Ten Trends: Educating Children for a Profoundly Different Future

Presenter: Gary Marx, Center for Public Outreach, Vienna, VA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part One

GARY MARX: I’m Gary Marx, President of the Center for Public Outreach in Vienna, Virginia. That’s in the Washington, D.C. area. Prior to forming CPO in 1998, I spent about 20 years as a senior executive for the American Association of School Administrators. I’ve been an administrator in two school systems – the Jefferson County Public Schools in the Denver area and Westside Community Schools in Omaha. I also worked in broadcasting for number of years. Currently, as an international consultant, I do a great deal of work in many countries around the world, focusing on future-oriented education, communication, leadership, community, and democracy. I’m delighted you are here today, because we’re going to talk about forces that will impact our future.

I’m particularly pleased to be working with ASCD. I have been an ASCD member for many years. This is a great organization. Would you like to give ASCD a round of applause for the magnificent work they do? I’ve spoken at a number of ASCD events – the Leadership Conference as well as state and chapter meetings in various parts of the U.S. and the world. I’ll be Singapore in a few months to speak to the ASCD chapter there.

So thank you for coming today. We’re going to spend a couple of hours together, so by the time we finish I hope you feel that we’re all friends and almost family. Let’s get ready to go as together we ignite this passion that we have for learning. We need to be reading the signals, and that’s what we’re going to try to do during this presentation…pick up some signals about the future.

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I want you to know that I respect all of you as high-grade professionals. So my aim is not to try to tell you what to do. Instead, our aim today is to stimulate your thinking about the impact of future forces on education, on the education system, on our students, and on our profession. Educators, I believe, need to be environmentalists. Educators need to adapt the organization to the needs of the environment and, at the same time, adapt the environment to the needs of the organization.

Today our topic is “Ten Trends: Educating Children for a Profoundly Different Future.” There’s a book by that title, published by the Educational Research Service. I worked with the ERS Schools of the Future Counsel in doing the study and serving as author of that book. I saw Katherine Behrens of ERS a bit earlier here at the conference. She told me that she has some of the books in her booth, so I wanted to let you know that just in case you’re interested.

This is the third fairly major study of the future of education that I have had a hand in directing during the past several years. When I was a senior executive at the American Association of School Administrators, I initiated a study that was released in 1996 devoted to Preparing Students for the 21st Century. In that study, we took a look at the academic knowledge, the skills, and the behaviors students would need to exhibit to be prepared for life not necessarily in an industrial age, but in a global knowledge/ information age. We took a look at the results of that work, and we asked ourselves, hey, do we have the kind of systems capable of delivering that type of education? The answer was, obviously, in some cases we do, but in too many cases we don’t.

So we did another study devoted to Preparing Schools and School Systems for the 21st Century. In that study, we involved a distinguished Council of 21 leaders in business, education, government, and other fields. We had former astronauts, cultural anthropologists, futurists, forecasters, and many others involved. They took a look at the characteristics of the schools and school systems we need to prepare students for life in a global knowledge/information age. We held our conference at Mount Vernon. John Glenn was our Honorary Chair. Following the conference of our Council of 21, we did a nationwide quasi-Delphi survey to narrow the list of characteristics.

I think you’d all agree that those two studies took a look at the innards of the system – what kids need to know and be able to do and the shape of the system. But while we’re looking at the inside of our education system, there are these trends that are sweeping across society. They are buffeting us, and we need to know what they are, because they are future forces, and our schools are very much a part of society as a whole.

We are shaped by society. You know what we said about being environmentalists. You might think of these trends as seismic shifts. Think of them as tectonic plates moving beneath the surface of the earth, banging against each other. Take a good look at the terrain and admire it, because it will never look the same again.

When we’re faced with forces of this magnitude, we have a distinct choice. One, we can defend the past; we can defend the status quo. And there are some people who tell us that in education we have done such a good job of defending the past and defending the status quo that we have actually deprived ourselves of the privilege of creating a future. And when you think about leadership, isn’t creating a future one of our primary responsibilities? Now don’t get me wrong--I’m not pure as the driven snow, because I’m the one who, several years ago, advised you to invest in canals, because the railroads would never amount to anything.

