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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
[1] Toffler, A. (1991) Powershift:
Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century",
Bantam Books.
[2] Naisbitt, J. (1984) Megatrends: Ten New Directions
Transforming our Lives, Warner Books,
[3] Some recent evaluations of the impact of computers in
education still measure "success" in terms of the number of computers
per classroom, in spite of the accelerated obsolescence of those machines and
of their decreasing relevance for the learning activities!
[4] Hall, E. T. (1976) Beyond Culture, Anchor
Press/Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
[5] Hall, E. T. (1976), ibid.