Do Schools Need to Invent New Roles for Their Survival?

As I listened to the words the eminent futurologist Michio Kaku in one of his interviews I started introspecting. He said that in the future ‘most of the middlemen in business, industry and in other social systems might vanish, as the direct access to information, knowledge and processes would make them irrelevant. People at all pathways of human activities would be able to access, process, and manipulate knowledge to their own personal needs, Customised knowledge supported by emerging technologies would make their functions easy and speedy. Thus, investments of time and space on several of the functions currently carried out by the humans both at the personal and professional levels will decrease, enabling them to divert to other productive domains including empowerment and entertainment.

As we transport these concerns to the field of learning, it does raise an array of concerns and questions. The role of educational institutions as harbingers of knowledge might come under intense scrutiny. With knowledge and skills being accessible to the learners directly, effectively and at their own gates, the learners might find any repetitive function of the same in the campus of schools as redundant and useless. The current cascade models in pedagogical deliveries or packaged capsules of information for rote learning or for reproduction would neither gravitate nor impress them. The learners are likely to get increasingly disillusioned with classrooms, seeking ‘freedom to learn.’ With divergent modes of learning empowered by technology that could curate their curiosity through play, gamification, logical reasoning and creative engagements, the current methods of pedagogy and assessment might continuously lose credibility and currency.

The educational institutions might have to change their robes and need to look more impressive by mixing play with purpose, edutainment with engagement, curiosity with research, learning with learnability, projects with professional attires and assessment with appreciation. As such, the school bags will seek their retirement giving tense moments to entrepreneurs investing in the organics and inorganics stored inside them. Knowledge imprisoned in textual content would give way to ‘open book’ operations both for learning and for evaluation. There is likely to bring a change in thinking forcing ‘non-linear learning’ and encouraging the learners to find their own answers to questions as the institutional knowledge could not help to find answers.

“Mediations” by schools and other learning systems to fabricate information and knowledge would seek new pathways and better personalization to meet the learning demands. “Interventional pedagogy” to remove the blocks in the learning pathways and ‘entrepreneurial pedagogy’ that would trigger formulation of new knowledge and multi-fold synthesis of knowledge would put pressure on the teaching community and make them restless. Teachers and educational leaders would find a new type of stress ‘to remain prepared,’ ‘to remain secured’ and to ‘remain progressive’ in knowledge management and delivery processes.

The classical infrastructure with its stereotype would seek review by professional school architects forcing them to design models where the classrooms will have flexible pathways to engage different learners in different tasks at any given point of time. “Learning” and “working’ in the classrooms might get newer and improvised functional types and interactions, possibly calling for multiple teachers interacting with the students during a given period. “Conditioned learning” with sounds of bells calling for re-orientation of the learning in specified periods might give way to ‘free time zones’ for learning and assessment. With technology in their hands, pockets and their mind, teachers would prefer continuous learning assessed and communicated. Teacher’s files could be filled with videos and photos of the ‘learning behaviour’ of the students in the classroom. Thus “evidence bases” for the assessment and communication would be fool-proof and authentic.

Schools and educators as ‘middlemen’ in broking knowledge and skills would give way to a nobler role of ‘co-entrepreneurs’ in knowledge management and processing. Both teachers and learners might have to make their investments to knowledge articulation and play shareholders of the knowledge production.

With the call for ‘Synthetic intelligence’ on high pitch, shaking the foundations of AI before it could make its significant and powerful impact in classrooms, the guessing game has already started in the tech industry with the questions – “where to and how far?”

Beware! Are we also getting ready for a quantum leap to ‘quantum computing?” Yes, the question- “where to and how far?’ will take a few years to find a credible answer. The schools will be on continuous stress to be relevant and hence play new roles.