As a child, do you remember having almost every adult around ask what you wanted to be when you grew up? To please these inquisitive adults, there were a limited number of acceptable options: lawyer, doctor, accountant, maybe carpenter or actor. Possibly even teacher. I should think truck drive or janitor were responses unlikely to have engendered satisfied nods and coos of approval.

I wonder if it’s possible to ask children that question nowadays. What would they say – cloud architect? That one is currently among the highest paying jobs apparently, but who of us born in the last century would have known that? The job market has changed so quickly in recent years, but that’s nothing compared to the turbo-charged exponential transformation ahead of us resulting from the introduction of AI. How exactly AI will affect our futures is still a topic of some fuzzy guessing, but it has many worried and has already caused quite some mayhem. Thinktanks like this and this seem to think that one of the jobs to be hardest hit by AI in the years ahead will be the legal profession: So much for the dream of pleasing your parents by becoming a lawyer. In fact, looking at this specific set of figures, it seems truck driver and janitor are exactly the career paths we should have opted for back when we were kids. 

Now, I think it’s fair to say that the purpose of education is to get children ready for a productive future. While this goal was not too problematic 50 years ago when the future was going to be the same as the present, who really knows what murky future our kids will face in 20 years when the current cohort of kindergarteners reach working age.

Given all this uncertainty, we probably need to reconsider how we use the time we have with our students. At least some of what we do in our classrooms is a residue of 19^th century needs for industrial laborers who could sit still for hours in a factory and unquestionably follow instructions. This, and other goals of education like the accumulating masses of knowledge on a broad array of subjects, have now become redundant. 

If we throw out our current models of education, what do we replace them with? The World Economic Forum has given some thought to what our children need. They propose that an education responsive to our children’s future needs must focus on developing their capacity and willingness to embrace and manage change. They have come up with a list 10 skills we can help children develop that will help to achieve this. 

To be honest, I don’t know what some of these are. Talent management? In any case, none of these were a feature in the schools where I’ve taught over the last 35 years. In fact, some were actively discouraged. To take an example: curiosity. Curious minds ask questions, seek answers, challenge inadequate responses. However, teachers can find curious children an annoyance when there are 35 (60?) other kids and a tight (industrial-rooted knowledge-based) curriculum to follow. “Neville, if you don’t stop interrupting me with questions, I’m going to send you to see Mr. Smith again.”

So, how do we achieve these 10 skills? Each of these can probably be systematically introduced and encouraged in a classroom. For instance, there is quite a lot of stuff to help a teacher interested in encouraging (or teaching) curiosity. Canva, not surprisingly, has tips for teachers on how to encourage curiosity which are actually pretty useful. 

For something more academic, try this paper by Scott-Barrett et al. (2023). At the very least, to get this process started teachers and schools will need some sort of paradigm shift away from industrial era rows-and-columns classrooms and the goal of knowledge acquisition. 

That’s a big task. Maybe we could get students to ask ChatGPT about the jobs they might like to do when they grow up.