Description

At its heart, this book is a call to action for schools and teachers to better prepare students for the modern world. The main focus is how and why we should change the paradigm of the entire education system to allow students to develop the skills, attitudes, and aptitude they need to be successful in whatever future they choose. While the scope of this book is wide ranging and world changing, the power to make the change real is in the hands of the teacher in the classroom.

The following quote was originally about enterprise education but can be applied to the foundation of any and every subject if we are to create responsible citizens.

” …education involves pedagogy, content, and contextualisation for the development of attitudes, skills, and knowledge of students to enable them to take a proactive, self-determining, and flexible approach to understanding, influencing, and shaping economically sustainable futures for themselves and others.

… education aims to develop a culture that equips students to adapt to, take advantage of, and proact upon changing circumstances in society, business, employment, career, and their community by way of innovation and entrepreneurship. The goal of education is to assist students to believe in and be ready to shape the future in a range of economically sustainable contexts devoid of dependency.” (from Enterprise Education: Connecting Schools with the Creative Knowledge Economy  by Graham, 2005).

With such fundamental and deep seeded problems in the current way we prepare students for their future, the solutions will need to come from every angle, will need to look like nothing that has been seen in education so far, and will likely be very challenging for the professional, parents, and practitioners who will need to create the new environment for the students to develop the skills and aptitudes for a productive future.

Our society has moved through times of the Hunter-gatherer, Agrarian Dominance, Consumerism and Industrialisation, the Knowledge Economy, Automation, and now when the rate of change in all aspects of life is so great, we enter an age of Uncertainty as coined by Wacker and Taylor in ‘The Visionaries Handbook: Nine paradoxes that will shape the future of your business’ (2000). Not only is the technology changing at great rates, but massive and fast paced change is occurring in social policy, conflict, expectations of work, balance of power on a local and global scale, how we belong, the use and access to resources, and most importantly how we learn and operate in this fast paced, information rich, uncertain period of human history.

The ideas offered in this tome are a starting point that presents the easiest and most effective paths to preparing students to contribute to the world today and in the near future. You can best lead the student’s journey by helping them:

• working in a true discovery space,
• discovering reality in new ways,
• focusing on contribution and reward,
• being future focused,
• experience ethical challenges,
• being responsible,
• following flights of fancy.
• enterprising in every subject,
• and much, much more…

Is this book practical?

This book shows how and why we need to infuse future thinking into all subjects, and how we can change the pedagogical fundamentals that we use in education. We need to act now if we are to support the student’s ability to operate in their post-school world. Allowing the real-world skills and mindsets to develop can’t only happen in the final year or two of school as an afterthought. It needs to start early and happen across every topic in every subject.

For now, the solution will have to be superimposed on the current curriculum driven process that churns students out into a future that is contradictory to everything they have been exposed to within school. Eventually the system will be forced to adapt to the new demands of the world and focus on outcomes for students, not exam scores grading how well they regurgitate redundant information.