Education for the Twenty-First Century

Education for the Twenty-First Century

Professor Edgar Jenkins

School of Education, University of Leeds

It is with some trepidation and considerable humility that I approach my task of speaking to you about education in the twenty first century. The humility would I hope be found in anyone faced with a task of such size and uncertain text. My trepidation rests on rather different grounds.

First, I am not sure that, despite a strong research interest in the history of education and the history of science education in particular, I understand as well as I would wish the developments that have taken place in education during the present century. When I was preparing this contribution to your conference, I found myself wondering what might have been predicted on an occasion such as this had it taken place a century ago. I therefore looked briefly at some of the ideas about the future of education presented towards the end of the nineteenth century. What struck me most forcefully was that those ideas were at least as much about society as they were about education:- so that in the case of the United Kingdom, for example, educational ideas were dominated by assumptions about social class, social order, imperialism and economic competitiveness, and it seemed difficult for those at the time to offer a vision of an educational future of which these assumption did not form a part. In other words, the message was that the future would be different but with strong underlying elements of continuity amid change anticipated with some confidence.

It is, I think, an open question whether the balance between change and continuity implicit in that message is appropriate at the end of the present century, if, as seems to be the case, we are caught up in another of those revolutions, in this case the information revolution, so-beloved of historians in seeking a shorthand to capture major social and economic change. It is of the nature of any revolution based on technological change to make some groups of workers redundant as others was the case when the printing press replaced the monastic scriptoria, or air travel superseded the transatlantic liners or the motorways challenged the railways. It is also the case that all the consequences of large scale technological change can never be anticipated (think of the motor car in the past hundred years) and that new systems are often a replacement of, and not a development of, what came before. However, there is one point about technological revolutions that I would wish to emphasise at this stage. This is that such revolutions are not caused by single technological inventions but are constituted in multiple, mutually-influencing technological and social innovations. Factors such as human choices, preferences and values and the social, political and moral forms in which they are expressed must be accommodated if we wish to understand what is too easily hidden by referring to a revolution simply as technological. Put more directly, there are always choices about the kind of technology we want, or indeed whether we want it at all, and what we may wish to do with it.

Uncovering the importance of social concerns in educational prediction is, of course, hardly a surprising finding. It reflects an assumption that if only we knew what kind of society we could expect to develop during the next century, the task of educational prediction, not to say educational policy making and planning, would, at least in principle, be somewhat easier. The reality, in contrast, is not only that we are all imbued with the idea of progress but also, and only too willingly, we overlook the fact that all educational change is historically contextualised and is intimately related to broader political, social, economic and intellectual concerns. It is, therefore, these concerns which we need to predict if our educational predictions derived from them are to rest on somewhat safer grounds.

Equally in evidence in the predictions at the end of the nineteenth century was a confidence in the benevolent transforming power of science and technology. In a century which had seen the invention or development of steam and electric power for locomotion, transport and communication with the consequent opening up of the globe, the introduction of anaesthesia, the acceptance of the germ theory of disease, the deployment of aseptic techniques and the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity, to identify but a few scientific and technological landmarks, such confidence is not difficult to understand and it is only with hindsight that we might describe it as misplaced. We would do well to remind ourselves, however, that the same nineteenth century seriously weakened rural communities, created new towns and expanded cities, generated the most appalling urban squalor and pollution and transformed the working lives and social routines of millions of people. Just as important, it changed people's perceptions of who they were and where they belonged in the world. Likewise, in the twentieth century, radio, television, mass personal transport, space travel, instant global communication, advances in medicine, genetics and biotechnology and much more have all to be set alongside nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, and the horrors of two world wars and a host of other conflicts in which science and technology have played a key role in inflicting the loss of life and destruction of property.

Our view of science and technology in the future is, therefore, more divided and more cautious than it was a hundred years ago, although we should resist the temptation to bask in our own wisdom. While some redressing of the balance of excessive and uncritical optimism which marked the first half of the twentieth century is perhaps overdue, there is a danger that scepticism, even hostility towards science and technology, might go too far. There is plenty of contemporary evidence of anti- and counter- scientific attitudes and Gerald Holton, the distinguished historian of science, writing about this phenomenon has warned us that:

‘the record from ancient Greece to Fascist Germany and Stalin’s USSR to our day shows that movements to delegitimate conventional science are ever present and ready to put themselves at the service of other forces that wish to bend the course of civilisation their way -for example, by the glorification of populism, folk belief, and violence , by mystification and by an ideology that arouses rabid ethnic and nationalistic passions’.

