Change is the only constant. But this has not been the case in the education system.

Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no
new story has so far emerged to replace them.

How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented
transformations and radical uncertainties?

What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the future
world? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is
happening around them, and navigate the maze of life?

At present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense,
because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was
repeatedly blocked by censorship.

In contrast, in the twenty-first century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information,

and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or
distracting us with irrelevancies.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They
already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information,
to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to
combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing pupils with a set of
predetermined skills such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++,
identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how
the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills
people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to
speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans,
and a new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless
Mandarin.

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch
to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.

Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to
preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the
world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will
above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making
discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial life was divided into two
complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first
part of life you accumulated information, developed skills, constructed a world view,
and built a stable identity.
In the second part of life you relied on your accumulated skills to navigate the world,
earn a living, and contribute to society. Of course even at fifty you continued to learn
new things, but these were just small tweaks to well-honed abilities.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, accelerating change will make this traditional
model obsolete.

This is likely to involve immense levels of stress. For change is almost always stressful, and
after a certain age most people just don’t like to change.

By the time you are fifty, you don’t want change, and most people have given up on
conquering the world. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You much prefer stability. You
have invested so much in your skills, your career, your identity and your world view that you
don’t want to start all over again.

If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as
the world flies by you with a whooooosh.

To stay relevant – not just economically, but above all socially – you will need the ability to
constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past
experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as
individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever
encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that
can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms,
and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when
confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How to live in a world where profound
uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature?

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great
reserves of emotional balance. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to
keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or
the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening
to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first
century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.

The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education.

In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical
rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go
to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as
you. Every hour some grown-up walks in, and starts talking. They are all paid to do so
by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you
about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at
this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now
bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative.

As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate

people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just
follow your heart. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull
the strings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference
between your self and their marketing experts? To succeed in such a daunting task, you will
need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you
are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know
thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know
themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century, because
unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola,
Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not
your computer, and not your bank account – they are in a race to hack you and your organic
operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers,
but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans. The
algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, who
you meet.

And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and
manipulate you, and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the matrix, or in
The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed
understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to
them.

Students’ syllabus will be designed to prepare them for the ongoing digital era through
exposure to key technologies that are shaping the world we live in. Artificial
Intelligence, Machine Learning, Virtual and Augmented reality, and Big Data shall play an
important role in this new-age education framework. Coding and computational thinking
skills will be promoted so students have diverse career options before them.

Since the pandemic pushed digitization into the education sector, remote learning became a
norm for over 1.5 billion students in the world. 92% of Indian citizens welcomed this as a
positive change. Naturally, this trend is bound to continue. That doesn’t diminish the crucial
role teachers play in education practices though. However, there will be practices in place to
ensure capable teachers are recruited through meticulous consideration of their past
experiences and positions held.

Another significant change will be the adaptation of blended or hybrid learning practices to
offer a more flexible and efficient system of education. This will include online teaching
techniques, e-courses, and learning applications as digital education extends its scope to
include at-home learning services. Partnering with content creation agencies will ensure
digital content is provided in a diverse range of languages, further boosting the growth of
India’s EdTech sector.

Classroom time, on the other hand, will be reserved for practical work, discussions, and case
studies. The new educational program has envisioned an immersive learning experience for
classrooms through the use of competent technologies.

Effective vocational training targeted at developing industry-related skills and expertise will
be mandated to help students land their dream jobs.

Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not
enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model.
What we need --and the word's been used many times in the past few days -- is not
evolution, but a revolution in education.

Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may
be, or if they have any to speak of.

I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives
getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than
enjoy it,

and wait for the weekend. And high among them is education, because education, in a way,

dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural
resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying
around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.

And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not.

We have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously
diverse.

It's about passion. Often, people are good at things they don't really care for.

It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing the thing
that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely.

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education,

a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people.

We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture.

We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process;

it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development.

All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're
actually teaching. And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future

because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education

in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a
personalized curriculum.

What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who
don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. And the reason is not that we're not
spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other
countries.
Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every
year

to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction.

There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the
culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to
endure.

The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse.

Education under "No Child Left Behind" is based on not diversity but conformity.

What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow
spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of "No Child Left Behind" has been to narrow
the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue
against science and math.

On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give
equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education.

The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark
of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often.

Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out,

or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this

is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-
professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country

that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.

But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system.

You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that,

but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage.

You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no
education going on.

And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus

on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests
have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be
diagnostic. They should help.

