The Future of Education

As we enter the new era of covid learning, it is clear that students and teachers alike are looking ahead to the new classroom year with trepidation. While no one enjoys the thought of change, we humans are adaptable and will survive. What hasn’t changed for over 200 years is the physical classroom and the way we teach, even as technology has changed so much of the world around us. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to allow us to see the benefits of things that were right in front of our noses. Here is an audio intro to the benefits of learning in a virtual world that is driven by the need to communicate at a distance.

Let’s go 40 years into the future and meet Tom a student who is on his way to school in his local PEA (personal education allocation).

Selling the Secure Learning Environment

While it may seem important to teach children about big data and the threats to privacy that this may have on their future, a private school have control over data that predicts a person’s likelihood to succeed. If private school’s control the important predictors of our future lives, can we trust them to care for it?

As teachers, we often sit in the staffroom and here the expression, “Well the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree you know….”

This expression connects a students behaviour to their parents. The bias this creates can harm a students chance to be successful. In the future, it will be easier and easier to predict a student’s future outcome not only based on behaviour of their parents, but also through comprehensive data collection. It is certainly possible that the data collected for a grade four student will be predictive of their personal success in the world. The consequences of this will be that large swathes of the population may find themselves left behind while schools focus on drafting students that are destined to succeed. Successful students will help a school build a reputation for their programme. By curating enrollment, a private school’s brand will become synonymous with success. The end result is a society of haves and have nots whose destiny is predetermined. While this happens today, the collection of data will intensify the effect.

The second issue will be the value of an individual’s information to groups that provide insurance. Health data, behaviour data, and personality data will allow insurance companies to avoid “liability” of “high risk individuals”. This may lower overall rates for the average person, but it will force the weakest even further off the path to success. At what point does the value of big data and our desire to see the strong to survive override human empathy and care for those who are weaker? How will this impact us as a society?