More children will leave school in the next 30 years than have left school in its entire history
– Stephen Heppell
A great video on YouTube explores the increasingly urgent need to rethink education in a networked society:
[ba-youtubeflex videoid=”quYDkuD4dMU”]
But there is another question that also needs to be asked – what is the future definition of work, or the ‘job’? We are seeing people increasingly having far more education than available jobs require. That doesn’t make anybody happy.
I read an interesting (worrying) comment in a book recently
Great wealth is naturally persistent, generation-to-generation, as is deep poverty, but a middle-class status has not yet proven to be stable without [intervention]. – Jaron Lanier
In the current economic climate, the government mantra is that we need economies to begin growing again. But the underlying assumption is that growth creates jobs for everyone. It worked in the past, it may not work quite so well in the future. There are currently two critical trends emerging that have far-reaching consequences for job markets: freelancers and automation. Both are being created as a result of technological advances and neither help grow or sustain the middle class that is needed for a stable society.
The Internet has made it much much easier to connect freelancers with clients for work. But most of the work being bid for is of a task-specific nature. To do well as a freelancer, you either need to be really really good at doing something (either naturally and through years of toil with a portfolio to prove it or stay in education to Ph.D and beyond as the new short cut to get started), or you need to be really really cheap. There’s very little market for those in the middle.
Advances in automation and analytics are leading to machines performing more and more tasks better than humans. Not just through efficiency but through computation and analysis. A lot of manufacturing has been relocated to countries with the cheapest and largest quantities of human resources. If many of those roles get eliminated through automation, rising energy and transportation costs could lead to the factories being relocated again for different efficiencies. What happens to the hundreds of thousands of engineering students graduating annually from those countries?
These questions are not easily answered in a blog post and plenty of books are being published that explore both the optimistic and pessimistic outlook for technology advancement and population growth. But it is not just the education process that needs rethinking.
To close out where we started, the following video was uploaded to YouTube in October 2007 with a more near-term perspective
When I graduate I will probably get a job that doesn’t exist today
[ba-youtubeflex videoid=”dGCJ46vyR9o”]
References
- Who Owns The Future? by Jaron Lanier, published 2013 by Allen Lane
- Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, published 2013 by MIT Press
- The Future of Learning, Networked Society by Ericcson, 2012
- The Lights In The Tunnel by Mark Ford, self-published in 2009
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