But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So
in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are
encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and
curiosity.

And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have
different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's
the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and
diverse and dynamic.

We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and
possibilities,

and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity.

Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.

Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own
biography.

They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with
the life they're living outside of school.

I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of -- they're called alternative education programs.

These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common
features.

They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the
community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students
outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are
called "alternative education."

There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. "There are three sorts of people in the
world:

Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it;

there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to
listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen." And if we can
encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough,
that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need.

But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world:

every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't
matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are
mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on
earth.

Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason.
Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century.

They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two
ideas.

Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably
steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the
grounds you would never get a job doing that.

And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of
intelligence,

because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system
of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance.

And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not,

because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.

When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job.

If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one.

i think there's no question it's completely obsolete the education system is a path-dependent

outcome from the need for daycare from the need for prisons for college age males who
would

otherwise overrun society and cause a lot of havoc the original medieval universities had

guard towers that face inwards for example um yeah because you you have to put a curfew
and then you need to lock up the young uh 18 year old males before they go out with swords
and daggers and you know create trouble so college and schools and what the way we think
about them they come from a time period when books were rare knowledge was rare
babysitting was

rare crime was common violence was prevalent there was no such self-guided learning

so i think schools are just byproducts of these kinds of institutions and now we have

the internet which is the greatest web of knowledge ever created completely

interconnected so it's very very easy to learn if you actually have the desire to learn

everything that's on the internet you can go on khan academy you can get mit

and yale lectures online you can get all the coursework and get interactivity you can read
blogs by

brilliant people we can read all these great books so it's so the ability to learn the
the means of learning the tools of learning are abundant and infinite it's a desire to learn that's
incredibly scarce.

one is to keep the kids out of the parents hair while the parents go to work it creates
socialization because kids want to be around their peers and they want to learn how to operate
society of

their peers but i think if it's purely learning you're after that learning can be done much more

either on your own or through the internet or by uniting through the internet with like-minded
groups so i think that's one problem with the current educational system

the second problem is what do you choose to learn and the current educational

system has to have a one-size-fits-all model has to say well you have to learn x now and then

you have to learn y um and you know to give you examples of

where this is obsolete memorization right in the day and age of google and smartphones
memorization is obsolete why should you be memorizing the battle trafalgar why you should
be memorizing what the capital of this or that state is but we still put undue weight on that
just because that's the way it's always been done and we've lived in a pre-google world.

from trigonometry to calculus i missed that whole part so now you get the

calculus you don't understand the fundamentals and now you reduce their memorization so

now you're like okay dxdy when i see that symbol i do this but now you've lost the actual
learning

you've lost the connection to the underlying principles so i think learning should be about

learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over because life is
mostly

about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love
and where you understand the basics inside out but that's not how our system is built we teach
all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all when really they
would have been better off served just doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the
entire time

so i i think there's a pace of learning issue

and then there's finally a what to learn

and there's a whole set of things we don't even bother trying to teach.

so we just haven't kept up and i have to believe that we can change the system but we're
not but you never you never change a system by taking the existing thing and reworking it i
don't

believe i've been in silicon valley in tech business long enough to know that you're better
off changing it just by creating something brand new.

We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you
again.

We sit you in straight rows just like they organize things in the factory.

We build a system, all about interchangeable people because factories are based on
interchangeable parts. If this piece is no good, put another piece in there. And org charts,
those little boxes are all designed to say, "Oh, we can fit Bob in there 'cause Rachel didn't
show to work today." And so we built school. That's what school was for.

If you wanted to teach someone how to be a baseball fan, would you start by having them
understand the history of baseball, who Abner Doubleday was, what barnstorming was,

the influences of cricket and capitalism and the Negro leagues?

Would you do that? Would you say, "OK, there's a test tomorrow. I want you to memorize
the top 50 batters in order by batting average," and then rank the people based on how they
do on the test so the ones that do well get to memorize more baseball players? Is that how we
would create baseball fans?

Here is the key distinction. What people do quite naturally is, if it's work, they try to figure
out how to do less. And if it's art, we try to figure out how to do more.

One, as Sal Khan has pointed out, homework during the day, lectures at night. World-class
lecturers lecturing on anything you want to learn to every single person in the world who's
got an Internet connection for free. And then all day go and sit with a human being, a teacher
and ask your questions and do your work and explore face-to-face.

It's stupid to have the same lecture being given handmade 10,000 times a day across the
country when we can get one person to do it great for the people who want to hear it.

