Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education and Skills & Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris
1. What is the most pressing challenge in education today, and how do you propose addressing it?
There are many challenges, for a start, 128 million boys and 122 million girls cannot go to any school, and two thirds or more of the world’s children have not acquired even basic skills. But the challenge of providing better access to today’s schooling must not cloud our view to the educational challenges of tomorrow.
The kind of things that are easy to teach and test have nowadays become easy to digitize and automate. We know how to educate second-class robots, people who are good at repeating what we tell them. In this age of accelerations and artificial intelligence, we need to think harder about what makes us human. The future is about pairing the artificial intelligence of computers with the cognitive, social and emotional skills and values of human beings. Better articulating these in our curricula and instructional systems and aligning assessment and examination with these will go a long way towards educating learners for their future, rather than our past.
A related challenge is how we can better leverage technology for learning. Technology is not a magic power, but it is an amazing accelerator and an incredible amplifier. The problem is that can amplify good ideas and good educational practice in the same way it amplifies bad ideas and bad practice.
Technology can help us make education more inclusive by making learning much more accessible and better adaptive to the different needs of learners, but the pandemic has also shown how technology can amplify almost any form of inequity in education.
Technology can super-empower teachers as designers of innovative learning experiences. Or it can disempower them to become slaves of scripted lessons plans or algorithms they no longer understand.
Technology can help reduce bias through better data, but it can also amplify and entrench bias.
Technology can connect people across geographic, linguistic or cultural boundaries, but it can also sort them into echo-chambers that amplify their own views and insulate them from divergent thinking.
The bottom line is that smart education is not just about technology, but about a radical reimagination of what teaching and learning can be when powered by technology. We need to shift attention from learning technology to learning activity and better integrate individual, team and class-wide activities with digital environments. The hardware needs to evolve so that devices are more present but less visible and distractive. And we need smart systems that work for all, that have equity not bolted on but at their core. We need to see that AI empowers learners and teachers rather than disempower them.
2.Where would you place India with regard to the performance of the education system?
India is not yet part of OECD’s PISA programme so it is hard to compare education in India with other parts of the world. But from my own experience, you can find both the world’s most advanced and the world’s poorest educational experiences in India. The challenge seems to build greater coherence and alignment in the system, and to build an exam culture that prioritises validity and relevance so that students, parents and teachers align their practices with tomorrow’s world.
The future is about pairing the artificial intelligence of computers with the cognitive, social and emotional skills and values of human beings. Better articulating these in our curricula and instructional systems and aligning assessment and examination with these will go a long way towards educating learners for their future.
3. The role of technology is growing with each passing day. Does Social Science have a future? Will students who pursue the Arts stream get jobs?
Absolutely, in our world today, education is no longer just about teaching students something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass and the tools to navigate with confidence through an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world. Social Science is a big part of this equation. Success in education today is about identity, it is about agency and it is about purpose. It is about building curiosity – opening minds, it is about compassion –opening hearts, and it is about courage, mobilising our cognitive, social and emotional resources to take action. And those are also our best weapon against the biggest threats of our times – ignorance – the closed mind, hate – the closed heart, and fear – the enemy of agency.
4. How can education systems better prepare students for the demands of the 21st-century workforce? How do you think India is faring in this regard?
Even a construct as basic as literacy has fundamentally changed. In the 20th century, literacy was about extracting and processing pre-coded information; in the 21st century, it is about constructing and validating knowledge. In the past, teachers could tell students just to memorise what they find in their textbook, because that textbook was carefully curated and authored. Nowadays, Google presents students with millions of answers, and nobody tells them what’s right or wrong and true or not true. The more knowledge technology allows us to search and access, the more important becomes deep understanding and the capacity to navigate ambiguity, to triangulate viewpoints, and to make sense out of content. Contrast that with the finding from the PISA assessment of reading literacy where, on average across OECD countries, less than half of 15-year-old students were able to distinguish facts from opinion when the cues were implicit. And we don’t have data for India about this.
The fact that advancements in literacy skills have fallen sharply behind the evolution of the nature of information has profound consequences in a world where virality seems sometimes privileged over quality in the distribution of information. In the “post-truth” climate in which we now find ourselves, assertions that “feel right” but have no basis in fact become accepted as fact. Algorithms that sort us into groups of like-minded individuals create social media echo chambers that amplify our views, and leave us insulated from opposing arguments that may alter our beliefs. These virtual bubbles homogenise opinions and polarise our societies; and they can have a significant – and adverse – impact on democratic processes. And don’t think those algorithms are a design flaw; they are exactly how social media is designed to work. There is scarcity of attention, but an abundance of information. We are living in this digital bazaar where anything that is not build for the network age is cracking apart under its pressure.
5. What are the most impactful policy changes that countries can implement to improve educational outcomes for all students, based on your extensive study of education systems worldwide?
I think we need to think about the educational transformation on many dimensions, in addition to issues around technology that I have already outlined above. The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces. But modern societies create value by synthesising different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, connecting the dots where the next innovation will come from.
In the past, schools were technological islands, with technology often limited to supporting and conserving existing practices, and students outpacing schools in their adoption of technology. Now schools need to use the potential of technologies to liberate learning from past conventions and connect learners in new and powerful ways, with sources of knowledge, with innovative applications and with one another.
The past was also divided – with teachers and content divided by subjects and students separated by expectations of their future career prospects; with schools designed to keep students inside, and the rest of the world outside; with a lack of engagement with families and a reluctance to partner with other schools. The future needs to be integrated – with an emphasis on the inter-relation of subjects and the integration of students.
In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements. But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators. We could see during this pandemic how the well-being of countries depends increasingly on people’s capacity to take collective action. Schools need to help students learn to be autonomous in their thinking and develop an identity that is aware of the pluralism of modern living. This is important. At work, at home and in the community, people will need a broad understanding of how others live, in different cultures and traditions, and how others think, whether as scientists or as artists.
The foundations for this don’t all come naturally. We are all born with “bonding social capital”, a sense of belonging to our family or other people with shared experiences, common purposes or pursuits. But it requires deliberate and continuous efforts to create the kind of “bridging social capital” through which we can share experiences, ideas and innovation with others, and increase our radius of trust to strangers and institutions.
