Glimpsing The Future : What is Modern Education For?

I have written and spoken many times recently about the concept of preparing students for a future about which we know nothing. It can be a difficult idea to explore because, by its very nature, we know nothing about it. It is a theme that emerges regularly at education conferences in a variety of guises. Sir Ken Robinson emphasises the importance of teaching creativity to allow students to be able to become, and to remain innovative. Sugata Mitra and Ann Knock tell of the importance of developing personal attributes like resilience, determination, collaboration, problem solving and communication, telling us that what ever the future may bring, these will be the keys to success. Some, such as Joel Klein talk of economic changes, saying at the recent London Mayor's Education Conference that we are 'loosing the race between education and technology'

While browsing articles on twitter today, I came across an article published on Wired.com that presented the vision of a Japanese power company to one day build an ambitious solar power station on the moon and return the electricity to earth for the ultimate clean energy source.

It seemed particularly topical as I had spent the morning listening to reports on BBC Radio 4 about the current motions in parliament to try and control energy prices. As we face up to the reality that the planet is running out of resources our children's generation will need to embark upon an industrious new era of ambitious, innovative and bold projects such as this. What struck me as an educator as I read this was how the children in today's classrooms, will be the adults of tomorrow that are faced with challenges such as this.

As the article points out, the difficulties and obstacles to such a project would be daunting. Firstly, and most obviously would be the tremendous engineering challenges that would surely require the sustained and collaborative efforts of the finest engineers int the world. But more than this, the article points out that 'space law' is notoriously difficult to apply in practice. Skilled legal professionals, politicians, civil servants and business people would have to have highly developed academic knowledge as well as refined skills of collaboration, negotiation, resilience and problem solving to have any hope of ever over coming such a challenge.

It is the education system that we build today that will be the determining factor in whether projects like this could ever become a reality. If we teach our children to be consumers to knowledge then they will go into the world as consumers of knowledge. If we teach our children to be resiliently innovative and skilled problem solvers they will go in to the world with the skills to overcome the great challenges that lay ahead of mankind. It is glimpses of the future, such as this, that must been seen as an urgent mandate for building a new kind of education.