Time to Rethink: Educating for a Technology-Transformed World

Abstract

Purpose

We hope to provoke a conversation about preparing students for an uncertain future that unforeseeable technological innovations will transform in ways we cannot predict. The unprecedented disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic makes this an opportune time to reconsider all dimensions of education.

Design/Approach/Methods

We present information on how technology is transforming virtually every aspect of our lives and the threats we face from social media, climate change, and growing inequality. We then analyze the adequacy of proposals for teaching new skills, such as 21st-Century Skills, to prepare students for a world of work that is changing at warp speed.

Findings

Despite harbingers of a radically different future, most schools continue to operate much as they have for centuries, providing a one-size-fits-all education. Technology now enables an unprecedented degree of personalization. We can tailor learning opportunities to individual students’ interests, talents, and potential with teachers serving as guides, resources, and critical friends. The Internet afford a cornucopia of learning opportunities—online courses, international experts, global collaborations, accessible databases, and libraries. Learning can occur virtually anywhere.

Originality/Value

The future depends on decisions we are making today about education. The value of this article is that we call for rethinking every component of education rather than considering each element independently.

As we write this, educators across the globe are struggling as schools, students, and families deal with the consequences of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Uncertainty is the order of the day as local and national policies on vaccination and masks change and, at times, conflict. Some teachers are required to teach content both face-to-face and online. For their part, students in some countries are struggling to recoup lost learning time and too often find themselves pawns in political conflicts among parents, educators, and policymakers. As stressful as the situation is for educators and students and their families, the pandemic accelerated a trend toward an expanding use of technologies to provide learning opportunities remotely.

Our contention is that major changes in education are imperative—not just tweaks to the status quo but the revolution that many such as Sir Ken Robinson (2010) have urged—yet, major changes in education are rare and slow-moving. The complex systems that characterize education are difficult to change. These systems are maintained by vested interests who view change as a potential threat to their power and control and to the existing social and political relations within the system. As a result, education systems are stuck in the status quo, countenancing occasional innovations as safety valves to release pent-up dissatisfaction. Thus, those who are part of educational systems are likely to view what we are proposing with, at best, skepticism and, at worst, indifference. The uncertainties and possible existential disasters of the future require a broad coalition of families, students, educators, business leaders, and policymakers to rethink education.

The technology tsunami

Prior to the pandemic, online education was already on the rise, and some teachers had begun to use various new technologies such as class management systems, digital devices, and flipped classrooms. In addition, MOOCs and other online learning resources were rapidly increasing in popularity. Global EdTech investment was estimated to be U.S.$18.66 billion in 2019 (Market Insider, 2020). How much the reliance on technologies for remote learning during the pandemic has changed conventional teaching and learning remains to be seen. That education will return to the status quo ante is very unlikely, if not impossible. As Wang Tao, the Vice President of Tencent Education, was quoted as saying: “I believe that the integration of information technology in education will be further accelerated and that online education will eventually become an integral component of school education” (Li & Lalani, 2020).

Looking into the near and mid-future, this generation's facility and comfort with various technologies is essential. They will face a world of work increasingly shaped by technology. Many current jobs will fade away or be significantly altered by technology. Concurrently, many new jobs will be created by evolving technologies that we cannot foresee. New technologies are already changing daily life from smart homes to driverless cars to wearable tech. Not only is change occurring, but it is occurring at an ever more rapid pace.

The pandemic has also spurred the rapid evolution and adoption of technologies that improve and save lives. Telemedicine grew exponentially during the pandemic. Unable to see patients face to face, medical professionals have been diagnosing and treating illnesses with the help of a range of technologies, crowdsourcing, and big data. Recent discoveries about DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid—the bearer of our genetic information) and RNA (ribonucleic acid—the carrier of DNA information in the protein-synthesis process) as well as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology have enabled cell-level manipulations of genes. Research into RNA—more precisely, mRNA—led to the development of vaccines effective against the COVID-19 virus (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention [CDC], 2021).

We are also writing at a time when social media is under greater scrutiny than ever before. The rise and proliferation of social media has enabled people everywhere to connect, communicate, and share joys, sorrows, grievances, laughter, cat antics, baby's first step, and more. Online communities such as those for programmers enable developers to learn from others’ discoveries and mistakes. Online communities have also coordinated protests, some of which have led to violence, in many parts of the world—France, Lebanon, and Algeria, to mention some of the more notable examples (Rachman et al., 2019). The insurrectionists planned and coordinated their attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, via several social media platforms.

A means of keeping us connected, social media has also opened a Pandora's box of outrage, hatred, misinformation, and conspiracies that has sometimes led to violence. Financial Times journalists who have observed protests in different countries concluded: “These are revolts that are convened by smartphone and inspired by hashtags, rather than guided by party leaders and slogans drafted by central committees. The rallying power of social media is a crucial enabler for leaderless movements” (Rachman et al., 2019).

Awareness of and concerns about the increasing power of social media and “Big Tech”—Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tencent—are also growing. Gallup reports that 57% of U.S. residents polled in 2021 want greater regulation of technology companies. This is a view shared by residents of other countries: 80% of those surveyed in Germany, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and New Zealand agreed that the power of big tech should be limited (Radu, 2020). As they accumulate data about us, their power continues to grow. A 2018 Pew survey found that 95% of U.S. teens have access to smartphones and 45% report being online constantly. Deloitte reports that 80% of people in developed countries and 82% of those in developing countries own smartphones (Deloitte, 2017).

Recording, saving, and aggregating every key stroke and applying proprietary algorithms to the amassed data, these largely unaccountable private companies may know more about us than our family and friends. Their goal is to monetize the resulting volume of data they collect, a goal that innate human behavior has significantly aided and abetted.

