The Future of Education and Jobs

The Future of Education and Jobs

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6N07G6kCgSc#

What the fourth industrial revolution could mean for education and jobs

By Andreas Schleicher

It’s so much easier to educate students for our past, than for their future. Schools are inherently conservative social systems, and as parents, we become anxious when our children learn things that we don’t understand – especially when they no longer study things that were so important for us. Teachers are more comfortable teaching how they were taught, rather than how they were taught to teach. And politicians can lose an election over education, but rarely win support over it, because it takes much more than an election cycle to translate good intentions into better results.

But the world is changing fast. The charity Education and Employers recently asked some 20,000 primary school children to draw their own future, and the opportunities children see for tomorrow are amazing. At the OECD, their report has inspired us to look at the future of education and jobs more systematically. We will present our findings and a selection of the drawings with them tomorrow in Davos, where world leaders are gathering to discuss the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

(...) For me, the most troubling aspect of the children’s drawings was the myopic perspective that children from disadvantaged background had about the world of work – a perspective that was narrowly constrained to what their parents or relatives do. We can certainly do better. Technology now allows us to give all children – regardless of social background, where they live or the jobs their parents do – the same chance to meet people (online and offline) who do all kinds of jobs, and to help them understand the vast array of opportunities open to them. Employers and educators need to work far more closely together to help broaden young people’s horizons and raise their aspirations.