Congratulations to the graduating class of 2021!

Good evening, everyone. I’d like to start by saying CONGRATULATIONS to you the graduating Class of 2021.

In the spirit of reconciliation, I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the country on which we meet, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and their connections to land, water and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

Tonight I’d like to talk to you about the future.

What’s your vision for the future? In thirty years time, my generation will be long retired. Your generation will be heading towards 50 and in charge of everything, you will be the workers, managers and leaders, parents and grandparents, thinkers and doers. The world will shortly belong to you, but what will it look like? What will you do with it? What is your vision for the future? We can’t know the future, but we can look at the past and present and try to understand trends and directions that might unfold.

I have worked in educational research for over twenty years. Today I want to tell you something about what some of that research might tell us about the future of work and education and what that might mean for you as you finish school and start out on the next phase of your journey.

The Organization for Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) is an international organisation that works to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being. In its research, the OECD has charted the changing nature of work. This chart shows the rapid decline in work associated with manual and routine cognitive tasks and the huge lift in demand for work associated with analytical and interpersonal skills. So in the 1960s in Australia, we needed lots of people to work in factories making clothes and shoes, digging roads and pouring asphalt, working on farms, digging coal and minerals by hand. Today, automation and global trade has meant we need very few of those types of workers. The modern day economy needs more and more people working in professions where their job is thinking, communicating, creating and caring.

“Education is no longer about teaching students something alone; it is more important to be teaching them to develop a reliable compass and the navigation tools to find their own way in a world that is increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain. Our imagination, awareness, knowledge, skills and, most important, our common values, intellectual and moral maturity, and sense of responsibility is what will guide us for the world to become a better place”

Andreas Schleicher, OECD

Andreas Schleicher, the head of education at the OECD says that we must change how we think about education if we are going to find enough people to do the critical jobs of the future. He says, “Our imagination, awareness, knowledge, skills and, most important, our common values, intellectual and moral maturity, and sense of responsibility is what will guide us for the world to become a better place”.

This has led the OECD and other research organisations to develop the concept of 21st century skills. Some people don’t like this idea, they say that these skills have always been important human skills and were needed in the 20th century as much as now. That’s missing the point. 21st century skills are not skills invented in the 21st century but they are the skills that are necessary for success in life and not just our own individual lives but the lives of all of us and future of the planet on which we live.?

I don’t know what your vision of 2050 looks like but I’d forgive you if it were more dystopian than utopian. But the future is not fixed. The future depends on what we all do, on what you do. And it seems to me that you and your generation, with a new understanding of the challenges of this world and the skills needed to solve them,? have an enormous opportunity to build a future that is so much better than the present.

So I want to talk about three big challenges. These aren’t the only challenges in today’s world, but they’re big ones. And they’re not just challenges, they are opportunities. In particular, they are human opportunities. And they each will need every one of those 21st century skills to solve. When you’re thinking about your vision for the future, about what you want to do in the next few years, have a think about these. These are all big challenges where you could make a difference.

Challenge number 1: The information wars.?

500 years ago, Johannes Gutenberg invented? a system of movable type printing which revolutionised the transmission of information in the 15th and 16th centuries. Books, plays, pamphlets, essays, posters went from being curiosities of the rich and highly educated to something that ordinary people could access and powerful people could use to promote their ideas. More books were printed in the next 50 years than had been produced in the thousand years before. Information raged across Europe at a speed and multiplicity never seen before and the next 100 years saw war, upheaval, revolution, famine. It took centuries for the world to adjust to this change in the way information flowed. Today, we may be facing a similar scenario. The internet has totally changed the way that information travels around the world. The scale and speed of information flow we are experiencing today would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. The world wide web, the way that most of us access the internet, is only 25 years old. Smartphones, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp - none of these existed 20 years ago. The information source of the 21st century is still only in its infancy and yet we may already be seeing signs of the kind of? strife and upheavals that Europe saw in the 15th and 16th century. Brexit, Trump, QAnon, conspiracy theories, flat earthers, protestors fighting police to assert their rights not to have life saving medical treatment holding effigies of politicians being hanged on gallows - these are symptoms of a huge destabilising shift in the volume, speed and control of information travelling around the world. How are we going to learn to absorb this pressure without resorting to authoritarianism, separatism, conflict, gated communities, walls and barriers? To address this challenge we need journalists, writers, science communicators, artists, advertising and PR professionals, lawyers, editors, fact checkers, software engineers and entrepreneurs with high level critical thinking, communication and information literacy skills. We need them to be empathetic, collaborative and persistent. We need a new generation of critical and creative professionals to address the challenges of the information wars.

