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2. DEFINING A GENERATION FOR LEARNING

Critical issues

»Understanding the changing timescale of a ‘generation’ in technological and educational terms.

»Appreciating the impact of technological change on society and learning.

»Understanding the future in terms of visions, challenges and opportunities.

»The paucity of government thinking in learning development.

Talking about a generation

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it explores the concept of a ‘generation’ as a technological concept in relation to the increasing rate of change in society. Second, it relates this term to a cohort of school pupils who will enter and leave formal education over the span of the next decade.

What is increasingly apparent is that the technological drivers of change in society are moving at an increasingly uncomfortable pace for many of us. Perhaps the most uncomfortable citizens in this drive forward are school pupils preparing for a future that is changing at a relentless pace. It is becoming increasingly clear that the body of knowledge their formal schooling has prepared them for is becoming gradually irrelevant (see Table 2.1).

How will we come to terms with a technological generation that is measured in so few years, when the educational generation is measured in decades?

THE TECHNOLOGICAL GENERATION

Forty years ago, a timeframe that was considered to be the span of a career in the world of work, there was an expectation that the whole of a working career may well reside within one occupation. You might change employers, and might experience redundancy, but the job skills you carried with you would largely see you through your whole career with some adaptations. A technological generation would constitute something like half or one-third of your working career.

If you worked on the railway, for example, as a driver or fitter, civil or mechanical engineer, you could comfortably accommodate the changes brought about by technological change. These may have been changes in the powering of locomotives, from steam to diesel to electric. The building and maintenance of the civil and mechanical aspects of the railway, although changing, were based on the same foundations and founding principles, with some increasing mechanisation included. Fundamentally, the railways involved you in an almost timeless series of jobs that were changing at the margins, although the central task of moving people and goods remained the same. Or so it seemed.

In the past few years, the move towards computerisation on the railways has removed one of the earliest and most vital roles on the system, that of the signalman. The thousands of signal boxes sitting at junctions and level crossings were manned, often for 24 hours a day. These are currently being reduced to some 10 central control boxes across the UK, connected by CCTV and remote sensors to every junction, crossing and controlling signal. This change is so profound that it is meaningless to consider ‘signal operator’ as a distinct and sizeable profession any longer.

The process does not end there. In trains, aircraft and automobiles, the direction of travel is to remove the human element from the operational loop. It is currently technologically possible to remove humans from the train cab, the airline cockpit and the driver seat of road vehicles. The only thing stopping these developments is the psychological impact on travellers of having no human in control; this, despite the fact that ‘human error’ is a component in a large proportion of accidents.

The car mechanic’s career, to which so many young people aspired, was catered for through myriad apprenticeship courses. These were run by garages and technical colleges. Such a career was largely about applying general principles to new car models. The essence was getting your hands dirty and showing some artistry in tuning and fettling the vehicle to maintain optimal performance. Although there were changes in systems and performance, these could be accommodated because their adoption was generally gradual and measured.

However, the introduction of engine management systems in the past two decades has fundamentally changed the nature of the job, the skill set and the role of the car mechanic. No longer is the role one of ‘engine detective’, using all the senses to diagnose and fix the engine and components. The engine management system means the car no longer ‘talks’ to the mechanic. Today, the conversation is between the engine management system and the maintenance and systems computer. They hold an electronic conversation about what is wrong with the performance of the car and the appropriate remediation. The primary role of the mechanic is to respond to the result of this electronic conversation. Increasingly, that is simply to replace one malfunctioning or dead component with another.

This exclusion of the mechanic from the diagnostic loop is significant as it mirrors the direction of travel of the relationship between humankind and increasingly sophisticated machines. This is the artificial intelligence (AI) dilemma we shall all face eventually – functional redundancy. At some point, machines will overtake our skill sets.

Table 2.1 Changing jobs: job evolution driven by technology

Case study

As an aside, an increasingly inappropriate preoccupation in the Department for Education (DfE) is in making a curriculum that mirrors this technological future. One development is in teaching information technology coding. But, in my view, the idea of adding coding as yet another element of the national curriculum, a kind of technological modern foreign language, is totally misguided. It is the equivalent of believing that you can create a world-class car industry simply by training everyone as a car mechanic. Understanding simple logic gates and the wiring associated with them might, of itself, be valuable knowledge, but the role of the coder is relatively low level when considered against the bigger picture roles in developing AI.