Rosa Parks got tired of sitting in the back of the bus. She got tired of giving up her seat on the bus. And she said, “Rather than find a road, sometimes we need to create a road.”

Ed Wilson – noted Harvard professor, biologist, sage on the world stage – wrote about what it is going to take to create a 21st century education system. Here’s what Ed Wilson said: “This is a very difficult task, but so are cardiac surgery and building space vehicles difficult tasks. Competent people get on with them because they need to be done, and why should we expect less from professionals responsible for education?”

Now those are either fighting words or they are challenging words, depending on where we sit and where we stand. I hope for everyone in this room that those are challenging words. How many of you saw the movie “Apollo 13”? Let me see your hands. Look at that! What do you think, 90 percent in this room saw “Apollo 13”? You know the story, of course. True story. A spacecraft is on its way to the moon. There’s an explosion on board. They slingshot around the moon; the world holds its breath; they make it safely back to earth. Gene Kranz, who was involved in that mission, is quoted as saying, “failure is not an option.” I think as we look at these trends today, we will again conclude that failure is indeed not an option for any of the kids in our schools, because we are living in a fast-moving world. We’re either headed for breakthroughs or we’re headed for breakdowns.

A year or so ago, I was elected to the board of directors of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the World Future Society. It’s a good group. They hold a meeting every month and invite a futurist from somewhere in the United States or some other part of the world to speak. During the past few years, the chapter invited a gentleman named Michel Godet to be our primary speaker. He is the leading French futurist, an expert on scenario planning. I wanted to share with you a few things that Michel Godet had to say. I’m not going try his French accent. But you might want to use some of these things in an article you write, in a speech you give, or in a meeting with your community.

He said, “The faster the car, the stronger the headlights must be.” He seemed to be peering into the future. He said, “The longer a tree takes to grow, the earlier you have to plant it.” And this one I like very much. He said, “Lack of foresight in the past has led to the present situation in which yesterday’s questions have become today’s urgent matters.” Isn’t that the way it is for most of us? And there is a sense of historic urgency here.

There’s probably not a person in this room who asked to be born at this time in history. There’s probably not a person in this room who realized when you were knee-high to grasshopper that you would grow up to be involved in the most important business, the most important industry on the face of the earth, and that’s education. But here we are at one of the most crucial times in history--because we are the first generations of people who have the capability to destroy the world. And we’re the last generations of people who are capable of saving it. What happens will depend largely on how well we educate our children. Yes, what we do is that important.

So the handwriting is on the wall. There is no more business as usual. If we’ve been resting on laurels, rest no more, because laurels have a way of wilting under us. The status quo is nothing more than a ticket to obsolescence. Now, at this point, there are often some people who will slouch down in their chairs and say, look, I’m busy. We’ve got No Child Left Behind. We’ve got a lack of funding. We’ve got all kinds of other things on our backs. Don’t suggest anything, because we won’t be able to do it. And they’ll say, "We can’t do that because…" Anybody in a position of leadership has heard that same thing every time you've come up with a program that you think will improve education for kids. Somebody will say, "We can’t do that because…we don’t have the money…we don’t have the people…we don’t have the professional development.

There’s a question we need to ask whenever we hear "We can’t do that because…" And that question is, "What are we going to do about it?" We’re talking about the education of children here. We’re talking about the future. We may ask that question, "What are we going to do about it?" 20 times and decide there’s nothing we can do about it. But on behalf of the children, it’s a question that needs to be asked.

I ask you, what’s currently driving the education agenda in the United States? We have a lot of Canadian friends and people from other parts of the world here as well. But I think most people in the United States would agree that it’s No Child Left Behind. And that, if you aren’t from this country, is the updated version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Unfortunately, many of our states in this country have limited resources. The economy is a little soft, and the tax revenues aren’t rolling in as quickly as some people thought they might. So you have limited resources tugging against the expanded requirements of No Child Left Behind.

What should command our educational agenda is creating the education system we need to prepare students for life in a global knowledge information age. So we need to build on No Child Left Behind while making sure that we don’t shortchange the very things that might make progress possible but aren’t easily tested. We’re going to talk more about that later.

