What are the Big Challenges of Education for the XXI Century: Proposals for Action

By A. Dias de Figueiredo
Department of Informatics Engineering
University of Coimbra, Portugal

Invited contribution for the preparation of the White Book on Education and Training for the XXI Century, Eurydice, The Education Information Network in the European Unit, July 1995

This report describes what are believed to be the key challenges of education for the XXI century and puts forward a number of proposals for action. A major challenge seems to lie in the growing disjunction between learning and schooling. While, in the past, schools were almost exclusively the appropriate places for learning, the emergence of learning societies is shifting much of the emphasis from the schools to the home and to society at large. The alternative offers of learning occur in very unstructured and confusing ways, however. Those facts, together with the lack of human references experienced in highly technological societies suggest that a new role needs to be reinvented for schools. In spite of some existing enthusiasm to the contrary, we claim the convenience of having schools that are more human rather than more technological. With this in mind, and taking into account the loss of references caused by present day information overload, we suggest that the technology push of the last decade should give way to a strong movement towards permanently renewed, and openly discussed, curriculum development. Although more human centred than technology driven, the school of the 21st century obviously needs to embrace the progress of technology, and is faced, in this domain, with the challenge of virtual communities. This challenge is discussed, and the suggestion is made that, as in most endeavours of technology that have critical social impacts, the big issues are not to be found at the level of technology, but rather at the level of the minds and of the ways in which institutions operate. A final challenge is identified in the need of accreditation systems capable of attaching the right social value to the increasing population of citizens of all ages whose professional profile results from competencies acquired in the most varied ways.

Learning societies versus schools

The age of schooling hardly existed much before the 19th century. Our school system was originally created to respond to the requests of mass education expressed by the emerging Industrial Society and to keep children protected from the reality of the economic system - the factories - where they were forced to provide unending hours of cheap labour.

In the advent of the 21st century none of these assumptions is valid any more. As the various countries switch from industrial to knowledge-based economies, the needs of the economy are much less for mass educated labour than they are for innovative knowledge workers. Also, there is no more need to isolate children from society and close them up in aseptic schools - just the contrary: we want them to be able to establish the construction of their knowledge as a fully integrated social activity.

The dominant information technology in the schools of the past industrial societies was the printed book. As the textbooks of two centuries ago shaped the education of their time, the information technologies of the present - computers, communications, and information management - are shaping the education of the present and the future.

All these are platitudes that almost no one would deny any longer. Indeed, everyone seems to agree, today, that we must adapt the schooling and learning of our times to the strengths of the new information technologies. However, the real impact of this change goes much further than anyone might expect. The major challenge results from the very fact that learning cannot, anymore, be equated with schooling. Learning, as provided in schools, is just a part - and an increasingly small part - of the learning we can get in society. An increasing variety of mechanisms for formal and informal social interaction across networks, plus interactive television and video, together with books and magazines integrated in a broad mesh of opportunities for self education, are becoming powerful sources of learning . . . outside the school.

Learning can now be obtained in varied forms, all throughout the working lifetime of our citizens, and most of this can only take place outside the schooling system. On the other hand, the requirements of economic life are constantly changing, so that the private offer of learning opportunities is becoming widespread. People can now pick up a short course here, another short course there, and, above all, they can learn by themselves, whenever they want, provided they are given the appropriate access to learning contexts and help.

This is why learning cannot, any more, be equated with just schooling, and why the key issue of education has become the much broader one of supporting the lifelong learners of a society of ever changing knowledge. We have entered the age of the learning societies.

This challenge leads to a number of other challenges. On one hand, we witness the sudden exposure of the school system to fierce competition from powerful technology based operators. On the other hand, we notice that this competition comes forth in a severely unstructured manner, plunging the learner into a most confusing and unfamiliar market. Additionally, we notice that the coldness of high tech societies desperately calls for human warmth and for the reinforcement of human values, pointing to the school as the right place to find them. All those challenges suggest that a new role must be reinvented for schools.

Reinventing a new role for the schools

As stated before, people are requiring many channels of learning and a high-choice system. They also require increased interactivity, mobility, convertibility, connectivity, ubiquity, and globalisation[1]. Traditional schools are badly equipped to face those challenges. The shift from the standardisation of the schools to the individualisation of free choice, namely across computer networks, is removing the emphasis from the schools, and putting it, increasingly, on the home.