It will be surely an important aspect of education in the twenty-first century to ensure that Holton’s implied prophecy remains unfulfilled by promoting wider scientific and technological literacy and according science and technology their proper place, but no more than that, among human endeavour. In perhaps somewhat dramatic terms, the issue seems to me to be that what people do not understand, they fear and that which they fear, they eventually seek to destroy. Programmes to promote scientific literacy by a variety of formal and informal means are, therefore, likely to become of increasing importance, although we should acknowledge that this does not necessarily mean simply understanding science on scientists’ terms. One issue that may have increased salience is the role of local systems of knowledge of the natural world, sometimes called indigenous science or ethnoscience, in science curriculum reform. The status to be accorded to ethnoscience is, of course, but a part of the wider range of tensions between the local and the global and universal, or, from another perspective, between the traditional and the modern. We all need to adopt a more global perspective on our activities, without losing our roots or weakening the roles we play within our own communities and countries. Tensions between the local and the regional or global will come increasingly to the fore in the coming years and it will, I believe, be part of the task of education to expose, illuminate and help to resolve them. At stake is a central and perennial educational task of helping individuals and communities to understand how they relate to the social and natural worlds around them and of which they are a part. Improved global understanding and co-operation are not only central to peace and justice. Many of the problems which the world now faces in such fields as health and the environment can only be tackled effectively on a regional or global basis.

My second cause for trepidation in addressing you this morning derives from the knowledge that so many exercises in what has come to be called futurology have proved to be wrong, and often spectacularly so, even in fields arguably less politically and socially sensitive than education. When Wells, who was more right about the future than many, was predicting just over a hundred years ago the twentieth century colonisation of the Earth by Martians, a British Parliamentary Select Committee decided, patronisingly and wrongly, that Thomas Edison’s new electric bulbs were ‘good enough for our transatlantic friends ....but not worthy of the attention of practical or scientific men’. As recently as 1956, the Astronomer Royal in England described the prospect of space travel as ‘utter bilge’ and, thereby, added to the long list of those whose predictions were to be confounded and provided more data to underpin Arthur C. Clarke’s law describing the capacity of the distinguished and elderly to get it wrong most of the time.

Without claiming membership of either of the two categories identified by Clarke, let me outline some of the features that I believe will mark the landscape during at least the early years of the next century, and indicate the relevance which they may have to education. In the time available, I shall necessarily be very selective..

If I start with telecommunications, the next decade will see computers perhaps five hundred times faster than those commonly available today. It will be possible for your PC to understand what you say to it and perhaps to recognise gestures. Another decade may make it as easy, perhaps easier, for you to talk with your computer as with your neighbour. In broad terms, the PC, currently comparable to the Model T Ford motorcar, will become increasingly domesticated. As a result, new generations of young people will come to schools, at least in the more prosperous countries, familiar and at ease with the electronic world. That world will allow new ways of doing existing things, like shopping, and obtaining and manipulating information of all kinds. It will also allow new kinds of activity such as living room to living room vidoeconferencing and the virtual realisation of places and environments, It will create a new kind of information that has its primary existence inside electronic systems and which cannot be accessed without such a system. Perhaps the birthday or other present of the future, where it can be afforded, is an electronic parcel which contains the latest video chart album of your daughter’s favourite pop group, tickets for a new video on demand movie, train or holiday tickets for a holiday, a video greetings card, family photographs (digitised but capable of being realised in a form suitable to be framed) and a subscription to an interactive training course provided by an institution on a different continent. The issue is not whether we would find such a present appealing. It will be available.

For some who have written about computing and the future, the question is what will happen to society when computers become smarter than human beings, become self-aware and are able to form their own electronic communities? Some date this as early as 2010 AD. For a number of computer experts, computing and human intelligence are set to merge: a prospect I find as challenging as I do puzzling.