We thrive on the affirmation that our conformation bias feeds us. As a recent documentary on social media revealed, big tech wants us to return again and again to platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Conforming to a behaviorist paradigm, we respond to the stimuli that positive reinforcements produce, feeding our psychological and emotional needs. Each time we return to a page or website, we supply more information about ourselves: our wants, needs, fears, insecurities, obsessions. Online retailers as well as political operatives pay large sums for these data and apply their own algorithms that enable them to pinpoint and manipulate our emotions, vulnerabilities, and even self-images.

This is not, of course, the whole story about new technologies. Technology has created a different world and made the world both better and worse for everyone. Technology is inextricably intertwined with geopolitical events, world trade, and the shifting order in the world. Although the term “globalization” is relatively new, the phenomenon is not. Global trade has been going on for centuries, even before the Silk Road and the Incense Trade Route of lore. World commerce has been steadily growing for decades with occasional and temporary declines such as the pandemic-related downturn.

The world has, indeed, become a global village, but a village consisting of many different tribes, some of whom have benefitted disproportionately from globalization. Whereas many countries have seen benefits from increased trade, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to grow (Deaton, 2015). An analysis of changes in household wealth globally based on data from the Credit Suisse Research Institute ends with this conclusion: “The worldwide spread Coronavirus pandemic has proved to be a boon for the rich and bane for the poor” (TeamTGH, 2021).

These growing disparities are one source of fuel for major conflicts within nations as well as among nations. Competition for scarce resources, land, and markets is as fierce as ever—as are nationalism and collective national grievances. The future of geopolitics is filled with uncertainty and unknowns as technologies continue to accelerate globalization and nations use technology to spy on, disrupt, and attack rivals.

Technology and the economy are deeply entwined. As in the past, the future world's economy will continue to experience major upturns and downturns. Amidst these fluctuations, however, how nations address the persistent inequality among different groups within a nation and among groups across nations will significantly shape the future at least as much as new technologies will. Climate change, for the foreseeable future, will continue to worsen inequities as a warming world will force population migrations from parched lands to more temperate climates. According to The New Times, although 1% of the world is currently a “barely livable hot zone,” by 2070, 19% of the earth will be so. Among future uncertainties is: Where will the people in the hot zones go?

Education lagging behind social and technological change

So, what does all this have to do with schools and schooling? Everything. The primary role of schools is to prepare students to live in the future as well as the present. The future is not prefabricated, just waiting for the arrival of today's students. Rather, the future is what current and future graduates will create. Even as we write, students are shaping the world, although their current contributions are modest compared to the impact they will have on the near-term and distant future.

To say that technologies are mere tools is true—even if it is also a truism. This is, however, the starting claim for the contention that to productively wield technology requires humans who understand both technology and themselves. They possess the knowledge and will to capitalize on the affordances of technology and mitigate its dangers, and the moral judgment to decide when it is and is not being employed for the betterment of their communities and society.

The questions for us are: Are we preparing students to both take advantage of what emerging technologies offer and recognize the potential dangers that these technologies—especially social media, algorithms, big data, robotics, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI)—pose to themselves, to their society, and to democratic processes and institutions? Is the current wave of educational reforms—labeled as “neoliberal”—that has spread across the world (Oplatka, 2018) likely to prepare students for a difficult-to-predict world of new technologies and rapidly changing world of work? Given a rapidly changing commercial world, are we positioning students to learn-on-the-go as existing jobs are transformed or disappear and new jobs appear? Are the widely touted “21st‐Century Skills” sufficient preparation for this new world? What of other conceptualizations of the skills and dispositions believed needed for the future, ideas such as “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” (STEM) education (or, alternatively, “Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics”—STEAM), “social-emotional learning” (SEL), “deep learning,” and “soft skills”? How and where are the young to learn these? Do these capture the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that a highly uncertain future requires?

Many of the threats we are facing are because, in the race between education and technology, education is losing ground (Goldin & Katz, 2008). As technology has advanced over the last few decades, education has failed to keep pace. As technology has become more sophisticated, more pervasive, and has replaced more workers and disrupted the society and economy, education has changed comparatively less. Curriculum content, the structure of schools, and opportunities to learn, initially based on a 19th-century Prussian model, have changed incrementally while technology has evolved ever more rapidly.

As a result, much of the global population is ill-equipped to fill the proliferating jobs in technology and to take advantage of technological advances to improve their lives and their communities. Many feel disenfranchized and disappointed, often resentful of the minority that have grown ever more prosperous. This minority have used their wealth, expertise, and social and political positions to take advantage of these technological advances and transformed the world, tightening their grip on power in the process. During the pandemic, when so many lost their jobs, a small minority not only prospered but also augmented their wealth and power (Lane, 2021).

For the world to improve for all, much more radical change is needed. The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of the misery to which the world is vulnerable. Virtually all economies in the world experienced negative growth. Millions around the globe were unemployed. Billions of students and their teachers suffered major disruptions and lost opportunities to learn as in-school learning was another casualty of the virus. Even as the pandemic accelerated the development, adoption, and use of some technologies, it exacerbated economic, educational, and political divisions.

The full impact of the pandemic has yet to be calculated. If the future was uncertain before the pandemic, it is dramatically more so now. Fortunately, vaccines are available to slow and, we hope, stop the spread of the virus. The increased uncertainty and disruption it has generated, however, will be with us well into the future.

The challenges education faces

At this critical moment, while there are many pressing issues and needs that policymakers and businesses must address, the long-term challenges for education are numerous and urgent. The question is whether education can change quickly enough to prepare citizens who can collaborate productively with robotics and AI, adopting and acting with a global mindset, creating new jobs and organizations, forming more mutually beneficial relationships locally and globally, engaging in rational and civil political discourse, and participating constructively in society. These capabilities and others are essential for an uncertain and potentially calamitous future.

As many have argued, educational systems do not change easily or swiftly. Much has not changed fundamentally over the last hundred years or so (Tyack & Cuban, 1997). Despite many promising innovations, informative research, and courageous efforts, schools around the globe remain largely resistant to the changes that the times and the future demand (Oplatka, 2018). Until the pandemic, technology had not significantly disrupted the “grammar of schooling.”

