The Fourth Industrial Revolution & Changing Educational Paradigms
How does the changing world impact the needs of our students and their education?
We are living in the midst of what economists are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a period in our history characterized by exponential change in the way we work and live.
The First Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century was characterized by steam power and the rise of manufacturing. At the start of the 20th century, we entered the second industrial revolution which was ushered in by the assembly line and the development of electrical and communications infrastructure. The Third Industrial Revolution in the later part of the 20th century was driven by the incorporation of computer technologies into business and industrial activity.
Today we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Advances in the areas of nanotechnology, robotics, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and genetics are rapidly reshaping business and industry and ushering in a new economy, new types of jobs, and rapidly evolving skill set requirements for workers.
As educators grapple with these changes, school leaders must work with teachers, families, and students to acknowledge that student needs are shifting and to stay engaged in conversations that will help the school community with a grasp of these changes and a sense of what it means for what we do in our schools. As the foundation for any work we do in building future-focused schools, the leader will want to build a foundation that helps constituents grow their capacity in two important areas:
Awareness of the exponential change that we face, and our students face with the onset of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
A sense for the related shift in the broader discussion about the purpose and day-to-day activities of school for today's students.
Evolution of the Desk
In 2014, two residents from Harvard Innovation Labs produced a short promotional film entitled Evolution of the Desk. This video was made as a promotion for their start-up company.
This video has gone on to more than 150 million views since it was made. In under a minute, this video shows the evolution of personal workspace from 1980 to 2014. The changes are dramatic, and a bit nostalgic if you grew up in the 80s and 90s. While fun to watch, this video does a great job of simply illustrating the changes in the way people work and process information. With those changes comes a question for educators. If we looked at our curricula from 1980 to 2014, would we see the same rate of change, development, and innovation? Should we see the same rate of change? Even in schools where personal technology has been embraced at a high level, has information processing and learning structure evolved? While the video is now older (2014), it still begs the same questions in 2023. Another video spanning the years 2014 to 2023 might yield similar substantial changes, particularly with the advent of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace and in school.
Moores Law
In a February 2020 article for MIT Technology Review, David Rotman reminds us that:
"Gordon Moore’s 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become known as Moore’s Law to a doubling of transistors on a chip every two years. Since then, his prediction has defined the trajectory of technology and, in many ways, of progress itself."
Rotman goes on in his piece to discuss a coming end to the rate of change that we can attribute to Moore's Law. However, there is no question that the rate of technological change over the last part of the 20th century and the early 21st century has been profound. Exponential change in computing power has led to cell phones that have more capability than the computers used to send Apollo astronauts to the moon, just to name one dramatic change in a single person's lifetime.
Arthur C. Clark, who wrote many classic science fiction novels including 2001, A Space Odyssey, and Childhood's End famously said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". With that in mind, here are a couple of questions to consider:
How has technological change impacted your working life over the last 10 years? How about your personal life?
What technological advancements of the 2000s do you think are “indistinguishable from magic” to your grandparents?
Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil has made several predictions for the development of seemingly magical technologies that will emerge by 2032. These include the proliferation of self-driving cars, food replicators, brain-to-cloud connections, printed body parts, and nanobot-assisted immunity, just to name a few.
With the rapid development and improvement of personal computing technologies and the advent of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, it surely feels like a magical time for many folks trying to navigate a new economy.
Implications for Our Schools
In terms of awareness of broader changes brought in by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, school leaders should read Thomas Friedman's 2016 Book Thank You for Being Late, An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. In this book, Friedman discusses how the rapid pace of change and the evolving economy are placing strains on traditional ways of working and governance. Friedman writes that,
“Our societal structures are failing to keep pace with the rate of change,” he said. Everything feels like it’s in constant catch-up mode ... We can either push back against technological advances ... or we can acknowledge that humanity has a new challenge: we must rewire our societal tools and institutions so that they will enable us to keep pace.”
Schools are among the essential societal institutions that must be rewired so that we can keep pace and prepare our students for a future world. It stands to reason that we are well past the days of an educational model built during the First and Second Industrial Revolutions being relevant or useful to the students that we serve. In fact, the disconnects and waning relevance of the high school experience are manifesting in the form of persistent student disengagement and rising wellness and mental health concerns for our students. For more on that, I recommend a previous post called "Goals not Grades". Building relevance, fostering student agency, and building a curriculum around human development rather than content acquisition are good places to start the rewiring process.
Future Proofing & Market-Ready Students
So what is to be done? Many forward-thinking educators are looking at the idea of future-proofing as a foundation for the design of their programs and curriculum. A program built around future-proofing concepts would be focused on building capacity in a few core areas:
Technical Proficiency
Problem-Solving
Creativity
Decision-Making Skills
Social Skills
Emotional Intelligence
Wellness
Sustained Reading
Moving beyond future-proofing as a programmatic focus, we might look to the concept of market readiness. Importantly, market readiness would not be characterized as job readiness, but it is also different than college readiness. The market-ready student is a student who is prepared to generate value, actualize their interests, and use post-secondary educational opportunities to further their own goals rather than mold themselves to fit a specific institution or profession.
Learn to Start is an innovative education program that works with schools to deliver unique entrepreneurship programs that focus on developing market readiness with students and provides a great example of the way that schools can refocus and redesign the student experience. Learn to Start focuses student development around three key questions that each student should be able to confidently answer in becoming market-ready:
Who are you?
What can you do?
How can you prove it?
The Learn to Start Program goes on to define market readiness based on three specific skills and dispositions to be developed in students:
Ability to create and add value.
Proficiency in creativity, communication, collaboration, and empathy, regardless of the career path or paths.
Being well and capable of experiencing a fulfilled life.
As we work to shift the curricular focus of our high schools, It is becoming our job as educators to reconcile that which is new with that which is timeless in educating our children. We need to beware of complacency with surface-level changes while thinking carefully about the time and attention that we pay to prepare students to take their place in a rapidly changing world while avoiding the trap of “we already do this” in our program design and change initiatives.
To what extent does your school's curriculum prepare students to be market-ready as they enter an economic system undergoing exponential change? Are you preparing students for their future?
- Dr. Steven Lyng / gofourthlearn.com
References:
Español, Entrepreneur en. “By 2030, Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says Humans Can Achieve Immortality.” Entrepreneur, 26 Apr. 2023, www.entrepreneur.com/news-and-trends/futurist-ray-kurzweil-believes-that-by-2030-humans-could/450379. Accessed 18 Nov. 2023.
Friedman, Thomas L. Thank You for Being Late : An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. New York, Picador, 2017.
LTS Model - Learn to Start. 9 Nov. 2022, learntostart.com/lts-model/. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023.
Rotman, David. “We’re Not Prepared for the End of Moore’s Law.” MIT Technology Review, 24 Feb. 2020, www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/24/905789/were-not-prepared-for-the-end-of-moores-law/.
“Special Report: Lifelong Learning - Learning and Earning .” The Economist, 14 Jan. 2017.