In fact, this simple, scalable, logical thinking is already a feature of current robotic technology, so it will not provide as many employment opportunities in the future. Indeed, my prior involvement in technological product developments highlighted that, when the big picture plan is developed, the simple coding task for individual elements is outsourced abroad to cheaper markets. In one case, this involved outsourcing to a former Russian nuclear submarine engineer. He had a large team of experienced coders who could turn round most well-specified coding tasks in a couple of days and for a few hundred dollars. This is not really the skill on which future high-worth, well-paid economies will be built.

Snapshots of the future

It was the car factory under Henry Ford that introduced the mass production process. It is now defining the cutting-edge world of robotics. The most startling thing about the modern car assembly plant is the absence of human beings on the shop floor. Human beings are not performing the primary assembly tasks anymore. Instead, they are monitoring the machines that complete those tasks.

It is in communication technology that the pace of change is fastest and here the mismatch between the future life experiences of pupils and the limited learning opportunities presented by their education will sell them short.

If you attended a major educational conference in 2009, be it a senior leadership event or a DfE-sponsored event with a Minister of State for Education present, there was a fair chance you would have been shown an engrossing and disturbing video that formed the quintessence of technical change. It was a peak into Pandora’s Box. It was as enticing as the old future-gazing television programmes like Tomorrow’s World. In characteristic style, the video was already two years old by the time the DfE started showing it. At least, at that time, they were trying to help put forward a dynamic view of the role of learning in the future world.

Underneath the cutting-edge ‘the medium is the message’ online production, there was an element of both challenge and menace in the accelerating rate of change and the impact it would have on society. In what some took to be a utopian future, and others took to be the foretelling of a dystopian nightmare, the presentation was called The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Kansas – and it went viral (Wesch, 2007).

At the time, it was a leading analysis of the change between Web 1.0, which required HTML to construct it, and Web 2.0, which enabled people to communicate without limit on the internet through social media. Now it already represents an essentially historic document. We have moved on so quickly.

Indeed, the presentation that characterised Web 3.0, the intuitive or semantic web, or the internet of things, which was at the edge of imagination when Wesch broadcast his seminal work in 2007, is now being overtaken by new, unimaginable and accelerating futures. A technological ‘generation’ has accelerated and is now considered to be less than five years.

By 2009, a new generation of defining ideas had arrived. A production called The Future Internet: Service Web 3.0 tried to predict the direction of Web 3.0. It was both prescient and partially correct in its predictions. We miss the significance of accelerating technologies in our lives and education systems at our peril. What once were significant points in the landscape of our daily lives are now half forgotten memories. Who now remembers Myspace or Friends Reunited or even video shops? The educational knowledge of our children may, by the time they leave school, be completely redundant.

Current government thinking and the challenge facing us

Since 2010, in the UK under a Conservative government wedded to a policy of austerity, there is neither the concern, the appetite, nor the finances to address the issue of preparing pupils for the world of the future. As Michael Gove stated so starkly, ‘we’ve heard enough from experts!’ (Mance, 2016), thereby disengaging education from discussions of the future or even from a culture of reflection and development. The current interest is focused narrowly on outcomes, not processes.

These examples of technological and societal change are cited in some detail to illustrate the pace of change and the impact it is having on our lives and society. Such rapid changes in relevant knowledge and experience are not reflected in the curriculum nor the subsequent examination content or format. Only knowledge that can be tested in a formal written examination is deemed worthy of testing, thereby limiting the pupils’ capacity to show the true range of their knowledge, understanding and abilities.

More disturbing is the fact that many of these and other technical developments have taken place in a timespan shorter than the school career of an individual pupil. What once was known as Moore’s Law (Moore, 1965), which was an observation about the capacity and capability of transistors to double every two years, is no longer keeping up with the pace of technological progress. Exponential technological growth is reducing a ‘generation of change’ to a year. The event horizon warned of by Elon Musk (Holley, 2018) and others, when artificial intelligence becomes autonomous and is able to self-replicate and even seek to eliminate the irrationality of human beings, may not be so far away.

How then can we prepare pupils for a world that we cannot at present define, but which seems to be reinventing itself every five to ten years?

Triangulation point

Consider the following questions in relation to your own school, or one with which you are familiar.

1.With which skills for the future do you think your pupils are best prepared, and which areas are they poorly prepared for?

2.How well developed are your relationships with local employers and enterprises to ensure your pupils gain insights into the world of work through site visits and more extended work experience?

3.Do local employers provide ‘real-life’ learning/problem-solving opportunities, rather than class-based ‘simulations’ to enliven your curriculum?

4.Are there professional development opportunities available to you as a teacher/member of the leadership team to experience the current world of work, through either secondments or shorter visits to local or national employers?

5.Has funding for careers/employment development for both teachers and pupils increased, decreased or stayed the same over the past five years? What impact has this had on morale, curriculum relevance and teacher competence?