Perhaps the greatest disruption in educational history, the pandemic moved most classrooms online and forced teachers to rethink their practice, yet, much remained the same. Subjects continued to be taught separately, students were still grouped by age, the curriculum was much the same, and professional educators still made most decisions about the organization and pacing of opportunities to learn. For example, a large-scale survey study in Guangdong Province, China, revealed that fewer than 40% of the high school students engaged in collaborative or group projects during online classes (Yan et al., 2021). Faced with pandemic-created fear, confusion, and uncertainty, many educators resorted to the practices they knew best and simply transferred these to online classrooms.

Major changes cannot happen without systematic actions. Pressure for change often comes from outside the system, from large-scale social movements. Individual schools, school leaders, teachers, students, families, citizen groups, and other non-school actors can and have pressured the system. Decades of concerted and targeted actions by civil rights groups in the U.S. forced school integration upon a resistant system (Branch, 1988; Keppel, 2016). In South Africa, pressure from international organizations, other countries, the African National Congress, and Black South Africans eventually ended apartheid (Eby & Morton, 2017). As the modern U.S. civil rights movement and the fight to end apartheid show, large-scale social movements can change public opinion. This, in turn, pressures systems and institutions to pay attention and change accordingly.

The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements are prime examples. Both started as grassroots movements whose messages resonated broadly in society and led to closer public scrutiny of systemic sexual and racial violence and injustice. Although both movements may have originated in the U.S., protesters across the globe joined and marched in cities across the world. According to Foreign Affairs magazine, women in 85 countries have used the hashtag to protest violence against women and demand change (Mahdavi, 2018). Pervasive sexism, sexual assault, and racism in workplaces, the media, justice systems, institutions, and police departments are universal issues.

Eventually, these movements for racial justice and prosecution of sexual predators grew and became sufficiently powerful so that businesses, courts, armed forces, the media, educational institutions, and other organizations and government authorities could no longer minimize or ignore the systemic and institutional nature of the problems. These problems will not disappear any time soon, but instances of sexual and racial violence will be much more difficult to ignore, dismiss, or cover up. This is due, in part, to technology. Cell phone videos showed the world police violence that killed George Floyd. Social media allowed women in many countries to name their attackers, connect with other victims of sexual assault, and pressure authorities to investigate and prosecute sexual criminals.

Technology affords people the opportunity to organize and apply pressure, on a scale previously not possible, to those in power to bring about systemic changes. This also requires that students understand the power of technology—social media in particular—to shape and focus people's attention and actions. Whether this is a force for good depends on the ability of students to think critically about the content they read and view and to exercise informed moral judgment.

Our goal in this article is not to offer definitive solutions to complex issues such as these but to stimulate a conversation about the education our students need. We hope to encourage everyone to rethink education, to reflect on the education of our children and youth with a “beginner's mind.” We encourage everyone to engage in conversations about how to best prepare students for a future, however wrought with uncertainty and threats, that also holds promise and emerging opportunities.

We offer our ideas about the rethinking we believe needed in all areas of education: schools, curriculum, pedagogy, opportunities to learn, assessment, and policymaking. A key condition to bringing about change is a redistribution of power so that practicing educators have greater voice and flexibility in deciding how learning should be organized, orchestrated, and assessed. They know what is needed for them to continue to learn both collectively and individually. We hope they are part of this conversation.

Rethinking what to learn

Herbert Spencer's (1911) criteria for what knowledge is of greatest value still seem relevant. Spencer posed these questions: Does it help self-preservation? Does it help promote the society? Does it inform parenting? Does it improve leisure time activities? Those in charge of educational systems have asked similar questions in deciding what is to be taught. These authorities must decide what knowledge, skills, and dispositions students need now and in the future to improve society and the economy and to live full, satisfying, and productive lives.

A century or more ago, these decisions were easier to make. Many societies were largely ethnically homogenous and slow to change. Technology evolved much more slowly, and predicting the future was less challenging. Unless interrupted by disasters, life for most people closely resembled that lived by earlier generations. This relative predictability also made easier prescribing what students must know and be able to do. Economic sectors were fewer and changed at a modest pace. Fewer types of jobs were available, and many required similar skills. Furthermore, the possibilities for individuals to create jobs for themselves were limited.

This has changed radically at an accelerating pace. Technology has transformed the contexts and conditions in which schools were initially founded. Predicting the jobs that will exist in 20 or 30 years is nearly impossible. Technology transforms extant jobs, supplants workers, and ends whole industries even as it generates new jobs and industries. As automation and AI technologies replace workers or make some jobs obsolete, innovators have demonstrated the ability to create new jobs, many of which require humans as well as machines. The growth of the gig economy, freelancing, globalization, and online platforms have also produced new jobs. New technologies and the accompanying changes in our behaviors and relationships create opportunities for more people to craft their own jobs to a degree never before seen or even imagined.

These are contextual factors that demand we rethink education, especially the opportunities students have to learn and the character and content of these opportunities. We need to rethink the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that schools have traditionally offered. This is not to say that schools must discard current curricula entirely. We need to rethink the standard fare to identify what is most essential for students who will be required to continue learning across their lifetimes, adapting to rapidly changing jobs and social conditions. We are aware that educational history is littered with the remains of promising ideas about how best to improve the school curricula and pedagogy (Celio & Hill, 1998; McDonald, 2014; Tyack & Cuban, 1997). Yet, in a world in which they will change jobs at least four, five, or more times in their lives, students’ capacity to learn independently what they need to know and be able to do is at least as important if not more important than the knowledge and skills represented in the traditional curriculum.