Number two, open book, open note all the time. There is zero value in memorizing anything
ever again. Anything that is worth memorizing is worth looking up. So we shouldn't spend
any time teaching people to memorize stuff.

Number three, access to any course anywhere in the world anytime you want to take it. So
this notion that we have to do things in a certain order, which is based on physical location
and chronology, makes no sense.

Number four, precise focused education instead of mass batch stuff.

Measuring experience instead of test scores because experience is what we really care about.
And cooperation instead of isolation. Why do we do anything where we ask people to do it all
by themselves and then we put them in the real world and say, "Cooperate."

Teacher's role transforms into coach,

lifelong learning with work happening earlier in your life.

Are we asking our kids to collect dots or connect dots? Because we're really good at
measuring how many dots they collect, how many facts they have memorized, how many
boxes they have filled in, but we teach nothing about how to connect those dots. You cannot
teach connecting dots in a Dummies manual. You cannot teach connecting dots in a
textbook.You can only do it by putting kids into a situation where they can fail.

Grades are an illusion. Passion and insight are reality.

Fitting in is a short-term strategy that gets you nowhere. Standing out is a long-term strategy
that takes guts and produces results.

if you want someone for example to like Indian food what you don't do is have them read the
history of Indian food and then have them take the Indian food test and if they do well

let them take a course in Indian food and then take them to the restaurant that's not how it
works right well it works is you start eating it when you're a kid you learn a little bit about it
you make it it reminds you of certain things and on and on and on

And people will sign up for a 45-day course on building a bicycle. Now, try to build a bicycle
without knowing that pi is 3.1416. You can't.

Well, we send our children to school to prepare them for the real world, which is changing
very, very fast. But our schools haven't changed much for hundreds of years. In fact, thought
leaders from around the world agree that the current system of education was designed in the
Industrial Age, mainly to churn out factory workers. And this Industrial Age mentality of
mass production and mass control still runs deep in schools. Industrial Age values. We
educate children by batches,

and govern their lives by ringing bells. All day long, students do nothing but follow
instructions.

Sit down, take out your books, turn to page 40, solve problem number three, stop talking.

At school, you're rewarded for doing exactly what you're told.

These are Industrial Age values that were really important for factory workers.

Their success depended on following instructions and doing exactly what they were told.

But in today's world, how far can you get by simply following instructions?

The modern world values people who can be creative, who can communicate their ideas,
and collaborate with others. But our children don't get a chance to develop such skills in a
system that's based on Industrial Age values.

Inauthentic learning.

Most of the learning that happens in schools today is not authentic, because it relies

on memorization and rote learning. The system defines a generic set of knowledge

that all children must know. And then, every few months, we measure how much has been
retained by administering exams. We know that such learning is not authentic because
most of it is gone the day after the exam. Learning can be much deeper and more authentic. It
can be so much more than just memorization and retention. But that's the only thing we
measure, and test scores are the only thing we value. This has created an extremely unhealthy
culture for students, parents, and teachers. Children are going through endless hours of
tuitions, staying up all night memorizing useless facts that they will forget very soon. No
room for passions and interests.

We have an extremely standardized system, where each child must learn the same thing

at the same time in the same way as everyone else. This doesn't respect the basic fact of being
human, that each of us is unique and different in our own way. We all have different passions
and interests. And the key to fulfillment in life is to find your passion. But do the schools of
today help our children find and develop their passion? There seems to be no room in the
current education system for the most important questions in a child's life:

What am I good at?

What do I want to do in life?

How do I fit into this world?

The system doesn't seem to care. There are so many greatly talented people who failed in the
traditional school system. Fortunately, they were able to overcome these failures.

But not everyone can. We have no measure for how much talent, how much potential goes
unrecognized in the current system.

Differences in how we learn.

Each of us is also different in how we learn, in how much time we take to learn something,

and what tools and resources work best for us. But the system has no room for such
differences.

So, if you're a bit slow in learning something, you are considered a failure, when all you
needed was a bit more time to catch up.
Lecturing.

In the current system, children are lectured for more than five hours a day.

But there are a few big problems with lecturing. Sal Khan from Khan Academy calls
lecturing

"a fundamentally dehumanizing experience. "30 kids with fingers on their lips,

"not allowed to interact with each other." Also, in any given classroom,

different students are at different levels of understanding. Now, whatever the teacher does,

there are bound to be students who are either bored because they're ahead,

or confused because they're behind. Because of the Internet and digital media,

our children have at their fingertips all the information in the world.

Technology has made it possible for anyone to learn anything,

but for fear of losing control, the system is not leveraging these incredible resources.