Education in the
future will be different from how it is now. There will not be school or
university classes or a campus. A technical guide will replace the traditional
teacher. The objective of learning will be to invent, not to test the students’
ability to memorize information. Students will teach each other. As in
medicine, where the drug is prescribed according to the condition of the patient,
learning will be prescribed according to the student’s readiness. Artificial
intelligence (AI) will enter information into the mind instead of the student
having to memorize it. The mind's absorptive capacity will compete with the
computer.
We will move
with science to where the Internet of things (IoT) will learn from objects and
teach students. There will not be printed books or tests to get certifications.
There will not even be ministries of education or government education
institutions. Knowledge will be available digitally. Educated humans will turn
into innovative, digital humans, and civil state will turn into innovative
state, where the citizens become knowledge workers and where continuous
learning will turn into continuous innovation.
To realize the
knowledge revolution, you may read my book The Brave Knowledge World and
adopt the way Talal Abu-Ghazaleh University College for Innovation (TAGUCI)
graduates inventors, where the student graduates after submitting an invention
rather than passing a test. This is because we are now living in two worlds,
the real and the virtual. The virtual world will eventually be the real world.
Take Finland as an example, where the country is leading the revolution of knowledge-based
education in the world (not America, Britain, nor China). A knowledge-based
education for a knowledge based society.
The Chairman of
Eton College says that students will teach themselves, each other, and
teachers, who will turn into technical assistants rather than teachers. The
President of Harvard University, Laurence Summers, says, “The knowledge
revolution will make the current education system collapse.” The President of
Stanford University, John Hennessey, says, “Education will face the digital
revolution tsunami. Siri will allow you to obtain information using voice. We
will witness the death of libraries. Robots, AI, bioinformatics, nanotechnology,
genetics, and other technologies will be the sciences of the future.”
Finland will not
teach writing as a prerequisite and will switch to scripts and smart boards. It
will also move from teaching subjects, such as Geography, Physics, etc., to phenomena-based
learning.
Education will
be achieved by learning and research and it will be available for all through
integrated, online schools around the world, such as the Connections Academy.
Internet will be available to everyone at high speeds. Half of education will
be research based and the other half will be vocational. There is also Sweden,
which is on its way to transfer all public education institutions to the
private sector. It will impose radical changes to the requirements of the
academic path in universities, where professional certificates will be included
in the requirements for graduation from universities and the calculation of
academic credit hours for them. This way, the students will graduate from the
university ready for the labor market, with an academic and professional
certificates specialized in the field of study. I am quoting H.E. Ahmed Aboul
Gheit, the Arab League Secretary General, “The Arab world has two options,
either to innovate or face extinction.”
Finally,
societies will be divided into knowledge-based and non-knowledge-based. Non
knowledge based societies will have:
1. Chalk and board.
2. A physical campus.
3. Students using desks.
4. The objective of education and
testing being memorization.
5. Educating students to graduate job
seekers.
6. Ministries governing education
institutions.
7. Unqualified teachers.
8. Repetitive, traditional curricula.
9. Lazy students.
10. Old PCs that use primitive, out dated
technologies.