The requisite levels of research skills, resourcefulness, and mental acumen require students to develop unprecedented degrees of self-awareness. Self-awareness and self-monitoring prompt students to ask themselves: What do I know? How reliable is what I think I know? What else do I need to learn? Where will I learn it? How will I know if my knowledge is sufficient? Many of us tend to overestimate our knowledge and competence (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Fostering requisite levels of reflection, self-awareness, and skepticism about our own knowledge—metacognitive skills—have not typically been featured in the school curriculum or even regarded as the school's responsibility. Some teachers, on their own, assume the responsibility to teach these metacognitive skills and dispositions. They are, however, rarely included in curriculum standards or standardized assessments.

Such skills and dispositions have recently begun to appear in the various 21st-Century Skills recommendations (Duckworth & Yeager, 2015). How to incorporate them into the conventional one-size-fits-all curriculum that is already overstuffed with information is a major challenge. Something has to give.

Rethinking the curriculum and opportunities to learn

We believe that a fundamental rethinking of the curriculum is necessary. Governments are highly unlikely, however, to relinquish their monopoly of what citizens should know and be able to do. Even in instances where educators are consulted about curriculum content, government agencies have the final say. Schools have long been expected to enculturate students with a common body of knowledge, skills, and expected civic attitudes and duties. If we have learned nothing else from two centuries of government control of schools, it is that mandated curricula do not ensure that students will have the opportunities they need to reach their full potentials. Some scholars have argued that this is not even the primary function of schools.

Bowles and Gintis (1976) posited that the primary function of schools in capitalist societies is social reproduction, reinforcing the existing social class structure. Along these lines, the French neo-Marxist philosopher Althusser (1973) argued that schools were an example of an “ideological state apparatus” designed to inculcate the ideology of the ruling class. Greer (1976) similarly contended that the primary function of American schools is to maintain the status quo, thereby perpetuating the marginalization of the urban poor, Black residents in particular. David Donavel's account of how a highly innovative and successful “school-within-a-scool” was canceled led him to argue that high school is less about engagement in intellectual activities and more a rite of passage to adulthood (Donavel, 1995).

Whatever one's view of the function of schools, governments will continue to dictate curriculum content. Growing interest in 21st-Century Skills, dissatisfaction with assessment results, and the appearance of a plethora of online resources, however, have combined to create an opening for new content and learning opportunities. Interest has grown in the potential of personalized learning plans and opportunities among policymakers as well as educators, students, and families (Xie et al., 2019).

In 2012, the U.S. Race-to-the-Top legislation, the major federal educational initiative of the decade, included the development of personalized learning environments as a “top priority.” In the U.S., some states and large urban districts have been working to institute more personalized experiences especially for high school students. Based on its own research, the European OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) has recommended that teachers individualize instruction to improve learning (OECD, 2019). Evidence from research on the effects of personalized learning is consistently positive and shows that students in schools that have implemented personalized learning approaches outperform students in conventional schools (Pane et al., 2015). For example, in research that the OECD conducted in 36 countries and/or regions, 29 showed improvements in 4th-grade reading scores when students received individual instruction (OECD, 2019).

Although the personalized approach has been primarily applied to learning the content in state-mandated curricula, it opens the door to content more directly related to individual student interests and needs. We can imagine a personalized curriculum built on each student's strengths and designed to support and guide the development of the student's interests and talents. This could be, in addition to the (trimmed down) mandatory curriculum or the required curriculum, woven into each student's personalized learning experience. Personalization allows for the inclusion of skills, abilities, and dispositions that are not subject-specific, such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, as well as metacognitive skills such as self-direction, self-awareness, and self-regulation. These experiences would help students both realize their potential and better equip them for the changing world of work and to be contributing members of their communities.

A key to students’ psychological and social development is their search for a sense of their identity (Erikson, 1968). Personalization creates opportunities for students to explore their identities. Among the factors shaping their identities are the communities of which they are a part (Erikson, 1994). This is the rationale for including local knowledge, values, and history in any curriculum. To make room for all of this in the time frame of schools requires revisiting subject-matter curricula with the goal to identify the information, concepts, algorithms, and methods in each traditional subject matter that constitute a foundation for subsequent learning. This is predicated on ensuring that students learn how to find and evaluate resources and opportunities needed to pursue future learning in those subjects of greatest relevance and value to them. Another predicate is that students would learn the metacognitive skills needed to be an independent and critical learner.

This suggests that, in addition to the officially mandated curriculum (in its “essentials-only” form), each student would need a personalized curriculum. Students should have the opportunity to develop their strengths in their own way, capitalizing on a variety of resources that include their teachers and other experts, local and worldwide. The legacy system that requires students to compete against each other in their mastery of a common set of skills and knowledge no longer serves students well. Except for basic knowledge and skills, forcing students to pursue the same educational outcomes along the same route seems unlikely to result in most students reaching their full potential.

Personalized educational journeys could help students develop their strengths and interests, developing in the process a unique “jagged profile” of abilities and interests. These unique profiles of abilities can potentially enable students to solve problems by employing analytical, creative, and entrepreneurial skills. In solving problems, students can translate their unique abilities into something valuable as well as continue their learning (Zoutou et al., 2020). In this way, students can develop the capacity to create their own jobs as business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, policy and political entrepreneurs, or intrapreneurs (Zhao, 2012).

Rethinking where to learn

For most students, schools have been the primary, if not the only, place for formal learning. Even though technology has made it possible for students to learn online from outside-of-school resources, formal learning has continued to be the province of schools. Although the pandemic forced schools to offer remote learning, learning has remained under the control and direction of the schools and its educators. As the pandemic receded, most students around the world began to return to their classrooms, although some opted out.

Throughout the history of state-sponsored education, instruction has been delivered to groups of students organized by age. A group of students congregate in one room and sit behind their desks. They face an adult who typically stands in front of them and teaches all the students the same content. The learning place is technically the classroom with the school campus available for non-academic activities.