Also, consumers are reacting more and more favourably to the output of the cultural industries. The big entertainment industries (Hollywood, Disney, Paramount, Viacom, Time Warner), originally exclusively dedicated to the movies, and later reconverted to cover the video and video games markets as well, are now establishing partnerships with communications operators and pouring more and more money into interactivity across the information highways. They are addressing the mass market of the individual consumers, incommensurably more attractive than the tiny market of the schools, and they are becoming more and more interested in the education of those individual consumers ... outside the school.

Two basic questions become important, in this respect:

can schools compete on the technological ground?
should schools attempt to compete on the technological ground?

Our answer to both questions is, categorically, NO! Schools cannot compete on the technological ground, first of all, for economic reasons: they will never be able to afford keeping up with the fast pace of renewal of technology. In fact, the home market is already incomparably more active than the school market, and it is not uncommon to have children complaining because the computer or software package they are using in school is outdated compared with the one they have at home. Also, the massive training of teachers for the use of information technologies in the classroom is proving to be a dead end. In spite of considerable amounts of money put in training teachers for the use of information technologies in education, the fast pace of renewal of technology has quickly made most of those efforts obsolete. Teachers are learning to use information technologies just like all the other citizens, and in this respect they will never be able to stay ahead of most of their students.

An additional reason why schools cannot compete on the technological ground is that the models of education practised in schools cannot be adapted to the transverse nature of information technologies. The compartmentalisation of knowledge, the presentation of subjects without reference to context, and even the common national curricula are strong obstacles to the natural use of information technologies in schools. A corollary of this fact is that schools will keep representing a rather small and uninteresting market for the cultural industries. As a result, those industries will keep directing their explosive offer towards the home market, much in detriment of the weight of the schools in shaping the knowledge of the citizens of the future.

The other question is whether schools should attempt or not to compete on the technological ground. In other words, should schools try to massively follow - with increasing lag - the development of new technologies and the increasing variety of technological offer? If not, should schools recognise their inability to compete in such a world, accept their increasing alienation from reality, and revert to an almost passive role?

Our answer to both questions is, emphatically, NO. Schools should not attempt to massively compete on the technological ground - because, as we said before, they cannot! - but they should not accept taking a minor role in the education of the future generations. Just on the contrary! We believe that the school systems are becoming even more essential than before for the progress and well being of societies, and that they may be facing, in this respect, their biggest challenge ever!

John Naisbitt pointed out that one of the major trends of our age is that "high tech calls for high touch"[2]. In other words, the more a society becomes technology based, the more it requires a compensatory human response. In support of this view, we claim that the school should become the key place of society for the professional provision of compensatory human responses.

In our view, the school of success in this new environment will not be crammed with high technology. It will not be overflowing with computers and networks in the spirit of the claims of ten years ago that the school of the future would have a computer for each child[3]. It will certainly need to have permanently updated technology and network access at the level of its resource centres - and we will be discussing this later in this report - but the distinctive character of the school of the 21st century will be its eminently human component and its role as a vehicle of culture. Culture, understood as a unifying force that reconciles people with technology, simplicity with complexity, unity with multiplicity, and the individual with the collective, leading to the balanced development of both the ego and the alter, the sensus and the consensus.

This requires a radical shift from content to context, leading to a major challenge in the arena of curriculum development.

The core issue of curriculum development

As learning becomes more and more a process of exposure to an unstructured multitude of learning opportunities, this multiple exposure tends to become the source of cognitive overload and anxiety, if not of serious loss of references or total confusion. As stated by Edward Hall[4], one of the functions of culture is to provide a highly selective screen between man and the outside world. It is this screening function that provides structure to the world and protects people from information overload. As pointed out by the same author, the solution to the problem of coping with increasing complexity and greater cognitive demands lies in the contexting process afforded by culture. Compartmentalising makes it possible to concentrate on one thing at a time, but also denies context. In the ocean of information overload, what one pays attention to is context, and, to a large extent, it is context that carries the meaning[5].

