Education in a changing world

No one denies technology is changing the world. NSW government’s ‘Education for a Changing World Symposium’ held last week tackled many important topics relating to education and technology. It’s certainly valuable to discuss how future teaching and learning should occur.

However, this kind of discussion tends to quickly devolve into vacuous bromides, apparently attempting to break the world record for the longest litany of mostly meaningless platitudes.

Apparently we must urgently “reconceive schooling.” With Australia’s declining literacy and numeracy results in international tests, it probably isn’t ideal to be focussing on well-intentioned but nebulous goals — given we’re not even doing the fundamentals as well as we should.

The cliché “preparing kids for jobs of the future which don’t exist yet” is repeated ad nauseam, an understandable response to concerns about technology replacing humans. However, a recent research report by my colleague Simon Cowan argued the extent to which jobs are at risk from technological advances is exaggerated; it is estimated that less than 10% of jobs fall in this category rather than the often-quoted 47%.

There is also a growing push for more use of technology in schools. But as my latest research shows, more technology doesn’t necessarily lead to better student outcomes. Australia already uses classroom technology significantly more than the OECD average and all the top-performing countries on international tests. There simply isn’t sufficient evidence to support further significant investments in this area. Technology can boost student achievement in some circumstances, so the focus should be on using it better rather than using it more.

In any case, unlike the fundamental competencies of literacy and numeracy, learning with and about new technologies can quickly become obsolete, due to the rapid nature of technological progress.

A wise old teacher once told me a great irony of education: if you teach kids the ‘latest’ thing, it will probably be the first thing you’ve taught them that becomes out of date.