For centuries, this arrangement made sense for several reasons. Teachers have long been viewed as the curators of valued knowledge. Following this belief, knowledge was believed to be imparted only in their presence. Second, parents needed a safe place to send their children when they went to work, and citizens feared packs of unsupervised youth roaming the streets freely (Tyack, 1974). In addition, schools were where students learned to socialize with their peers. Finally, organizing students into groups made efficient use of educators’ time and other resources.

This long-standing arrangement makes much less sense today. As our experience during the pandemic showed, technology enables learning virtually anywhere. Whereas in the past, most physical resources were available only in schools, now resources such as textbooks, library books, curricular material, audio and video materials, and so on are readily available online in digital form. In fact, learning resources have expanded well beyond what schools have traditionally been able to offer. In addition to online modules, courses, books, journals, podcasts, games, and so on, experts in all sorts of domains have become globally accessible as well through YouTube and other platforms.

Freed from the limitations of traditional schools, any student can now, in theory, pursue his or her own interests. A student interested in penguins can connect with an Antarctic wildlife specialist. A French horn student can book a lesson with a horn master. A student intrigued by electric vehicles can talk with an automotive engineer. A student who wants to start a nonprofit for abandoned pets can converse with the CEOs of successful non-profits. The possibilities for personalized learning are virtually endless.

No longer limited to just the educators and peers in their school, students can reach out to educators and peers globally. Some schools have already established partnerships with schools in other countries through organizations such as the Global School Networks (globalschoolnetworks.com).

Partnerships such as this offer opportunities for students to experience collaborating with their peers from different backgrounds, cultures, and social classes. Digital simultaneous translation tools make language differences less of a barrier than they might have been. Opportunities such as this can help dispel mistrust of and prejudice toward unfamiliar groups, ethnicities, races, and nationalities. Years of research suggest that personal interactions between students from different races, ethnicities, and cultures reduce prejudice (Dovidio et al., 2021). In a sense, the new classroom is the globe, teachers are guides, and students, individually or in virtual groups, are investigators and problem-solvers.

Impeding this rethinking are culturally embedded ideas about what constitutes genuine knowledge, who has it, and where it can be learned. As the pandemic forced many families, educators, and policymakers to rethink their beliefs about knowledge and its acquisition, some are not committed to a full return to the status quo ante. For instance, the U.S. public school enrollment is down 1.5% and higher education enrollment is down 3.5%. The data that will tell us what these opt-out students are doing are not yet available. However, at least some of them are likely to be pursuing their own paths to learning outside of conventional classrooms. Yet to be determined is whether the pandemic experience will prompt a reassessment of conventional classrooms as the most legitimate venues for learning and to capitalize on technologies that open up the globe as a classroom.

A primary challenge is that many people and groups have a stake in the status quo. Teachers’ identity as teachers is, for many, tied to their classrooms and the accompanying sense of both responsibility and control. They may be understandably reluctant to turn over some of this responsibility and control to others. As we discuss below, allowing students to use online resources to pursue their learning needs and interest entails a change in teachers’ roles.

Families may also resist the idea of their children relying heavily on online resources for learning. Just as the Internet is a treasure trove of courses, information, data, expertise, and ideas, it also hosts sources that promote potentially dangerous ideas and beliefs and that flood searches with links to misinformation and conspiracy theories. It also includes people who use it to exploit unwary and trusting children.

Government authorities may also have strong reservations about allowing sources they do not control to provide learning opportunities and information. School authorities as well as governments, in some cases, already mandate various methods to limit student access to certain sources of information and ideas. As schools move to expand personalized learning that typically relies, in part, on Internet resources, we can envision ever-tighter controls over access to such resources. This would, of course, undermine one of the most promising affordances of digital sources.

Rethinking how to learn

Mere information harvesting, memorization, and answering already-answered questions will not best serve students in the future. As the various lists of 21st-Century Skills emphasize, future jobs and social and environmental challenges will require citizens who think analytically and critically, collaborate to creatively solve complex and unpredictable problems, and regard new information and ideas skeptically. To develop these capacities requires, in the present, opportunities to learn in ways that differ significantly from those to be observed in many classrooms.

The movement toward project-based leaning (PBL) that focuses on solving real-world problems is a step in this direction (Barshay, 2021). The process starts with students collectively considering various societal and environmental problems. A critical step, this evaluation includes consideration of the relative urgency of various problems, the availability and accessibility of resources, and the group's ability to address the problems. Once a problem is identified, all group members are engaged in developing a solution. If circumstances permit, the group might be involved in implementing the solution or reporting to those responsible for addressing it. Finally, inviting “critical friends” to evaluate the solution generates feedback to help the group improve the process (Zhao, 2012, 2018). Critical to the success of PBL appears to be teachers who have been trained to organize and support students through the process (Barshay, 2021).

A problem-oriented learning approach changes the orientation of learning (Zoutou et al., 2020). Rather than encountering information, procedures, and ideas whose application is, at best, obscure, learning is clearly linked to identifying and solving specific, authentic problems. Identifying problems and devising solutions help students to develop the entrepreneurial and creative mindset that prepares them to create innovative tools, services, art, and organizations. These are essential to a brighter future not only for students but also for the societies in which they will be living.

Learning in collaborative groups also takes advantage of the social nature of learning. As psychologists have discovered over the past century, although learning may unfold intra-personally, it is mediated by our sociocultural contexts (Brown & Duguid, 2000; Luria, 1976; Wertsch et al., 1995). As students learn with and from one another, their understanding of themselves as learners changes. Such metacognition, reflecting on the self as a learner, is essential to their development as life-long learners. With proper guidance, such social learning can also help them learn to take the perspective of others—a disposition found in various 21st-Century Skills recommendations.

Rethinking the role of the learner

Rethinking the learning process implies rethinking the learner's role. No longer a largely passive recipient of information that is soon forgotten, learners become active agents and managers of their learning. As Bransford et al. (2000) concluded, without the opportunity to apply what they are learning, students cannot see its relevance and are unable to use the knowledge when an opportunity to do so offers itself.

