Reinventing schools for the digital age (1/2)

The skills being taught to our children and indeed the teaching methods themselves, are changing far more slowly than the pace of digitization. Many parents are worried by this disparity and are turning towards alternative teaching solutions. However, the uncontrolled “uberization” of schools is not inevitable, although an in-depth transformation is needed; its cornerstone should be the autonomy of teachers and schools.

The school is still performing the same function it always has, summarized as follows by Martin Luther King: “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education”. But if the function never changes, its meaning is subject to profound change, at a time when (nearly) all knowledge in the world is available on-line, and above all at a time when machines are out-performing humans for increasingly complex cognitive tasks – the game of go or Texas Hold’em poker simply being the examples most talked about in the news.

As the prodigious capacities of these algorithms become ever more apparent, we can see that “thinking intensively and critically” will soon no longer have the same meaning, that these activities will require an intensive, two-fold collaboration: with the machine on the one hand and with our fellow humans on the other, working together in complex collaborative projects. In a previous post, I sketched out the implications of this change on the skills that will be needed in the future: soft skills, creativity, critical thinking, in addition of course to cutting-edge scientific and technical skills.

In their comments, several readers/parents had expressed their skepticism regarding the school’s ability to take this change on board in a short period of time, probably no more than a couple of decades. Indeed, the challenge appears to be a major one.

At present, in most of the advanced economies, the ratio between the cost and the effectiveness of education is deteriorating.

The US is certainly the most striking example: the cost of education has grown by an average of 5.2% per year since the beginning of the 1990s. As the students bear most of the educational costs themselves, this rise is felt all the more keenly. A master’s degree now costs 36,000 euros in a public university and 125,000 euros in a private one. The consequence of this inflation is that the total debt of American students stands at more than 1,100 billion euros - a financial time-bomb - that some economists have no hesitation in comparing to sub-prime loans.

Although the rise is less spectacular in France, it is no less real. In its statistical document entitled “Repères et références statistiques”, the Ministry of National Education indicates that domestic spending on education has risen by 93% in constant euro terms since 1980. More worrying is that it has grown faster than the country’s GDP, of which it now represents 6.8% as against 6.5% a generation earlier. Moreover, since the 2000s, the contribution of households to this spending has been on the rise too, which more particularly reflects the explosion of the school support market or the constant rise in fees at the more prestigious schools and universities.

Although the cost of education has risen significantly, on the other hand, there is a clear erosion in its “effectiveness”. There is no doubt that this notion is an debatable one, depending as it does on the philosophical outlook of each individual regarding the role of the school. One could argue that the role of the school is not simply to “turn out” students with diplomas, or young people ripe for the employment market. But one must admit that diplomas and professional opportunities are nonetheless legitimate concerns for the majority of students and indeed their parents. From this point of view, the indicators reflect a downward trend. In a report in 2012, McKinsey’s French office showed that there was a yawning gap between the skills being sought by companies and the availability of these skills. This report foresaw that by 2020, there would be a shortfall of 2.2 million graduates needed to meet employer demand, while 2.3 million unqualified or under-qualified young people would have trouble finding a job. It should also be recalled that every year 122,000 young people come out of the French school system with no qualifications at all, or just over one in six. In a recent study, the World Economic Forum made the same observation, although this time worldwide, and stated that current educational systems prepare our children inadequately for the professions of tomorrow. In the United States, where the subject hits the middle class in the wallet, a debate is emerging over the “profitability” of higher education. The contrarian Peter Thiel is openly urging ambitious young Americans to drop out of universities and opt for the “school of life”.

It is therefore urgent to transform schools

Faced with the two-fold challenge of increasing skills while controlling costs, the school has no other choice than to open up to teaching innovations, digital in particular. And let us be clear: the digital transformation of education involves much more than installing a connected PC in the back of each classroom: it consists in totally renewing the teaching toolbox, as well as the role of the teacher.

For what is currently happening in education is that the school monopoly is being called into question. This is comparable to what happened to banks with fintechs. As with banking services, “customers” hitherto “captive” and forced to “buy” a bundled offer, suddenly find themselves with freedom of choice. They are offered a broad range of proposals, from which they can select those which meet their specific needs.

As with banking services, this change is virtually imperceptible at first, reserved for a small number of early adopters, but could then accelerate. The early signs of the erosion of the school’s monopoly are already visible: for example, the percentage of home-schooled children in France doubled between 2007 and 2014 (admittedly this is still very low, rising from 0.16% to 0.32% between these two dates).

Schools therefore have everything to gain from rapidly recognizing this new paradigm and preparing for it. The “one size fits all” teaching method runs the risk of becoming obsolete. The new role of the school would then be to help the student along an individual path, with a combination of numerous teaching solutions, digital in particular.

>>> What tangible forms could this take? I will in the second part of this paper.