As we move along, here are some things I’d like to have you think about. In your handouts there are some fairly blank sheets for you to jot down your ideas. Think about what these trends might mean for how we run our schools and school systems. There’s another sheet that will ask you what the implications of these trends might be for what students need to know and be able to do – their knowledge, their skills, their behaviors. And another one. You could speculate on whatever position you find yourself in, whether you’re a superintendent or a principal or a curriculum director or a teacher, or whatever position you hold, whether you’re at a state or national department of education or a ministry of education or in a nongovernmental organization. Whatever your position, ask yourself, "What are the implications for us?" You might also want to think about the implications for economic growth and development in your community, in your state, and in your country – because all of these trends have implications for economic development as well.

We’re going to move on to the first of these trends. I do want you all to know that you’re all going to be safe, because I have brought some duct tape for all of us, so you didn’t have to worry about it. If we need it, I’ve got it right up here. Just let me know. By the way, we had a big snowstorm in the DC area a few weeks ago, and I found a use for the duct tape. We were snowed in for two and a half days and didn’t see a snowplow. I used it to tape my mouth shut so that the neighbors wouldn’t hear me scream when cabin fever started to settle in.

Okay, let’s jump right into these trends. For the first time in history, the old will outnumber the young. Why is that? Until this past century, people simply didn’t live very long. Now, here’s some of the handwriting on the wall. In 2000, 27 percent of the U.S. population was 18 or under, 21 percent 55 or older. But move out just 17 years to 2020 – 25 percent of our population will be 18 or under, 30 percent will be 55 or older. It’s a fact that whenever life expectancies and average ages go up, and when birth rates and death rates go down, a society becomes inevitably older. We all know that.

Here’s the one that has a shaking in our boots: It’s the Social Security worker-to-beneficiary ratio. If we lived in a place like Italy or the United Kingdom or Japan, we’d be even shakier. But take a look at these numbers. Back in 1950, we had 16 people working for every person drawing benefits from the Social Security system. In 2000, we had three and a half people working for every person drawing benefits from the Social Security system. But move out to 2030, when the baby boomers will be between 66 and 84 years of age. In 2030, we'll have only two people working for every person drawing benefits from the Social Security system, and both of those people are going to have to be very, very productive, thank you. That is, if you want that Social Security check to be in the mail next Tuesday. So we have a vested interest – even a mercenary interest, if you need it – in ensuring a sound education. We need to make sure that those students are well enough educated that they can go out and make a good living and can afford to pay their Social Security taxes.

I do quite a bit of work with the World Future Society. I speak at its conferences and so on. When you work in futures, you often come up with a possible trend. You look at the pros and cons and do some research to determine why this might or might not be a trend. Then, once you’ve determined that something is indeed a trend and you want people to think about it, you stretch it to see what else is in it. So I’d like to stretch this trend, if you don’t mind, and see what you think.

Let’s stretch this trend internationally – this aging of the population. Take a look at the United States population in 2000 – about 275 million. By 2050, it’s estimated that our population will be about 404 million, and at that time about 26 percent of our population will be from birth to 19; 31 percent 55 or older. The Western World is diminishing substantially as a percentage of the total world population. Take a look at Italy for example: current population 57.6 million; by 2050, the population of Italy will drop to 45 million, and of that 45 million only 15 percent will be from birth to 19, and 48 percent will be 55 or older.

Take a look at Russia: current population 146 million. By 2050, the population of Russia is expected to drop to 118 million, of which only 19 percent will be from birth to 19; 41 percent 55 or older. Now, I would ask you to take a look at Yemen: current population 17 and a half million; by 2050, it’s projected that the population of Yemen will be 71.1 million people. How many-fold increase is that? Pretty gigantic. And in 2050, it's expected that 42 percent of the Yemeni population, living in Yemen, will be from birth to 19, 11 percent will be 55 or older.

My point here is that I want you to think about what happens when you have a lot of young people between the ages of 16 and 24, for example, who are un- or undereducated or unemployed. We’ve seen it in our own country, haven’t we? They become very, very angry, and they can become cannon fodder for terrorism. So the point is that we have an interest in ensuring sound education for people all over this world. National boundaries don’t protect us. We need to be concerned about the education of children virtually everywhere.

What are some of the implications of this aging trend? I’ll share a few with you, just to get the idea pumps going here, because you can think of a lot of other implications. I think we may need to recruit and retain older citizens for service as educators. As you know, we have a lot of people retiring. They’re taking the early out. The minute they can get out, they retire. Now if we could be a little bit more flexible – a lot of people would love to continue to work in the system as a teacher or administrator, but they don’t want to work all the time. There are other things they want to do in their lives. I think we’re going to be calling on experienced people to help us build connections between what we’re teaching in the classroom and how it might be useful to those students in their lives. There are some people who are telling us that unless students can see the usefulness in what they’re learning, they’re not going to be very interested.

In terms of seeing that connection, I was working in Taiwan a while back, and we were in Taichung at an elementary school. They had a portion of that elementary school set aside for older citizens. These older people were coming in, and they’d sit down in a kind of glass enclosed area. They would sip their tea and read the paper, and all these wonderful children were walking by. Occasionally, a teacher would come in and say something like, "Mr. Wong, you’re an engineer, aren’t you? Didn’t you work as an engineer? Will you come into my classroom and talk to the students about how what they’re learning in math today will be useful to them when they get a little bit older and move into a profession, into a job, into a career?"

I think we’re going to need to expand adult education courses, other opportunities for lifelong learning. If we hope to maintain a constituency, we need to make sure that we think about how we’re going to inform, how we’re going to involve, perhaps how we’re going to serve that other 72 to 75 percent in many communities who don’t have kids in our schools. We need to balance the political demands of the young and the old, and perhaps we even need to offer courses about aging. If you work in a high school, you very likely have some kids who go home and take care of an older parent or grandparent or older relative, who take care of an older neighbor – who might see geriatric care as a legitimate career option. Any implication for education? I don’t know. Maybe something we should think about. We need to promote intergenerational communication. We need, as educators, to communicate across generations in order to maintain our constituency, in order to understand the people in our communities, in order to get the votes we need to pass those finance elections. Our students also need to know how to communicate across generations.

Okay, another demographic trend, then we’ll move into some other areas. The country will become a nation of minorities. We have in the United States of America traditionally been a majority-minority society. We soon we will become a minority-minority society. Let’s stretch this trend. I think we may move from this majority-minority, minority-minority concept based on racial and ethnic minorities toward minorities based social and economic conditions. We may see a trend in that direction. You’re already seeing that concern in some parts of the country. And then, I think at some point we may see minorities based on the level and quality of education that people receive. Of course, you can make the point that this situation already exists, but I think we may see an even greater shift in this direction as we move into the future.

Now, let’s take a look at the handwriting on the wall. In 2000, 71 percent of the U.S. population was white. By 2050, only 53 percent of the population of this country will be white. Shortly after 2050, that percentage will drop below 50, and we will have no single racial or ethnic group in the United States of America that constitutes more than 50 percent of the population. We will indeed be a nation of minorities. Every person in this room or the person who represents you here in 2050 will be a member of a minority group. That will bring new life to our motto, E Pluribus Unum – of the many, one. And this whole phenomenon is going to happen much more quickly among young people aged birth to 18. I’m just delivering what the U.S. Census Bureau is telling us. In 2000, 64 percent of that age group was white. You move out to 2050, 46 percent will be white, and that shift is going to take place sometime between 2015 and 2020.

Now let’s talk about a couple of factors leading to this trend and then a couple of concerns. First, factors. One of the factors is certainly immigration, because at any point during the past several years, just under 10 percent of the population was born outside the United States. Another of these factors is birth rates, which tend to vary among various racial and ethnic groups. That can have an exponential or a quantum impact on the make-up of a population. There are a couple of words that I believe we should be using more often. One is “exponential” and the other is “quantum.” You’ll hear them more than once during this presentation today. When you think about it, slight variations in birth rates, for example, multiplied by millions of people, can have a fairly profound impact on the make-up of an entire population.

Let’s talk about some concerns. One of the concerns is whether we will have a cleft community, whether we will be or remain a cleft nation, with people living in enclaves, or whether we’re going to have a diaspora of some kind with people coming together in common purpose. You know, after 9/11 we said, "United We Stand." Do we really stand united if we are living in enclaves within our communities, if we’re living in enclaves within the country.

Another of these concerns – the percentage of children who are at-risk varies among various racial and ethnic groups. The Kids Count Databook, developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, tells us that six percent of white kids are at-risk, 29 percent of black kids at-risk, 24 percent of Hispanic kids at-risk. Now, think of the exponential, the quantum impact of those numbers unless we’re sure that we’re providing equal educational opportunity for all.

[Question from audience] What do mean by “at risk”? Can you define that? Response: We're talking about kids who could be at risk of school failure. Thanks for asking.

There’s another phenomenon that I think we need to pay attention to here. It’s called the Tiger Woods phenomenon, and it comes under the heading of “Melding, Melting, and Mixing.” Bud Hodgkinson points this out. I want to be there when Tiger Woods is asked to fill out that form, that federal form or that state form, that says “Race or Ethnicity – Check one,” because Tiger Woods is “Cablinasian.” I don’t think there would be a little box to check for Cablinasian. Tiger Woods is Caucasian, he’s Black, he’s Native American, he’s Asian – and he is becoming the face of America in many communities across this country.

What are some of the implications of this trend? Well, one of the implications we just talked about. That’s ensuring equal opportunity and improving achievement for all students, ALL in caps, underlined, bold. And we need to attract and keep the very best teachers we can for all of our schools. You know, there’s something that’s been happening in some school systems. I know it doesn’t happen in yours. But there are some school systems that have been accused of placing first-year teachers and those teachers who are having problems somewhere else in those schools where the kids have the greatest needs and the parents are least demanding. That’s been found out in some communities, and people are raising a ruckus.

We need to seek common denominators with as many groups in our communities as possible, so that we don’t become cleft communities. I don’t have to point out to you some of the cleft countries in the world where there are battles taking place in-country, because people have not come together in common purpose.

We need to develop an international focus. I believe that unless we understand the people, the histories, the cultures of the world, we may not even understand the students in our own classrooms. I say that to people in North America, but I say it to our colleagues in other countries as well. We need to understand each other.

Let’s move on to another trend. Let’s dive out of the demographics here for a while and take a look at economics. Another of these trends: Social and intellectual capital will become the primary economic value in society. We are moving, as we said earlier, from an industrial age at warp speed into a global knowledge/information age. If you want to stretch this trend, you have to consider that tug that’s going on between economic growth and environmental sustainability. And that’s one of the pressures that’s going to start impacting our basic trend or assumption. It’s perhaps accelerating the move toward social and intellectual capital, because that might be more environmentally sustainable, as some people see it today.

What do we mean when we’re talking about intellectual capital? Tom Stewart is one of the editors at Fortune Magazine. He’s written some books on intellectual capital. He defines it this way: “Intellectual capital is the intellectual material, it’s the knowledge, it’s the information, it’s the intellectual property, it’s the experience that can be put to use to create wealth. It is collective brainpower.”

There’s a gentleman named Dan McKnight, president of High Performance Strategy Associates. At a World Future Society conference a while back, he was asked to further define intellectual capital, and he did it this way: He said, “With land, labor, and traditional forms of capital, the more you make, the more you have to pay for it.” And that’s true, isn’t it? You have to go out and buy or rent the land, hire the labor, and acquire the capital. But with knowledge, you can’t use it up, because the more you use knowledge, the more it grows, and it creates a perpetual wealth machine.

Now let’s take a look at social capital. Bob Putnam, the gentleman who wrote that famous piece Bowling Alone, is the expert on social capital. At a White House economic conference a couple of years ago, he defined it this way: “The basic idea of social capital is that networks have value for transmitting information, for undergirding cooperation and reciprocity.” That’s a textbook definition if I’ve ever heard one. I needed a definition of social capital that I could readily understand, so I turned to that great American philosopher Yogi Berra, who defines social capital this way: “If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they aren’t going to come to yours.”

I want to share with you a few entrepreneurs in this age of social and intellectual capital. When some educators hear me use the word "entrepreneur," they say, "I knew it was coming to this, Gary. You’re going to tell us all we need to do is to prepare these kids to be good little worker bees, go out there and make a lot of money, and contribute to the economy." Well, if you want to build on to your church, your synagogue, your temple, or your mosque, if you want to build a park in your community, if you want to get the resources you need to improve education in your community, you’d better be entrepreneurial. So it works in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.

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