Given limitless power, an unconstrained budget and a warm, safe place to sleep, I still would not want to be the person responsible for planning the future of public education. Not at any price.
This is not the place to enter the age-old academic debate about the overall purposes of education — individual fulfilment or preparation for employment. Legendary educator and philosopher John Dewey said: “The general purpose of school is to transfer knowledge and prepare young people to participate in a democratic society.”
The reality is that participation will involve finding something useful and fulfilling to do.
But when we read what tech billionaires Mark Cuban and Bill Gates warn about the future of employment, it is clear that the world we thought we were preparing today’s kids for might not be the same by the time they get there.
That’s not to say Gates and Cuban have a lock on predicting the employment future our kids will face, but in a recent interview, Cuban warned that robots and automation will cause unemployment, and the world needs to prepare for that.
Meanwhile, Microsoft founder Gates went as far as to suggest that robots that take over human jobs should pay taxes.
Tech innovator Elon Musk and physicist for the ages Stephen Hawking agree about the impact of automation on employment. In Hawking’s opinion: “The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction.”
Speaking recently at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Musk asked the question: “What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better [than a human]. These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.”
If all this sounds too H.G. Wells, too dystopian, a view of the future, consider the automated options we already take for granted: automated checkouts, automated cash machines, automated ticketing machines at the movies, automated gas pumps.
Admittedly, the jobs those machines replaced were not high-skill ones, but they kept people employed.
A big part of sales has always been figuring out — or even predicting — what a customer will want. Amazon grossed $136 billion last year, but now its “salespeople” are its algorithm-powered recommendation engines.
It will be the people who conceive, create and execute these systems who will be in demand, and it would be fair to say that in an increasingly technological world, a sophisticated understanding of the mathematics of constantly evolving technologies will demand more than just being good at simple arithmetic and times tables.
Dominic Barton, chairman of an advisory committee to federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, recently told a conference of university students, administrators and educators that about 40 per cent of existing Canadian jobs will disappear over the coming decade as technology automates their work.
Responding to a question during a subsequent Canadian Press interview, Barton said governments need to find better ways to confront income inequality that risks becoming deeper as some jobs become irrelevant.
Barton added that governments at all levels must think ahead to helping students upgrade their skills over the course of their careers — because what they learned in school isn’t going to remain as relevant as they think.
The Brookfield Institute, Canada’s think tank on innovation and entrepreneurship, identifies workers in jobs deemed at high risk as being between 15 and 24.
“Canada’s younger and, to a lesser extent, older populations are more likely to be vulnerable to the effects of automation,” says a Brookfield report on the future of employment.
The institute suggested that more study is needed of high-risk occupations to determine their ability to withstand automation and technology-based restructuring.
Even the education establishment will not be safe from the encroachment of technology.
Heuristic technologies that enable learners to discover or learn something for themselves will not replace teachers, but will change the teaching role from a source of information to a guide to information.
Now, who wants that job planning the future of public education?
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
