Knowledge for the Future
Source/Author: Mike Murphy, Headmaster
March 01, 2019
A 2015 Forbes Magazine article about the growth of big data noted the following two points, among its list of 20:
- The data volumes are exploding, more data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race.
- Data is growing faster than ever before and by the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet.
If one can be humble for even a moment, it is simple to see that what we knew or believed just four years ago may be very different today. The rate of change in knowledge, technology and global events involving the estimated but growing 7.7 billion people living on Earth makes it impossible to know everything.
Why, then, would any teacher, school or university evaluate students on information that will be obsolete in a decade, a year or even a month?
The basic math facts and rules of conventional grammar may remain constant. We can expect that many of the universal values will remain true in the face of change. But we can be sure that much will change.
Our Alpha students will be ready to commence from Shorecrest in 2034. I cannot imagine that universities and careers will be the same 15 years from now as they are today.
So, what do we want our children and grandchildren to learn at school, on the playgrounds and at the clubs and activities in which we enroll them? My top 10 list is:
- How to work with others
- How to be ethical
- How to find the most reliable sources for information
- How to know when information is fake/propaganda
- How to problem solve
- How to make good judgements
- How to be safe
- How to learn
- How to make/invent/repair
- How to bounce back from adversity (resilience)
If you go through the exercise of making your own list, you can then test it against what you are doing to ensure you have done your best to prepare your child for the future. That is one of our important jobs as educators and parents/guardians. It is something I think about often for our Shorecrest students.
I would like to see the list our Ebytes readers develop. Good luck keeping the list to only 10 items while avoiding the conjunction “and” within an element.
Cheers!
Mike
