Why Wider? For Versatility
The world around us is changing profoundly, and education must adapt. In an age of growing uncertainty, a wise strategy would be to hedge against disruptions by embracing versatility.
A K-12 education today must equip the learners with the abilities to tackle life challenges, ranging from social and political issues (global warming, pollution, inequities, etc.) to technology’s disruption (Social Networks, and now particularly Artificial Intelligence). As such, Education is NOT Training; Education is broad and life-related at large, while Training is narrow and job-related (and sometimes begins in high school).
Of course, education and training are eventually necessary, but they must not be conflated as they have different goals (psychosocial-focused for education, economic-focused for training).
The future is not knowable, but cultivating versatility is a wise and appropriate strategy – think of it as a “hedge against all
eventualities.” Using a Swiss army knife analogy, it is best to equip learners with a broad set of tools that can be sharpened as the circumstances require—poet, physician, painter, and physicist.
How Wiser? By redesigning the What and the How
More than ever, wisdom is the goal of education. However, to get there, it is necessary to redesign both standards/curricula (the What) and Pedagogy (the How, which is not treated in this article), as there are significant gaps between emerging needs and current practices.
The What:
What schools teach is abdicated to jurisdictional powers, which resist modernization due to inertia and fear of change. Education has not yet fully adapted to the Information Age: for example, though called “STEM,” only “St_M” is taught in K-12—very little Technology and no Engineering. The Internet Age, 25 years later, which David Houle called the Shift Age, requires adapting rapidly to changing information and dealing effectively with a diversity of languages, cultures, and lifestyles. And with the AI age, the accumulated deficit of the past two ages comes back even more forcefully, augmented by a new set of challenges.
As a result of this inertia, some will argue, perhaps to temper their cognitive dissonance, that What does not matter “as long as you learn.” CCR profoundly disagrees: why focus the teaching on old content if better options are available? For example, why waste time learning trigonometric functions that matter to very few and have been largely automated, rather than data science, which is useful across many disciplines and is in hot demand?
All Four Dimensions Matter:
Harvard’s Chris Dede summarizes the situation well: “The current curriculum and high-stakes tests often prioritize fostering skills at which AI excels, such as reckoning skills involving calculative prediction and formulaic decision-making. However, AI cannot easily replicate human judgment, a deliberative thought process that is flexible and contextual based on experiential knowledge, ethics, values, relationships, and culture.”
As described in our 2015 book Four-Dimensional Education, and more relevant than ever, this means paying attention to all four dimensions of education: Knowledge, Skills, Character, and Meta-Learning.
Declarative knowledge is more challenged than ever by LLMs, which is an amplification of historical trends (scripts, books, Internet, search engines). As explained earlier, it does not mean that humans do not need base knowledge; they need to be more discriminant about what is essential and relevant.
Also, counterintuitively, there is a need for a broader set of declarative knowledge to respond to the need for versatility. David Epstein, author of Range, contrasts “kind” and “wicked” learning environments, explaining that while structured, predictable “kind” environments can favor early specialization, real-world “wicked” environments often reward a wide range of experiences.
He also stresses that a sampling period, where one explores various interests before settling on one, can lead to more career satisfaction and success. Epstein argues against early specialization in education, stating it can limit children’s ability to explore their potential and adapt to new situations, and investigates “match quality”—the fit between one’s interests, abilities, and career, and how a broad range of experiences can enhance it. However, it is crucial to articulate a mindset at this stage:
Competencies
Skills: These are both challenged and augmented by AI.
- Character: Some remain significantly Human (for instance, Ethics) and must be leaned on, while others are helped and pushed by AI (for instance, Curiosity).
- Meta-Learning: Learning how to Learn is more critical than ever, as are Metacognition and Metaemotion. Will AGI ultimately have those capabilities?
In addition to the goals of modern education described by the Venn diagram above, there is also a growing need to personalize Education. This personalization comprises four drivers: Motivation, Identity, Agency, and Purpose—of which motivation and purpose will remain quintessentially human.
About the author
Charles Fadel is a global education thought leader and futurist, author and inventor, with several active affiliations. His work spans the continuum of Schools, Higher Education, and Workforce Development/Lifelong Learning. He is the founder and chairman of the Center for Curriculum Redesign (Boston, Massachusetts), focused on “Making Education More Relevant” and answering the question: “What should students learn for the 21st century? In an age of Artificial Intelligence.”
He is Project Director at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in the Laboratory for the Science of the Individual, exploring “Machine Learning + Human Learning”. He serves as Chair of the Education Committee of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC) to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), nominated by the U.S. Chamber of International Business (USCIB). He works with several teams at the OECD – Education 2030, PISA, and CERI most notably. He is a senior fellow, human capital at The Conference Board, and a board member at the USCF.
Editor’s Note:
This article is a modified extract of Chapter 4 from CCR’s recent book, Education for the Age of AI, by Charles Fadel and his CCR staff. We will review the book in the Fall.