Challenge number 2: Mental health crisis

I recently heard an interview in which Professor Patrick McGorry, the founder of headspace, tried to explain the incredible challenge that we face in providing the support services we need to address the tidal wave of mental health issues in this country. Professor McGorry is best known for his work in early treatment of psychosis, which effects more than 60,000 Australians a year and can have devastating impacts on people’s lives and families. According to the Black Dog Institute, one in five Australians aged 16-85 experience a mental illness in any year and almost half of all Australians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime. Research tells us that the vast majority of mental health issues and illnesses are very treatable, especially when the person gets the help they need early on. According to Professor McGorry, we now know so much about what we need to do to support people experiencing mental health issues but we are faced with a critical shortage of health workers: nurses, counselors and social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, youth workers. To fill these roles and be able to provide these critical services, we need many more young people to choose to take on a career in the caring professions. Those people need to have a good basic knowledge out of school necessary for further study to become a health professional but even more critically, they need to have high level skills in empathy, emotional regulation, communication and persistence. We need a new generation of thinking and caring professionals to address the challenges of mental health and wellbeing that face us.

Challenge number 3: Environmental disaster

You might put the disappointment of the recent COP26 meeting or any of the environmental summits held over the last 20 years down to the failure of right wing politicians and their fellow travellers. But I don’t think it’s that simple. Voting out Donald Trump and electing Joe Biden didn’t solve the climate crisis. One reason why action on climate change and many other environmental crises is lagging is less to do with politics and more to do with something called the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is a concept originated by the economist William Forster Lloyd in the 19th century but made famous by an ecologist Garrett Hardin in the 1960s. The tragedy of the commons describes a problem where the rational self-interests of individuals leads inevitably to the destruction of the precious resource in which that individual has an interest. So in the current context, too many countries can say: why should we reduce our carbon emissions and increase our cost of living when other countries aren’t? Why take an individual hit when it won’t change the final outcome anyway. It’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy - we act to grab the last bit of benefit while it lasts because we expect everyone will be as greedy as us and destroy the thing anyway. Garrett Hardin argued that these kinds of problems can’t be solved by technical means unless they also require changes in human values and morality. To solve the intractable problem of global climate change, what we need in the future is a new kind of thinking that puts human relationships, networks, connections, empathy at the heart of decision making, that is inclusive and constructive. Yes, we need scientists and engineers to solve these problems and politicians to act, but we also need architects, communicators, artists, designers, philosophers, lawyers who can lead us to a new kind of thinking in which technology is part of a human solution.

So, congratulations on completing your year 12. It’s an enormous achievement and one that you should be very proud of. During your years of school, you have had the chance to study English and mathematics, science and history, food technology and design, politics, psychology and more. In the last couple of years of school, you have focused a lot on a small number of subjects, and I know that many of you are nervously waiting on your results. What I want to remind you tonight is that in your 13 years of school you have learned much more than those subjects and you are much more than your study score or exam results. You have developed important skills that I hope will help you and your generation make a huge difference in the world. You have developed your critical and creative thinking, your skills in collaboration and communication. You have learned to use and understand information, you have learned to persist, to set goals, to develop a growth mindset. You have developed empathy and understanding, care for others and the world around you. In short, you have developed the skills you need to succeed in life in the 21st century and skills that the world of the 21st century desperately needs from you.?

Although you have reached the end of school, you know that it is also a beginning. I’ve spoken tonight about three big challenges for the future but there are lots more: inequality, disability and inclusion, gender based violence, bigotry and discrimination, technological advancement and what it means to be human. Take your pick. Whatever it is that you choose to do after school, however you seek to engage with and contribute to the world around you, whichever opportunities you pursue, I wish you all the best and I know that we are in good hands.