence with which anyone could describe their replacements. We simply did not know. The examples I used – Kodak, Xerox, M-Pesa, Uber – were intended to show how quickly business models and social arrangements could change, and how difficult it was for institutions to see beyond what they already knew.
The argument was really about education. If the twenty-first century was becoming a century of uncertainty, ambiguity and rapid change, then education could not be organised principally around transmitting a body of knowledge that we imagined would remain stable. I suggested that children would need personal capacities for presence, critical reflection and creative inquiry, while also needing meaningful relational competence: a sense of dialogue, interdependence, dedication to others and a larger purpose.
In that formulation, there was an important juxtaposition that seems to have become far more important than it felt then. I called them the science of presence and the religion of togetherness and suggested that there was a need to do both together even though they felt seemingly contradictory. I did not then elaborate why I thought they were seemingly contradictory. With all that I have seen playing out in our recent social, political and economic lives, I now feel the need to explain myself better.
Science asks us to see clearly, assess critically, and only accept what can be logically defended based on what we have seen. It seeks to strip delusion from observation, and build an eye for seeing logical patterns. Empiricism is its playfield and measurement is its touchstone. Within those boundaries, it describes our world with a precision and accuracy that makes our lives run with the assurance of stability.
Religion creates a world that asks for faith. It repays that with a glimpse of the immeasurable that nevertheless feels supremely important. It provides not only moral anchors, but also a steadying of the relationships that sustain us in this life. And it promises a continuity that goes beyond what we can see in our empirical fields. With that expanse, one of the most significant things it gives us is resilience, togetherness and purpose in the face of uncertainty.
The protagonists of each have often declared the other heretics or deluded. It has often seemed that they cannot co-exist. Their foundations seem to proceed from different sources and reconciling them has mostly invited ridicule from both sides.
Yet, it has always felt to me that to hold both simultaneously is not to betray one or the other; it is to honour our deepest impulses for meaning. That meaning arises in data and logic and faith and emotion, all operating together and making different aspects of our being come alive. It makes our responses to the changing world around us more complete, more capable, more wholesome and more effective.
It feels important today to expand in this way what I then referred to only peripherally. We feel a crisis of meaning at a large societal level today, evidenced by the dramatic expansion of mental health crises at all ages, including the very young. It has accelerated the pace at which minds can be hijacked into polarized tribes. It is felt in the loss of togetherness that we have allowed technology to impose upon us. It is evident in the widespread loss of regard for institutions that have abandoned fostering the pursuit of truth.
Today, when there is at least a half-credible cry that something we have invented may wipe out humanity in ten years, it seems urgent to understand the world of shifting sands better. In that world, as our children grow up, they need more than individual adaptability. They need relationships, a sense of belonging and some understanding of obligations beyond themselves. Otherwise uncertainty can become a permanent invitation to protect oneself at the expense of others. The education I was arguing for in 2017 therefore still seems to me to require both capacities at once: the clear-eyed freedom to question indoctrination and the ability to remain connected to the people and places within which we live. Perhaps that is what it means to educate for a century of shifting sands.
Responses
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