Many if not all students begin school as active learners, as natural experimenters and investigators. This is one of evolution's gifts. Were we not born learners and creators, our species would have died on the African savannah millennia ago. As they progress through preschool, kindergarten, and then primary grades, students encounter fewer opportunities for investigation and more of the prescribed curriculum. Whatever their interests or abilities, they find themselves expected to learn a predetermined myriad of information, skills, rules, procedures, and behavioral and social norms. The lucky ones have teachers who try to identify and cultivate their individual interests. Many, however, are not so lucky. The interest in and curiosity about the world that is their birthright finds the school culture and curriculum barren ground.

This need not be the case when technology affords multiple tools for students, even at early ages, to explore whatever sparks their interest and enthusiasm. With guidance from professional educators and knowledgeable others, they can become designers of their own educational pathways and learning preferences. In so doing, along the pathways are opportunities for them to continuously cultivate the awareness of themselves as learners. They can develop the self-regulating and self-monitoring skills and dispositions that characterize successful independent learners. Although maturation of these skills and dispositions requires time and practice, strategies exist to support the changes (Wehmeyer & Zhao, 2020). The future belongs to those who can learn, adapt, and grow intellectually, psychologically, socially, and emotionally.

Rethinking the role of the teacher

Problem-focused, personalized learning not only changes the role of learners but also that of teachers. Despite models of active learning that have been around for decades and promoted in teacher preparation programs, many teachers seem to prefer a conventional classroom role. It offers the comfort of familiarity and, in policy environments that discourage risk-taking, it is the safest route. To support the development of independent, collaborative, critical, and skeptical problem-solvers demands that teachers adopt different roles, the most primary of which are those of guides and question-askers. Teachers themselves must model independence, inquisitiveness, collaboration, skepticism, and problem-solving.

These roles involve working with students to identify problems and unanswered questions, guiding them in their discussions and debates, asking questions that provoke deep thinking and reflection, and helping them find trustworthy sources and evidence. In organizing collaborative work, the teacher's role includes inviting diverse voices and perspectives into all conversations and working with students to establish group norms, procedures, and protocols for discussions. Monitoring group progress and being available as a consultant, mediator, or “critical friend” also fit into this role.

In a personalized learning environment in which students design their own curriculum, the teacher serves as facilitator, adviser, and supporter (Zhao, 2018). Teachers in this role help students find the resources and materials they need to pursue their personalized curriculum. As they are pursuing skills and knowledge of their choosing, students have less need for teachers to serve as motivators, an aspect of teaching that many teachers find challenging, especially at the secondary level. In poll after poll, a majority of high schoolers report being bored most of the time they are in class. Personalized learning is not a cure-all for teenage boredom, but it holds the promises of reducing it significantly. Moreover, it relieves teachers of the need to convince students that what they are learning has value beyond merely preparing for a test or getting them into college.

Rather than diminishing the importance of teachers, these roles enhance it. In particular, it heightens the significance of their relationships with their students. Delpit (2003) wrote of educating African American children that “we must learn who the children are, and not focus on what we assume them to be . . . developing relationships with our students, and understanding their political, cultural, and intellectual legacy” (p. 18). Delpit's advice applies to all children, not just African American children. These relationships enable teachers to help students identify their interests and passions and reach their full potential.

Personalized learning enabled by technology can relieve teachers of the tedious, repetitive, and predictable aspects of teaching, affording them the time and energy to engage more fully and personally with their students (Zhao et al., 2015). Given the increasing availability of information online, teachers’ culturally defined role as transmitters of information and ideas needs rethinking. To quote Delpit (2003) again, educators are “seed people” cultivating the talents, interests, character, values, and ethics that students need for the future. This is precisely the role to which most teachers aspire, and many have already achieved.

Rethinking schools

Because they are parts of complex systems, the foci of multiple interests and perennial battlegrounds for culture wars, schools are difficult to change. Schools have become a language with its own grammar (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). As we have noted, school governance in highly decentralized systems, such as the U.K., Canada, Norway, and the U.S., is shared with local and state school boards or councils, state/provincial departments of education, governors’ office, legislatures as well as the central government. Publishers, teachers’ unions, the media, testing companies, foundations, parent and community organizations, think tanks, nonprofits, civic organizations, political parties, higher education institutions, tech companies—the list of those who monitor and feel they have a stake in schools is seemingly endless. Adding to the complexity of the environment are the critical roles schools play in many communities that extend well beyond education. In some communities, schools are also major employers, recreational and community centers, libraries, after-school care providers, meeting venues, and health clinics.

Considering the complexity of both the governance and environment of schools, we are left wondering whether significant change is possible. Schools, however, are human creations, and like all things we create, we should be able to change them (Zhao, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). From a historical perspective, modern schools are a relatively recent innovation, only about 200 years old. In contrast, we have been living in communities since at least Neolithic times, and communities have always found ways to prepare the next generation. Otherwise, they would likely have died out. We are arguing that now is the time to rethink schools as institutions designed to pass on the codified knowledge of the dominant sociopolitical group.

Expecting change to come from within existing systems seems unrealistic. Expecting change to happen quickly seems similarly unrealistic. Expecting change to be widely and enthusiastically embraced is unlikely, although those who have been poorly served by the existing system may welcome it. Expecting change agents to emerge from the existing systems also seems unlikely but by no means impossible. More likely, as we have seen with changes in other spheres, change will be driven by groups and individuals who offer compelling ideas about education that enhance the life chances of all students, not just the fortunate ones.

As a start, schools can rethink their psychical boundaries. The Global Online Academy (GOA) ¹ , for example, is an online school that offers courses for students who attend over 200 schools globally. The GOA started as a consortium of a small group of prestigious private schools and gradually expanded. Member schools pay fees to GOA, and their students can take GOA courses together with students from other member schools. The courses are regarded the same as the courses taught in the students’ home schools. Teachers from member schools receive professional development to teach online and are encouraged to offer courses via the GOA.