The major concern of present day schools has been to compartmentalise knowledge rather than to provide context to a world of diversity of offer where people are flooded in information but starving for knowledge. The reconciliation between content and context requires curriculum development to become the key mobilising project for both teachers and educational authorities. The major concern is not, anymore, the one of preparing teachers and the school system for the use of information technologies in the various subject matters. It becomes that of maintaining a permanent - and cross-disciplinary - reflection about the ways in which education can meet the challenges of the Information Age. This imposes the dynamic identification of the fundamental subjects and the creation of contexts where students can learn how to make sense and give structure to the complexity of the world that surrounds them.

Curriculum development becomes, in this way, the central issue of schooling in the 21st century. It certainly includes an effort to find out how to integrate information technologies in education, but this becomes just one aspect in a gigantic agenda for action that touches deeply the changing aims and ends of education in its relationship with society and technology. In this complex agenda, the affective dimension of schooling must be carefully stressed, to provide the compensatory human response imposed by survival in a highly technological society. On the other hand, the cultural function of contexting must be closely studied, so as to help teachers develop in children the knowledge, attitudes and values that let them make sense out of unprecedented complexity and enable them to create the frameworks where knowledge from external sources can be built and structured.

The shape of teacher training will have to be significantly influenced by this approach. It must not be, as it often is, the "delivery" of speeches to relatively passive audiences. It must take the form of project work that fully engages the activity and creativity of the teachers. Also, it should not be given to teachers that are not deeply interested in receiving it. For this reason, it should be offered within the motivational impulse of large mobilising projects. A possible sequence of steps to attract teachers to deep engagement in curriculum development projects might be: first, to make known to them the existence of new problems and solutions; second, to prepare and make available materials that create further awareness of those problems and solutions; third, to engage interested teachers in action/research projects concerning those problems and solutions; fourth, to professionally reward their efforts and achievements.

The challenge of virtual communities

At this very moment, the academic communities of the developed world are all wired up to the Internet, the major research and education network, which has now more than thirty million users and is said to be growing at the explosive rate of one million new users per month. Millions of people are now moving their offices and their places of leisure to this cyberspace, where geographic distances and physical borders do not exist.

We may interpret cyberspace as the virtual space of interaction, the network of networks where all people can meet and interact with each other and where they can have access to all sorts of information repositories. But the distinctive feature of this virtual space is not its incredible power as a virtual storage media. It is its nature as a platform where people can really DO things: they can discuss and collaborate with other people, they can exchange all sorts of files, and, above all, they can build up knowledge, together, in a cumulative process of mutual help and shared perception of problems and needs.

If we recall that people learn to do things better by doing them, rather than by reading about them or by being told how they can be done, and if we remember that learning is the effective creation of knowledge through personal effort - and, most often, through genuine social interaction - we can easily understand the importance of networks in the learning process. By offering varied forms of social interaction, communications networks make possible the discourse of conjectures and refutations that leads to genuine knowledge building and ownership. In many cases, they can bring into the classroom the dimension of multicultural social interaction that it misses, including the linking between academic reality and the world of work, as well as the exchange of experience between people in different regions and in different countries. On the other hand, by letting children explore - in various learning contexts, as well as in their leisure time - the multiple facets of network access and navigation, they offer an excellent workbench for children to become familiar with the current transfer of professional activities from physical space to cyberspace.

Not only children will gain by interacting in cyberspace. Teachers will also have much to gain from the ability, afforded by networks, to let them interact very easily with their peers and with the world of work. This will let them share and build together lesson ideas and examples of good practice and will enable them to import from the world of work meaningful case studies to be explored in their classes and projects. It will also offer them, very easily, a wide range of contacts, projects, partners, addresses, resources, pilot demonstrations, and database access points, plus the exposure to the international dimension. Besides, the interaction across networks provides an excellent platform for the permanent debate on curriculum development that has been recommended elsewhere in this report. The launching of mobilising projects may take place nationally across networks, and those networks can easily support the dissemination of materials, the discussion, and even many of the action/research activities that make up each project.

