Future of Education
The Program for the
International Assessment of Adult Competencies, the adult counterpart, is
partly owing to its analytic and assessment frameworks, which prioritice
real-world competency in applying and employing cognitive skills. The idea that
learning should be relevant to job, social participation, and real life has
been supported by work on adult learning across the life course.
Competency-based education
has proven to be a significant adjustment to an educational paradigm dominated
on subject-matter knowledge reproduction. At the same time, neuroscientific
learning research shows that competencies are formed on a solid foundation of
information. Smart memorization and retrieval practize have been found to be
extremely effective in promoting subject mastery. Finding the correct balance
between topic knowledge and the critical thinking skills that underpin and frame
disciplines will continue to be a difficult task for educators. There is a lot
to be gained from sharing curriculum design and implementation experiences on
an international level.
Assessments of learning
outcomes have been expanded and reinforced in recent years to include other
important domains of learning in addition to proficiency in core academic
domains. The first international evaluation of social skills, measured as
collaborative problem-solving, was released in 2015. The idea that social and emotional
learning is equally important as cognitive domain development is gaining
popularity, thanks in part to pioneering studies on this area. The findings of
the Survey of Social and Emotional Skills give the first international
comparison data on social and emotional learning. It's an example of
cutting-edge multinational cooperation in a hotly debated field.
Families, communities,
peer networks, and, for good reason, schools all share responsibility for the
development of social and emotional abilities. In certain systems, the
harmonious development of a person's character is regarded as an important goal
of public education, while in others, the role of public schools in this arena
is still debated. However, schools will not be able to accomplish this on their
own. The interplay between multiple sites and spaces of learning is even more
important than cognitive skills in the development of social skills.
After-school activities, athletics, community involvement, volunteering, and
other experiences interact with what families and schools "teach"
children and young adults.
The epidemic will be a
watershed event in the advancement of the social and emotional learning agenda.
Students with well-developed resilience, tenacity, achievement motivation, and
self-control had a noticeable edge when schools had to drastically shift their
ways of working. Citizens' empathy, trust, and accountability were required in
societies' reactions to the crisis. Although more research is needed to
determine what made some countries more effective than others in managing and
containing the virus, individuals' behavioral responses, driven by their
optimism, trust, and resilience, may well be crucial variables. Working with
countries to solve these and other difficulties in the realm of social and
emotional development will be critical.
For the near and mid-term
future, this is an important and crucial area of endeavor. However, knowledge,
talents, and character do not include the entire scope of human learning.
Ethical development, which involves the integration of values and moral norms,
is also an important aspect of learning. Despite the fact that some countries
have given values a prominent place in curriculum design, our understanding of
human learning – and how formal and informal learning contexts influence it –
is still mostly uncharted ground. There is a cognitive component to values.
For example, caring about
climate change and having a sense of urgency to take personal action
necessitates a thorough understanding of environmental science, especially
because the dramatic repercussions of climate change are still decades away.
Beyond climate change and pandemics, however, social cohesiveness and global
collaboration will necessitate human capabilities to reconcile personal and
social goals, as well as immediate and long-term costs and benefits. How
cognitive and non-cognitive building blocks coalesce in the formation of
powerful and long-lasting ethical beliefs and standards is an issue that needs
to be investigated further.
Empathy, trust in others,
accountability, and tolerance are just a few of the social and emotional
abilities that form the foundation of values. The relationship between the
social and emotional components of how young people understand and value other
cultures, and learn how to engage in fruitful intercultural discussion, was
demonstrated in PISA's evaluation of global competency in 2018. Artificial
intelligence (AI) also raises basic questions regarding education's purpose. AI
is driving us to rethink what it means to be human when it comes to learning
and development. Understanding the complementarities between machine and human
capabilities will have enormous implications for selecting what learners should
learn.
What are the fields of
human activity that smart computers and algorithms will not or should not take
on? Which areas will remain "human" when many productive skills are
supplanted by computers? What about ordinary ethical decision-making, judges'
legal judgements, a medical doctor's diagnosis based on limited and sometimes
contradictory facts, or an artist's aesthetic eye? In an AI-driven society, how
should we rethink what pupils learn so that they can flourish? Will artificial
intelligence finally give educators the opportunity to focus on what makes
people truly human?
The OECD can keep track
of, analyze, and predict this trend, as well as present a picture of how human
learning will continue to be crucial for future growth, prosperity, social
progress, and general quality of life. AI will significantly alter the manner,
channels, and processes through which we learn at the same time. To enable more
personalized and individual learning at scale, we need use the power of AI, big
data, and learning analytics. Digital technology and artificial intelligence
(AI) have the potential to revolutionize education and dramatically improve its
productivity. Learning ultimately leads to behavioral change, and it is at
this point that learning becomes socially meaningful – when information,
skills, character, attitudes, and values are mobilized in real-world
situations.
This is not a naturally
occurring process. We witness persons with highly developed cognitive and
non-cognitive abilities behaving differently than we might expect in regular
life. The problem of cognitive dissonance, for example, is widely known, but
there are several additional examples of people failing to convert what they
learn internally into behavioral change when confronted with real-life
challenges. We cannot just compare comparative strengths in cognitive,
social-emotional, or ethical abilities if we want to advise countries on how
education in its various aspects might contribute to tackling today's and
tomorrow's difficulties. We need to figure out how education can bring these
disparate elements together to effect real behavioral change.
This is what agency is all
about, and why agency and co-agency are such important concepts in today's
educational landscape. Climate change may necessitate large-scale behavioral
change and people's readiness to strike a different balance between current
needs and the planet's future well-being in the medium and long term. The
foundations for this can be laid by education.
Make the concept of
lifelong learning the guiding principle. In an age when the amount of
information available grows at an exponential rate, certain information becomes
fast obsolete. And, when the need for skills shifts, the notion that what one
learns in school can be applied for the rest of one's life becomes a dangerous
fiction. Lifelong learning is not a new notion; it has been discussed in policy
circles for more than half a century, but it has been stuck in hyperbole with
little policy and practise implications. This must change, particularly in
light of the pressures that digitalization and artificial intelligence are
exerting on the nature of employment and what occurs in the workplace.
We already know that
digitalization facilitates skill development and encourages workers to improve
their skill sets. The pandemic, according to experts, will hasten the
reallocation of labor between economic sectors, with significant implications
for up- and reskilling. Because of the rising complexity of societies and our
daily lives, as well as the responsibilities of social involvement and
citizenship, the need to learn will grow. Language learning and digital skills
development are in high demand not only for job-related reasons, but also for a
variety of additional reasons ranging from tourism to civic integration. The
line between job-related learning and people's motivation to learn for social,
cultural, or personal reasons is dissolving in the context of lifelong
learning.