Establishing the GOA is a remarkable achievement for the founding elite and prestigious schools. The fact that they allow their students to take courses from other schools and share their own staff with others globally is a recent development enabled by digital technology. If this model were to spread across the educational world, what would it mean? It would mean that schools anywhere could share resources and staff with each other, that students can participate virtually with students from schools around the world. Teachers in any network school can teach students in any other network school in the world. Students would have access to a variety of courses and teachers. International networks also create the potential for students to collaborate on projects with peers from other countries.

Higher education has created similar consortia (Pros, 2017). The Five College Consortium, dating back to 1965, allows students to take courses for credit at any of the campuses. More recently, in response to the pandemic, seven of the Big Ten universities agreed to allow students to take online courses at any of the partner universities and receive credits at their home institution (Big Ten Alliance, 2021). This illustrates that a sense of crisis can override long-standing policies regulating the award of course credit. We are arguing that education is in crisis—pandemic or no pandemic.

Another possibility emerged from the pandemic. Families, desperate to continue their children's education amidst the chaos of schools opening and closing, devised “learning pods” (Calarco, 2020). Through various social media, groups of concerned parents connected and arranged to hire a teacher who would teach their children. The parents may not even live in the same school district, much less send their children to the same schools. These arrangements that seem to accommodate eight or fewer students are like those that homeschooling families organize for their children. In the case of learning pods, they are much more common in affluent areas where families have the means to support their share of a teacher's salary. Some families may choose to continue supporting these pods even after schools fully reopen. Whether or not enough families would or could support enough of these arrangements to disrupt schools is not clear.

Yet a third possibility is that schools could evolve into collections of learning communities either run in cooperation with teachers or fully student-managed. Such learning communities, organized around students’ interests and needs, could network with other student learning communities locally, nationally, and globally. The central idea is that students take charge in creating and managing these communities. Online platforms like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Discord, and Skype obviate the need for a physical school.

Networked schools have shown promise in addressing inequities. Kinlaw et al. (2020) studied the effects of the Gates Foundation-funded Networks for School Improvement (NSI) and found that they showed “considerable potential to help schools and districts dismantle barriers to opportunity for marginalized students.” Moreover, the most effective NSIs were those in which teachers used greater independence to strengthen their problem-solving approaches to teaching. Notably, Gates backed off from its prior strategy of dictating that project districts and schools adopt the Foundation's prescribed approaches. Rather, the educators in the NSI schools could develop their own strategies and approaches.

Rethinking schools could also include school size. Micro-schools could offer more personal experiences for many educators, students, and families than the large comprehensive schools that have resulted from consolidation policies over the past seventy years. Smaller schools need less space and facilitate more personalized learning opportunities. In the 1960s and 1970s, storefront schools sprang up in U.S. cities across the country in communities that wished to offer their children more relevant, personal, and engaging learning opportunities than those available in the large local public schools (McLaughlin, 2014). University students in Karachi, Pakistan, have been organizing street schools to teach children in the poorest neighborhoods for decades (Baloch, 2008). Storefront and street schools also, figuratively, knocked down the walls and capitalized on the rich learning opportunities their cities offered. Local businesses, experts, and elders joined the storefront and street teachers, thereby creating a faculty representing highly diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and skills.

The “school-within-a-school” (SWS) concept has been around at least since the 1950s when school leaders divided Newton High School in Newton, Massachusetts, into four “houses” (Lee & Ready, 2007). We know that all students but especially marginalized students and those in under-resourced schools benefit from higher levels of interaction with their teachers. Breaking down schools and classrooms into smaller groups appears to be an approach that fits with existing school systems. As the Gates’ Small School Project showed, however, system dynamics and prevailing school cultures and structures can undermine efforts to create smaller learning communities. Tinkering with existing school arrangements is not sufficient to change the social relations and learning opportunities.

Rethinking assessment

The well-worn adage that “teachers teach what is tested” is a primary motivation for rethinking assessment. At the same time, trustworthy evidence of the effects of instruction is essential as a basis for educators to improve opportunities to learn for students. The question is: What forms of assessments will afford students, educators, and policymakers the most reliable and actionable feedback to inform improvement?

Different forms of assessments serve different purposes. To support new curriculum content, learning opportunities, and learning community configurations requires rethinking all our assessments. Most critically, we need to rethink large-scale standardized assessments whose primary effect seems to have been increasing pressure on schools and educators, not improving student learning. These assessments include international assessments such as PISA (Program for Intentional Student Assessment) and national, provincial, or state accountability assessments.

Assessments do provide data for essential research purposes. Their usefulness as a means to judge the quality of teaching or student learning is not only far less clear, but it also may have negative consequences. The idea that students and educators be evaluated based on one body of knowledge and skills or on one type of assessment seems patently unfair and misleading. Unfair because the results lack context. We do not know the “dosage” students have received for any given item or sets of items. The PISA, for instance, tests 15-year-olds around the world. But do all 15-year-olds receive the same level of instruction on the mathematical items that the psychometricians at OECD choose to include? Involving practicing educators in selecting the content to be tested seems a helpful step, but those educators who are consulted represent a small, non-random sample of the teachers worldwide whose students are tested.

In addition, the data can be misleading as a country's general mathematics or reading scores obscure variability. When scores are broken down geographically, significant disparities appear, school-to-school, district-to-district, region-to-region, state/province-to-state/province. However, policymakers tend to focus on the aggregate scores and the comparative rankings. Rather than rethinking policies, authorities are tempted to game the system. After China fell in rankings on the 2012 PISA because three other provinces were added to the original Shanghai-only sample, authorities substituted a wealthier province with a strong educational system, Zhejiang, for a less-wealthy province with a weaker education system serving millions of migrant families, Guangdong. Voilà! China resumed its place atop the PISA scorecard in 2015.

