Memorizing, listening, and being obedient towards authorities won’t get children far in the world that we’re racing towards. Yet, that’s often the sad reality of outdated school systems that can’t keep up with the progress. But even if we can’t get kids perfectly ready for what we can’t predict, they can sharpen the skills that will help them thrive.
We’ve rounded up expert opinions that explain what teaching, learning, parenting, and schooling should look like so that children gain skills fit for the future.
Creativity
Kyriakos Koursaris, an expert on educational technology, a passionate teacher, and a Minecraft Global Mentor, believes that creativity is the “it” skill that glues everything else together.
“It provides kids with a framework to develop as citizens of an ever-changing world properly.
With creativity being treated as a skill with the same importance as reading, writing, and arithmetics, we can be certain that children will have the confidence and proper head start to develop other crucial skills.”
Among those crucial skills are critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurialism, effective oral and written communication, and curiosity and imagination.
“These skills will take them places, allow them to look at the world and its problems with a positive attitude, and do their best to make it as good as possible.”
Curiosity
Dr. Laura A. Jana, internationally acclaimed pediatrician and a parenting expert believes some of the skills that we desperately try to learn later in life are crucial to develop in small children. As she explained in her TEDx talk, it’s mostly within the first five years of a child’s life that we have an opportunity to intentionally “build” their brain. However, instead of nurturing skills natural to children – such as curiosity – we tend to destroy them, and they have to learn all over again in the future.
“Exploration, curiosity, inquisitiveness, and asking all sorts of questions to better understand how the world works. Fueled by technology, the information age has not put so many answers right at our collective fingertips that it is no wonder that the ability to ask good questions has become so much more valued than simply knowing the right answer. As Albert Einstein put it, the important thing is to never stop questioning.”
Jana points out that it’s ironic that we run corporate training programs such as 5 Whys to train business leaders to ask questions until they get to the root of the problem.
“Implemented by some of the top companies in the world, these formal questioning and training techniques ironically leave one fundamental question unanswered: why should we have to go to such great lengths to train adults to do something that comes so naturally to 2- and 3-year-olds? The answer is, I am afraid, is that we train this skill out of children. While it is natural for the young children to question the world around them, making sure that they continue to see the world as a question mark very much depends on our commitment to encouraging rather than squelching their natural sense of wonder.”
Flexibility
Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist, speaker, and best-selling author, argues that the current educational system is too hierarchical, disciplined, centralized, and closed. Instead, it would be based on networks. That means children should gain skills to become flexible enough to make empowered decisions about their future educational path. This is what he said in his Keynote at Adobe Summit:
“I think that people are going to go towards a network model. What you’ll have is self-organizing groups of students who will make deals with a series of posters for parts of their education. So I can imagine a group of 20 kids who are really interested in political science, and they say, OK, we’re going to spend our first year at Penn State because there’s a couple of professors there we love. We’ll go there.
The second year we’re going to make a deal with Brigham Young because they have a great overseas study program. Because we really are interested in going to Thailand and learning about how the Thais run their government, there’ll be a year or two that year three; we think we, by the way, we want to do some coding and figure coding. So we take online courses from Emmett Till. We get back. That’s an awful lot of education. That strikes me as something that is probably a lot closer than we think as a change we have to get ready for.”
The skills machines won’t ever have
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, is well aware that the future will rely heavily on AI. But some skills are inherently human, and the things only we can do go way beyond creativity and empathy.
“If we do not change the way we teach, in 30 years, we’ll be in trouble. We teach our kids things from the past 200 years, it’s knowledge-based, and we cannot teach our kids to compete with machines who’ll be smarter. We have to teach our kids something unique so that a machine can never catch up with us: values, believing, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others – the soft skills – sports, music, painting, arts, to make sure humans are different from machines.”