Summary

• The heavy hand of government, and the generally conservative nature of educational systems, means that the curriculum diet and skills development on offer in state schools are increasingly irrelevant and redundant.

• Taken with the examination system deficiencies discussed in the previous chapter, the inevitable conclusion is that we are educating the next generation for the life led by the last generation.

• Attempts to address these deficiencies, such as adding new components to an outmoded curriculum, are irrelevant.

• We need to completely review the purpose and processes the curriculum is designed to service if we are not to fail our young people.

Further reading

Wesch, M (2007) The Machine is Us/ing Us. [online] Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g (accessed 11 September 2019).

Mike Wesch’s seminal explanation of the relationship between technological innovation and human interaction was much lauded when it was first published.

On the positive side, he outlined the great enabling force of the internet as a democratic tool. He developed his presentation, which was the ultimate manifestation of Marshall McLuhan’s point about the medium being the message (McLuhan, 1964) at a time when the internet was in rapid transition. It was transforming from a tool that was so technologically sophisticated that it could only be accessed by technocrats speaking the native language of Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML), into a form of communication requiring no specific skills other than a keyboard and access to the internet.

This was the democratisation of the internet, insofar as the content of the web was no longer defined by those who could speak HTML; everyone could find a voice online through Web 2.0. The simplification of using the web and the growth of social media gave everyone access to the ‘global village’ (McLuhan, 1964), with social media hubs creating communities for social, political or economic interaction and education.

Wesch was very perceptive in seeing the direction of travel of the internet and anticipating some of the darker aspects of Web 2.0 and also Web 3.0. He could see Web 2.0 becoming a Tower of Babel in which all opinions contended for supremacy. When everyone can transmit an opinion, how do we differentiate between verifiable fact and unsubstantiated, but deeply ingrained opinion? Do we now live in a ‘post truth’ world in which the argument is won by the strength of feeling with which an opinion is expressed, rather than its veracity?

Equally sinister was the use of the internet by business. In a world in which your every online keystroke can be monitored, you provide your unique profile for the commercial world who can match their products to your desires. Alternatively, they may match your desires to their products by subtle manipulation and this may extend to material, economic and political wants and needs.

Web 3.0 is sometimes referred to as the ‘semantic web’ and the ‘internet of things’ and Wesch could see the creation of the internet leviathan that was not only responding to human users but using meta data, a quantity and quality of data previously unavailable, to anticipate needs in advance of their human expression. Projecting this development forward, we see the internet operating as a functioning brain, accumulating data and experience to be able to anticipate and execute actions. This is the genesis of artificial intelligence (AI).

To this extent, the term ‘disruptive technology’ is fully warranted as previous patterns of human interaction and social, economic, employment and political discourse are overtaken by developments online that shape the pattern of the future.

This is the backdrop against which young people will learn and live. This is why merely replicating existing redundant patterns of education is not tenable.

Robinson, K (2010) Changing Education Paradigms. TED Talk. [online] Available at: www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms (accessed 11 September 2019).

This is possibly the most erudite and articulate exposition of the deficiencies that need to be addressed in the education system in the twenty-first century. Again, like Wesch’s work, the medium in which the talk is presented presages how education generally, and learning more specifically, can be promoted in engaging ways using new technologies. This is the epitome of what an illustrated talk can achieve.

The main thrust of Robinson’s talk is that the current systems of formal state education are incredibly wasteful of talent. The ‘industrial process’ of education is a quality control process designed to weed out any learners who do not conform to expectations at the end of production batches – the process wastes human potential we can ill afford to lose. Robinson argues for a system that is more collaborative, more relevant and more adaptive to rapidly changing circumstances.

Robinson’s lament against the current state of education, and what is to be done about it, reflects the key issue of this book.

Bibliography

Holley, P (2018) Elon Musk’s Nightmarish Warning: AI Could Become ‘an Immortal Dictator from Which We Would Never Escape’. Washington Post. [online] Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/04/06/elon-musks-nightmarish-warning-ai-could-become-an-immortal-dictator-from-which-we-would-never-escape/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a42e14322bf7 (accessed 11 September 2019).

Mance, H (2016) Britain Has Had Enough of Experts, Says Gove. Financial Times. [online] Available at: www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c (accessed 11 September 2019).

McLuhan, M (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Moore, G (1965) Moore’s Law. Wikipedia. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law (accessed 11 September 2019).

Robinson, K (2010) Changing Education Paradigms. TED Talk. [online] Available at: www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms (accessed 11 September 2019).

Wesch, M (2007) The Machine is Us/ing Us. [online] Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g (accessed 11 September 2019).