Instant global communication is already with us and its transforming effects on everything from the stock market to entertainment are now part of everyday experience in many countries. It is transforming the nature and location of work. Within a decade it is likely that in many industrially advanced countries about a third of all jobs will be home-based, at least in part, bringing gains which will be more obvious, at least initially, to employers than to employees. The widespread introduction of computer-based control technologies and information systems is already helping to widen the gap between the most and the least prosperous sectors of the population within wealthy nations. It is surely imperative to ensure that such technologies and systems do not become more of a gap between rich and poor countries than they already are.

Here, it is pleasing to note a number of encouraging initiatives. In the United States, an organisation which provides technical assistance to developing countries has launched the first of 24 planned low earth orbiting satellites to which anyone can connect at low cost. Kidsnet, a network created by the National Geographic Magazine, has over one million children using the magazine's data base for educational purposes. It is operating in 40 countries and helping to build a better understanding of environmental issues. Children in Africa and Latin America and the United States are now communicating knowledge about, and data relating to, pollution, as part of their school studies. The European Commission has a program to create a Trans European Education Network intended as an infra-structure to support the transfer of learning materials, to provide access to databases and to enhance communication with a view to improving the skills and knowledge available in the countries involved.

Nonetheless, a major task for education in the early years of the twenty-first century will be the skilful deployment of the new technologies to give to all students and especially to the disadvantaged and the disillusioned, opportunities to capture the excitement of learning and to foster the confidence that successful learning brings. Greater equality of access to the new technologies for learning, teaching and communication should be a global priority. It will not be achieved without, first, the political will, and, secondly, close partnership between education and training organisations on the one hand, and business and commerce on the other. What is certain is that we can have no room for complacency about the political and economic consequences of failing to make real progress towards this goal. Nor can we be complacent about the implications of the adage 'knowledge is power', particularly within the context of knowledge systems and education. The ability to make informed judgements about and, where appropriate, to challenge what is given, have arguably never been more important.

More generally in the field of production and employment, we are seeing not so much a minor extrapolation of present computer usage within industry as the emergence of new industries and businesses , sometimes referred to as the infobusiness. Infobusiness will be able to offer in the information marketplace that which is currently available in the physical market place, health care, education, entertainment, publishing, billing, data extraction, sport, competition, security, surveillance, brokering and trading, and virtual reality. What might a visit to the Zoo be like in, say, 2020: putting on a virtual reality headset in your own home ? In these businesses, what might be called the ‘human factor’ , by which I mean the skills, qualifications and attitudes of the workforce, will come to assume a pre-eminence in many economies. However, equally important to economic growth are technologically literate consumers. The structural changes in many economies, the emergence of chronic unemployment, the growth of part-time work and longer life-expectancy beyond conventional retirement all mean that new understandings need to emerge of what is means to be active as a citizen in society. The distinction between what is education and training on the one hand and the economy on the other is already being blurred and this will continue.

The global economic context is, of course, one of intense competition. New national economies have emerged to challenge and overtake those which have dominated world trade since the end of the second world war. We are familiar with the growth of the so-called Pacific tigers but we should not ignore the fact that China seems set to have, by the early years of the next century, the largest GDP in the world and that, thereafter, it may become the dominant force in the world’s economy.

The broad message here is that education will need to be re-conceptualised by individuals and by whole societies as something much broader than that provided by formal educational agencies. If the various partners in this reconceived educational enterprise are to fulfil their respective roles to best advantage, mutual understanding is essential. Such understanding will include, as a minimum, a recognition both of the different time scales which have traditionally governed industrial and public sector investment in education and will pay due regard to issues of gender and equity. Much training and skill development is already being done by employers, labour organisations and self-help groups, partly in response to the rapid pace of technological change and partly because of a recognition of the limits of what can be provided by formal systems of schooling and higher education. It is important to note, however, that far from weakening the contribution of formal education to life long learning, such developments serve to underline the importance of providing initial learning experiences of a high quality. Without a good grounding , further learning is not only inhibited, it is expensive. Fortunately, we have an excellent definition of basis learning needs, produced by the Jomtien Conference on Education for All in 1990. Such needs comprise: