What Will a 21st Century Education Look Like?

Over the years I've looked back on my own education and wondered why does it always feel 20 years behind what's going on in the real world? Why was I being taught how to use a typewriter instead of a word processor? Why was I learning shorthand when we have tape recorders? Why are there no classes I can take (beyond BASIC) to further develop my computer programming skills?

Occasionally I would be accused of leaning too heavily on technology. I disagree. More than anything else I believe education must hold itself accountable to being relevant to our future. Technology, as I see it, is simply an access point to relevance. Walk into a classroom today and look around. You'll see things such as overhead projectors, cassette players, chalk boards, and standardized tests. They're all obsolete yet we're still using them.

Throughout my own education I saw a rapidly changing world that wasn't matching up to the textbook-driven, passive learning of facts I was being exposed to in my classrooms. Fast forward to today and the rapid changes I witnessed back in the late 80s and early 90s are nothing compared to what I've seen in the last ten years. The fact we can look up anything at anytime on our smartphones is itself a game changer in education.

While it may be convenient for society to tuck kids away in buildings for 8 hours a day, learning no longer has to take place at a set time, in a set place. The digital age has allowed learning to happen anywhere at anytime. That's a major cultural shift education must confront. Students no longer have to spend their days sitting in successive classrooms memorizing facts to regurgitate on a test because they can look up the same information on Google in a fraction of the time, anytime they need it.

Local, state, and federal policy makers rarely considered the possibility that students might one day have an option to learn outside a room with four walls. Without this forward thinking, it gave rise to the standardized testing mania we have today. The assumption that education will always be teacher-centered and passive learning and memorization of discrete facts will always be the norm. That's great scientific management of our population should we want to deploy a factory model based upon the needs of employers in the Industrial Age. The only problem is we're in the 21st century.

The biggest challenge that schools must overcome is the emergence of participatory, user-driven technologies. The fragmented curriculum that exists today must be replaced with an integrated and interdisciplinary curriculum that engages each individual student, helps them adapt, and inspires them to dream, innovate, and create. We're talking about real-life, relevant, project-based 21st century education that is outcome-based. The future of education isn’t in finding the best way to get all students to pass the same test. The focus should be on what students know, are like, and can do after all the "facts" are forgotten. It's a system where active, research-driven learning is encouraged and supported. It's student-centered. The teacher's role shifts from being provider of information to coach and facilitator of learning.

As school districts across the country ponder what their future will look like, it’s impossible to envision it without understanding the new means of pedagogy and how students and teachers will interact 10, 20, even 50 years from now. There is indeed an important connection between pedagogy and facilities that must be critically looked at before any decision about future learning spaces can be made.