Education

How will kids be educated twenty five years from now(2038)? While Aditi is still being educated in the traditional manner - going to a school with other kids of her age group and going through a prescribed curriculum, would her kids be educated in the same manner?

A number of trends which are starting off now seem to indicate otherwise. Technology is enabling us to receive and consume very personalized information which was not possible even five years ago. Today we are not constrained to consume news from standardized  sources like newspapers and TV, but can configure various gadgets online to read the news we are interested in. We have moved to an on-demand world where we can consume information which we are interested in, at the time we are interested in consuming it and to the level of detail we are interested in.

A similar trend has begun in the area of education too. If you look at Khan Academy, it provides an amazing set of tools to educate oneself and allows you to learn things at the pace you would like and to the depth you would like to learn. Imagine a world where your 5 year old can start taking courses on Calculus if her inclination and abilities are so tuned? Look at the trend of the increasing online courses being offered by universities? Imagine getting a masters degree in Engineering and becoming knowledgeable in Astronomy and Philosophy?

Would Aditi's kid enter a world where the traditional classroom is obsolete? Would every kid be able to learn maths at the pace at which they can? Would every kid be able to decide for herself whether or not she wants to learn about world war I or not? 

While this is an attractive thought on the surface - it brings up a whole range of new questions. Who figures out whether the kid is learning at the pace she can? The kid's parents? The kid herself? If it is the kid herself, how does she know the pace at which she can learn? How does she know what all she should learn? Would this trend place a tremendous responsibility on kids of having to make choices early in their lives and then live with the consequences for the rest of it?

When I was growing up and getting educated - my world was quite limited and predictable. There was a boundary around what I had to learn and as long as I learn that, life was good and wonderful and I had the sense of achievement. When such boundaries do not exist, how would a kid know how well he is doing? How does she measure herself and how does the world measure her on whether she can contribute?

That immediately leads to a related point. Is it important or even necessary to grade one individual's performance against her peer group? Are we looking at a future where such rankings/ratings at an individual level become meaningless? Referring to the same trend of growing individuality and diversity of knowledge, I am tempted to say that such ratings would become obsolete... however, I am struggling to envision what would replace this, for there still has to be some mechanism to pick specific individuals out of a group of people for a particular resource. 

The pace of change in the sciences has been going at a breath taking pace in the last few decades and we are getting closer to a world where we have easy access to all known information. What would get more and more challenging to Aditi would be on how to process this information - how to get knowledge from this petabytes of data and take intelligent decisions. The world has already gotten so complex that it is quite difficult for an individual to assimilate and process data to any reasonable degree in more than one field. This would just get more difficult down the years.

I believe that the objective of basic education is to arm a child with the required verbal, analytical and quantitative skills to pursue her interests which will allow her to contribute in a field of her choice. What is getting more challenging though, is that this base is continuously increasing for individuals to keep up.

Would Aditi be in a world where there are intelligent tools which will actually process the data and help in making decisions? We already have some of this today in the financial stock brokerage world... would that become pervasive? Would there be tools which will tell Aditi which school she needs to pick for her kid? Would a tool tell her which party/candidate to vote for to achieve a certain result? Would a tool tell her which car to buy and whether she should buy/lease a house given her personal circumstances? Would a tool help her decide whether she should put up with an incompatible boss or quit her job?

Where would Aditi's kid get her values from? One of the avowed objectives of education is to instill in children a set of values, an understanding of right and wrong. If we are looking towards a self educated world, how would this happen?

19Oct2013: Quite a few ted talks on education. Very good insights on how education is being re-looked at and some experiments being made in different schools in the US to personalize the education. I am sure that all this thinking will bring in a sea change in how we look at education a decade from now.