Apart from children and teachers, the schools, themselves, have much to gain from their full access to communications networks. Each school can create its private virtual environment (the so called "pages" in World Wide Web jargon), and make it accessible both internally and externally. Within this private environment, teachers and pupils can also create their own virtual environments (or "pages"), where they share with others their intellectual interests and their affections. Public spaces can be "visited" by students, teachers, parents, enterprises, old students, prospective students, the media, and the community at large, thus reinforcing the integration of the school in its surrounding community.

From the technical and financial points of view, this challenge might look as the easiest one to meet, since the installation of a server and a few terminals in the resource centre of the school is relatively accessible and the cost of communications can be kept down with some measure of discipline. However, as Heidegger once wrote, "the essence of technology has little to do with technology". The major problems are in the minds of the people and in the ways the institutions operate. What is offered to us as an innovation is often no more than an old paradigm dressed up with some new technology. Innovative network access calls for entirely new ways of thinking and of working, it leads to new languages, new forms of expression and new intellectual tools. It depends on the ability to reconfigure and reinforce new intelligent collectives. This is, indeed, where the big challenge resides, and it calls for attentive discussion and experimentation.

The challenge of accreditation

The qualifications currently offered by schools are recognised by the State according to criteria that employers still tend to trust. The same applies to qualifications obtained through many private providers of education, including some distance learning operators.

However, as the variety of sources of learning offered outside the school system increases, each person becomes a mosaic of "knowledges" and abilities acquired in different ways, including self exposure to informal learning opportunities across computer networks. How can this person prove to employers that he/she reliably holds the right mix of "knowledges" and abilities? How can employers, and society at large, take full advantage of this diversity of offer?

Although it may sound quite unimportant at present, this issue may lay close to the very heart of the problem of unemployment in the 21st century. Unemployment is, technically, a mismatch between supply and demand of human resources. If supply is established on the basis of a rigid taxonomy of competencies, demand looses visibility of supply, and unemployment is likely to result, even when supply and demand exist. It happens quite often that the right person is available for the right job, and none of the parts knows it - the person remains unemployed, and the job is taken by a less appropriate candidate. A young person who is keen on water sports, masters a foreign language, has a friendly mood, and is capable of maintaining interaction in a few newsgroups on the Internet may have been ruled out as a complete school failure, and yet may be an invaluable employee for a holidays operator. The difference between marginality and success may, thus, be quite dim, and society should be able to recognise it.

In this context, a radically different official accreditation system is needed. In fact, it may make the whole difference between a society of frustration and a society of success. The existing rigid forms of accreditation, almost exclusively based on school performance, are, above all, insufficient, because they only cover (an increasingly smaller) part of the competencies of an individual. Yet, they may also be coarse, insensitive, unprofessional and inhuman. Coarse, because they label an individual has a whole, while being unable to highlight any of his/her partial competencies. Insensitive, because they cannot be used easily to evaluate the adequacy of an individual to a job. Unprofessional, because teachers are often unable to overcome the contradictions between teaching and evaluating. Inhuman, because the evaluation is often based on mass criteria that do not respect the individual differences.

A finer, more sensitive, more professional, and more human official accreditation system is needed. This may lead to the creation of a new profession - the profession of certificator - together with the identification of a dynamic mesh of competencies and abilities in a broad range of professional areas.

Conclusions

A number of challenges facing European education in the XXI century have been identified in the above report and some proposals for action have been advanced. Although, for facility of analysis, those challenges have been discriminated under a few different headings, it is clearly impossible to isolate them from one another. The emergence of learning societies, to pick just one example, has been discussed in the context of their opposition to schools, but, as shown later in the report, they do complement each other, and the existence of the former does, in reality, impose the strengthening of a few dimensions of the latter. Although not so clear, the challenge of curriculum development and the recommended shift from content to context are also closely related - by reasons of both cause and consequence - with the emergence of learning societies. The challenge of virtual communities, as presented in the report, may sound as an issue that concerns mainly the schools, but this is certainly not true. In fact, we may notice that virtual communities do integrate both the schools and the learning societies, gathering them into a collective intelligence that presents no noticeable fractures. Finally, the issue of accreditation, although not directly linked with the learning societies, is an obvious consequence of their existence. This kind of transverse analysis of the report, which has been carried out here from the point of view of the learning societies, should be understood as a way of stressing that the challenges identified are so closely related that facing one may mean facing some of the others simultaneously.