Preparing for a better tomorrow
Historian Will Durant once said most of history is guesswork and the rest is prejudice. My guesswork and prejudice about education history has four phases: Education 1.0 evolved humanity from hunter/gatherers through ancient civilisations to monarchies. India has valuable intellectual property from this phase; Kautilya’s Arthashastra on statecraft, Krishnadevaraya’s reflection on administration, Aryabhatta’s speculations about Astronomy and Kabir/ Rahim’s reflections on uncommonness of common sense, but education was accessible to few. Education 2.0, massified school, began with the industrial revolution for a predictable and linear world of work where the ability to recall limited information accurately was essential for workforces controlled by punching a clock, and most people did repetitive and mechanical jobs in mass manufacturing. Education 3.0 was driven by growing democracy, the scientific revolution, and the rise of automation. Suddenly narrow knowledge was insufficient and different disciplines needed to come together for rockets, modern medicine and the internet. Education 4.0 is about the next decade when thinking across disciplines and
knowledge is indispensable and connections are built in response to experience and reflection to solve complex problems. Sustainable civilizational scale transformation and disruptive change needs a systems thinking approach. Not having all the answers is good, because you can discover them with other people collaborating across bodies of knowledge; ‘Multilingualism’ across thought worlds, countries and industries is indispensable, because blended solutions lie at the intersections. None of this is possible
without curiosity, communication, risk taking, and high team skills.
No curriculum offers a perfect solution for Education 4.0, but arguably the IB comes closest. A surprising shift in the Pandemic has been a 30% rise in the number of IB schools in India, from around 150 to 200+. A state government has already declared its desire to work with the IB to reform its public education. We need to be careful that this does not become a new colonisation of India but meets national aspirations - building a work ready generation that shifts our low GDP per capita rank (138th) closer to our high overall GDP rank (5th). We need pride and comfort in our identity; we don’t need to be western. The seed of that intellectual resurgence is already a small tree; 5 million Indians now export more software than Saudi Arabia does oil.
Schools are often forced to make false choices; Either academics or creativity, Either science or humanities, Either thinking or discipline. Good education is beyond either/or - it is both /and; Both scores and thinking, Both math and arts, Both discipline and freedom, Both global outlook and identity, Both service and excellence. All of this becomes possible to do in an IB education that combines knowledge with critical thinking and identity to build lifelong learners, that have strong signalling value for colleges and careers.
The IB recognises disciplines as bodies of knowledge that invite different ways of thinking; sciences as distinct from math, languages different from arts, and humanities different from the environment. This thinking develops consistently and collaboratively through the PYP (ages 3-11years) with transdisciplinary learning, focussed on inquiry and experiential learning, the MYP (ages 12-16years) with interdisciplinary learning, focussed on skills across disciplines, and then the DP (ages 16-18 years) that is multi-disciplinary, focussed on a broad and deep education, with many choices driven by individual passions.
The IBDP (Grade 11&12) is holistic (across science, mathematics, two languages, humanities and the arts) and rigorous (half of the subjects have to be at a challenging ‘Higher Level’, and all subjects need independent choice based investigations to apply knowledge in real world contexts). It’s three mandatory or core requirements encourage independent work, research, critical thinking, creativity, identity and service. The reading and writing intensity of the IB is unparalleled.
The students enter a world of work where soft skills matter more than hard skills, intangible assets matter more than physical assets, organisations are replacing hierarchies with networks, and the size of the internet doubles every nine months. The future being impossible to predict doesn’t mean we can’t prepare for it. An IB education gives us a compass not a map because it prioritizes learning, connecting, thinking and reflecting over knowing.