Education without end
Industry 4.0 is still a realm in the making, but restless keynoters are already heralding the coming of Industry 5.0. Economies will change, societies will adapt, and education systems will fill in the blanks.
Here lies an elementary lesson of the modern era: education equals the addition of future society and economy. Logically, social and economic transformations must mean renewal in the educational sphere, too.
Before we indiscriminately dismiss the current schooling process as a relic of the “factory model” established during the industrial revolution period, two important considerations have to be made. Firstly, that the education system has changed radically since the ill-famed Prussian prototype which introduced state-funded compulsory schooling in the late 18th century. Curricula have continued to expand both in specialisation tracks and in learning years from decade to decade. Indeed, the concept of continuing education is today a staple of knowledge-based societies.
A second point about the systemic approach to education is that debates about the quality and purpose of schooling have raged fiercely within the education sector since those first experiments with formal teaching. Proponents of different ideas have successfully made the case for specially-trained teachers, for methods that stoke critical thinking, and for new technologies that facilitate learning.
Education is not a static arrangement. While the basic formula of a ladder of classes has persisted through the centuries, the schooling process itself has changed with the evolution of society, the economy, and shared priorities. Seen from another perspective,
educational transformation has itself driven change in these same areas from one generation to the next.
The system is designed to cultivate the skills that are expected to be in demand when students come of working age. Employability and highvalue jobs, in turn, promise to create more prosperous, more dignified communities. But educational reform reveals less about the predicted future and more about the reality today.
There is a clear connection between education and the development of societies, but any aspirations to engineer new and improved versions of the economy or the country are contingent on the prevailing values of the time. After all, modifications to the system are implemented by those who have themselves graduated from it.
The eagerness to update the educational process is an acknowledgment of the standard of skills and capabilities that a generation feels it lacks as well as the ambitions it harbours. In this sense, the primary objective of education reform is neither the economy nor the country, but the student.