More trustworthy and informative data are provided by “authentic assessments.” Such assessments are tied directly to the learning opportunities students experience. Moreover, if appropriate for the content, authentic assessments measure students’ ability to apply their learning to real-world problems. To authentically assess learning from collaborative problem-solving projects requires, from the outset, identification of the evidence of success as well as criteria applied to the evidence. In this way, students can assess their own learning based on the outcomes of the project.

Authentic assessments are similarly valuable as students pursue their personalized learning plans. In developing their plans, students benefit from figuring out their own markers of success as well as bench-markers that inform the students, teachers, and families of their progress along the way.

If students are to develop 21st-Century Skills, assessment programs need to capture development of these recommended skills and dispositions as well as the conventional curriculum content. This is a challenge for educators. How do we best assess students’ creativity, critical thinking, collaborative and communication skills as well as their self-awareness, ethics, and civic engagement? Conventional assessments seem like dull tools for such a job. On the 2018 PISA, the OECD experimented with online simulations to measure students’ collaborative skills. Such an approach seems promising.

Similarly, the Measuring and Improving Student-Centered Learning Tool Kit (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009) generates valuable data for educators and schools intent on creating learning opportunities that afford students greater latitude to explore and pursue their interests.

The most trustworthy approach, however, might be to train teachers to use observational protocols designed to collect information on students’ interactions and classroom behaviors. Early childhood educators have long been trained to observe and document the social skills and dispositions of their charges. Yet, although social–emotional learning (SEL) program evaluation tools exist, educators lack instruments necessary to gauge their success in helping students develop non-cognitive and social and emotional skills (Grant et al., 2017). Lacking reliable tools for measuring the impact of their efforts to help students develop 21st-Century Skills and dispositions, most teachers will continue to focus on the knowledge and skills measured on conventional standardized tests. What is tested will continue to be what is taught.

Summary

A sense of urgency motivated us to write this article. Our concern is that educational systems have been slow to seize the opportunity created by the pandemic to rethink the how, where, when, and what of schooling and learning. A future best characterized as uncertain and unpredictable requires knowledge, skills, and dispositions that have not found their way into schools that are still in the grip of neoliberal policies that feature accountability, high-stakes testing, marketization, and standardization.

Organizations such OECD recognize that, as current jobs disappear and new jobs appear in a rapidly evolving global economy and as leisure time increases, people who thrive in this new world will need skills such as creativity, critical thinking, teamwork, inquiry, communication, logical and ethical reasoning, and mental and social flexibility. Although essential, these are not enough. Those who thrive in the future will also value diverse ideas, perspectives, and voices and view new information and ideas critically, aware of their strengths and weaknesses, open to criticism and rethinking, and prepared to continue learning and relearning.

Helping all students develop these skills and dispositions is a challenge and a different mission for educational systems. Instilling knowledge of the traditional subject matters, work habits valued by businesses, and uncritical allegiance to their communities and the nation-state is a mission suited to an industrial world. The emerging new world would seem to require a rethinking of this mission. This is a world in which machines are replacing most humans in manual and routine jobs, many current enterprises are dying as unforeseen enterprises are appearing, organizations are growing flatter and decision-making more distributed and team-based, collaboration and co-creation across national boundaries are increasingly the norm, technology-based opportunities for innovation and creativity abound, access to information (and misinformation) continues to grow, and information itself is expanding as artificial intelligence (AI) enables us to extract new knowledge, insights, and solutions.

As we have argued, to manage and capitalize on these dramatic changes requires a rethinking of all aspects of educational systems—curriculum, pedagogy, opportunities to learn, assessments, the roles of teachers and students, school organization and governance, and educational policies.

Also needed is a rethinking of how to bring about these changes. Greater engagement of frontline educators, communities, and students is necessary but not sufficient. Innovations and changes are at the mercy of policymakers who control the flow of resources and who establish and maintain policies and regulations. Outside groups can pressure policymakers to support or reject proposals for needed changes, and foundations and corporations can supply resources to challenge the government's grip on the educational system.

We are mindful that none of what we are suggesting, most of which others have advocated before us, will be easy to pull off. If it were, many of the changes would have happened already. We are also mindful of H. L. Mencken's warning that for every complex problem, there are solutions that are clear, simple—and wrong (Mencken, 1920). If, however, we are to profoundly rethink how well we are preparing our students for the future, we need to begin conversations that include all the actors in the system, anticipating that disagreement is inherent to the process. Provoking conversation that engages the various actors in and outside the system is our goal.

We are in a very interesting and challenging time. This is the time to make big changes. The saying, “Never waste a crisis” comes to mind. Changes can take place in what students should learn, how they should learn, from whom they should learn, and where learning should take place. Schools and teachers will need support in making needed changes. And, of course, assessment needs to change as well. The bottom-line message is that schooling can no longer continue as it has been. As the late Sir Ken Robinson urged in a 2010 TED Talk: “Reform is no use anymore because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need—and the word's been used many times in the past few days—is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else” (Robinson, 2010).

Questions for discussion

Here are some questions we believe our article raises. We offer these in the hope of seeding conversations.

How do we convince policymakers, educators, and families across the globe that the education currently available to students is unlikely to prepare them for a future that is replete with uncertainty, evolving technologically at an accelerating pace, and facing existential threats such as climate change and growing wealth disparities?

What are the non-cognitive skills and dispositions students will need to succeed in a rapidly changing world of work where many of the jobs of the future have yet to be created? How do we help them to work productively with current and future technologies?

How do we help students identify their strengths, interests, and talents and tailor learning opportunities to help them develop these? How do we help them live fulfilling and contributive lives in an uncertain future?

How do we take advantage of the Internet and other technologies to make available to students everywhere opportunities to collaborate with peers around the world; to learn from experts wherever they may be; and become the innovators, entrepreneurs, and creatives we believe they can be?

Similarly, how do we use these technologies to free educators to assume roles as guides, co-creators, critical friends, and resources?