The things we've learnt are no longer enough

The title of this post comes from the lyrics of the Joy Division track Transmission. It was played during the introduction of the 2015 ALT-C Conference in Manchester. The quote was used in the opening session because a) Joy Division were from Manchester, b) it's an iconic post-punk track and c) it's a challenge for education today.

It led me to the question - what are we actually teaching our children today? We teach quite a lot of knowledge in our classrooms, and we also teach skills. Thinking and doing are central to the curriculum. Is this knowledge (and are these skills) up to date? More importantly, are the knowledge and skills we teach future proofed? Teachers are in an invidious position, trying to educate children when we don't know what the future will be for them. And before someone says 'It's always been thus..' I would like to point out that the current labour market has never been so volatile, prone to change and disrupted by technology as it is right now.

There is a lot of discussion about the future of work. Some would claim that many of the jobs that will be available for children when they leave school in 10 years do not exist yet. Whether this is true remains to be seen, but one thing we can be certain of is that future jobs will be highly dependent of new technologies, and many future jobs will contribute toward the advance of new technologies.



So what are we teaching the children in our schools? Are we preparing them for a future replete with technology and change? If so, what are the transferable skills they need to learn? They will need to be literate in a era of major technological advances, the digital age. My list may be different to yours, but think about these: problem solving, team working and collaboration, designing and making, decision making, leadership, logical (algorithmic?) thinking, research and discovery, and of course communication skills. I believe that transliteracy - the ability to communicate across multiple platforms and media will be one of the most important. I also believe that learning to learn (or metalearning) will be a key skill for all this century. I sincerely hope that children who leave our schools in the next decade have learnt enough to survive and thrive in a future that is uncertain. They will, if we ensure the skills they develop are adaptable to any circumstance.

Photo by Wesley Fryer on Speed of Creativity


The things we've learnt are no longer enough by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.