Anything I’ve achieved in life I owe to those who invested in me and to the hard-working teachers who educated me. I never take this reality for granted, and that’s why I’m passionate about doing my part to invest in the next generation. We all have a shared responsibility to help the next generation succeed, and if we focus on what we can do today to prepare our youth for the future, it will help them, and us, prosper tomorrow.
In my role as a business leader, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from and study the customers and employees of the future. From what I’ve seen, I believe there’s a big opportunity to evolve our education system to better prepare our youth for tomorrow. In hopes of sparking further conversation and ideas, I’m sharing my point of view on ways I think we can help prepare the next generation.
My provocation follows three themes: deeply understanding the students of the future; preparing those students for the jobs of the future; and preparing our education system to teach and build the skills needed in the future.
Understanding the students of the future:
Digital Natives – children under the age of ten who were born after the invention of the iPhone – are a generation unlike any before them, which means we need to adapt our educational approaches in order to better serve them. Their brains are wired differently, with information always at their fingertips. As a result, they have developed the unique ability to do multiple things at once – something neuro-scientists call continuous partial attention. Some of you probably observe your kids watching TV, looking at a YouTube video on their laptop, and scrolling through social media on their phone, at the same time. Our first instinct is “they cannot possibly be effective in doing that,” because even the most skilled multi-tasker among us would struggle to do so! But science suggests otherwise. In fact, Digital Natives switch back & forth between devices an average of 27 times an hour, and their brains are wired to do so effectively – thus the term “continuous partial attention.” What a gift! But with this gift comes a different reality – they possess an average attention span of 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds just four years ago. For context, a goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds!
As educators or business leaders, it’s important that we understand these facts, and begin to think differently about how we tailor our approach to education and work environments to maximize the potential of the next generation. The methods that worked for past generations simply won’t work in the future. Digital natives require a re-think and approach that is designed for them and the way their minds work.
Preparing students for the jobs of the future:
Welive in a global economy, connected by the cloud with computers in the palms of our hands, powered by big data and machine learning. These trends are having a profound impact on the types of industries and jobs we need to be building for today, or we risk being left behind tomorrow.
To thrive and survive in this world, we need to inspire in our children a love for STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts and math. Just as my generation learned to write in cursive, our kids should understand how to build apps and write code, even if their passions take them in different directions later in life. Not all of us who learned to write in cursive became journalists or poets, but we had the foundational skills needed to contribute in a society where writing skills were important. Of course, that was before OMG and LOL came along! There is a growing demand for “digital builders” to create the world of tomorrow. Many technology companies desperately need to hire skilled tool and die makers to build products like smart phones. Yet estimates suggest we could take our entire nation’s tool and die makers and fit them into a single basketball gymnasium. In China, this would take several football fields. As leaders, we must re-embrace and respect the industries that build things with our hands. At the same time, these industries need to know that it won’t be building the same things we did in the past. Instead, we must focus on the future trends and on building those products and services.
Preparing our education system to teach the skills needed to thrive in the future:
With the pace of disruptive change in the world today, one of the most important skills we can teach is problem solving, which also develops entrepreneurial skills.
From my experience, success is an exercise in constant contingency planning. Ninety percent of start-ups that succeed in the Silicon Valley strike gold on an idea completely different than the one they started with. These are problem solving skills – wrapped in methods such as design thinking or agile development - that we can and must teach in schools. And we need to teach them in all education environments.
Which takes me to the need to evolve our notion of what a successful education looks like. Traditional college is simply one form of learning. I believe that we need to re-invigorate our passion and respect for vocational schools. It is estimated that sixty percent of Germany’s workforce graduated from vocational schools – and they have one of the most productive economies in the world. While in the state of Massachusetts, an entire generation of electricians is retiring, and because our notion of a successful education system is so focused on four-year colleges, there is no one to replace them.
In addition to vocational schools that can be tailored to the skills needed by companies in their communities, we should also embrace new versions of trade schools such as coding bootcamps. These programs are sprouting up all around us, and can teach individuals how to write computer code in a matter of months, beginning their journey to be a part of the next generation of jobs.
No matter how we do it, the key is finding ways to focus on the skills needed for the future, and supporting a broad portfolio of education alternatives to develop those skills.
I understand these are complex issues and that change won’t happen overnight. But it has to start somewhere, and with someone. It’s up to all of us to help write the next great chapter for our youth. As Franklin Roosevelt once said – “we cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”
creat : Brad D. Smith
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