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 Three

Gary Marx: So these are some concepts we need to think about. And that’s our purpose today, to get us all thinking about these things. Let's look at some of the implications of this trend. Top of the list is that we need to shape the education system for the future. We need to help educators and students understand and apply the principles of continuous improvement. You have probably been in school systems, maybe in your own schools, where kids are actually involved in discussing their personal learning objectives. Of course, many of those objectives are connected to the requirements of the system. The students take a look at what they’re studying and their needs and accomplishments and they apply them to their objectives. They are very much involved in the continuous improvement process and are part of the management process for improvement.

Another trend: Technology will increase the speed of communication, the pace of advancement or decline. We’re moving to atoms to bits, according to Nick Negroponte at MIT. At the same time, we’re moving from macro to micro to nano. One of the people who’s been an adviser to all of these studies we’ve done on the future of education is Marv Cetron. Some of you know Marv. He’s president of Forecasting International.

Marv tells us that 80 percent of all the scientists…all the chemists, all the physicists, all the medical doctors, you can throw in all the engineers if you like, who have ever lived in the history of humankind are alive today and they’re on the Internet. Now, I’ve got a cousin named Shirley from Storm Lake, Iowa. Shirley did some genealogical research a while back. She found out that on my mother’s side of the family we’re related to Johannes Kepler, the gentleman who discovered the laws of interplanetary motion. Back when Kepler and Copernicus and Tyco Brahe and Ulug Bek and Galileo were doing their work, they’d come up with a discovery. Then they’d jot it down in their journals. Shortly thereafter, they’d be sent off to the hoosegow for a couple of years for heresy. Then, maybe 80 years later, someone would pull that journal off the shelf, leaf through it, find an idea interesting, and they’d build on it. Well, what once took 80 years is now taking eight minutes or eight seconds.

That means that the school, the school system, the community, the business, the country that is preparing for the future by unleashing the genius of its people though high-quality education and appropriate use of technology is going to move forward at an unprecedented rate. Unfortunately, it also means that the school, the school system, the community, the business, the country that is not unleashing the genius of its people through high-quality education and appropriate use of technology is going to fall backward at an unprecedented rate. As we said right at the outset, there is no more status quo. Take a look at 20th century technologies, identified by the Markle Foundation. As you examine these technologies, whether you’re looking at communications technologies, transportation technologies, or medical technologies, the one thing you can conclude is--they have all had a quantum or an exponential impact on the pace of change.

What’s the technology that’s going to drive our economy in the near future? It’s going to be nanotechnology, technology at the molecular level. We’re talking mighty small here. As you know, it’s already possible to move atoms around within the molecule. That means we’ll able to create stronger, lighter-weight materials than the world has ever known – in some cases, superconductors – that will have a quantum or exponential impact on the speed and capacity of our computers. We’ll have medical breakthroughs that will allow us to deliver medications directly to a single diseased cell. We’re going to have pharmaceuticals designed for our genetic makeup.

Now let’s jump out of nano for just a minute and take a look at sources of energy. Have you been to a pump lately? I understand here in the San Francisco area that gas is about as high as it is anywhere in the country – and that’s inexpensive compared to what gas sells for at the pump in many other countries. But eventually we’re going to run short of petroleum. And before we do, it’s going to be so expensive we can’t afford it anyway.

When’s the last time in the past month you’ve seen anybody take the old Winnebago down to the store to get a loaf of bread – it costs you three or four bucks to get down there and back. Who’s going to develop hydrogen fusion? Who’s going to develop multi-fuel hybrids? Who’s going to develop renewable sources of energy? Who’s going to develop these nanotechnologies and then help us take them to market to sustain our economy? It’s going to be the kids who are in our schools today.

So what are the implications for education? I don’t have the answer, but it’s a question we all need to be asking. I had a meeting a while back with some scientists and they were telling us what they have on the drawing board, things that are coming on line very soon. I thought I'd share a few of them with you. For example, they mentioned satellites the size of footballs that can be launched with a cannon as opposed to a rocket. Now, of course, you’re not going to get the shuttle up there with a cannon; you’re not going to get the Hubble space telescope up there with a cannon. They mentioned surveillance devices the size of a speck of dust that you can plant in somebody’s office, in their vehicle, in their home. Some people say, "Won't this great for the war on terrorism?" And, they give it more thought and say, "Hey, what about my personal privacy?"

Other technologies: These people are telling us that by 2020 we’re going to have a computer the size of a cube of sugar that will have more computing power than all the computers that currently exist on the face of the earth.

And then, we’re hearing more and more discussion about subatomic particles – neutrinos, quarks. If we’re ever able to develop subatomic machines, we will be below the level of mechanical friction. We’re not anywhere close at this point, but it could happen as we move into the future.

We need to redefine this whole issue of technology. Granted, we need to get the hardware; we need to get the software; we need to keep things maintained; we need the professional development; we need to use it creatively – but let’s redefine where technology fits. It’s not just the technology, it’s what the technology does to unleash the genius of students, staff, and community, and to increase the pace of change that will really make the difference. And isn’t a lion’s share of our work in education the process of releasing that genius?

So what are some of the implications of this technology trend for our schools? I’ll get off this list for a minute and just tell you I think we’re going to have increasing numbers of students coming to our schools with more information on a lot of topics than their teachers have. It’s already happening. They may have had more time than the teachers did last night to mine the Internet – which means perhaps that teachers will be using their higher-level skills and probably enjoying teaching even more. It means that we have a lot of kids with not much life experience who have a lot of data and information. The teacher will help move those kids from raw data and information toward usable knowledge and then, we hope, toward wisdom. Teachers will not only be subject matter specialists or age group specialists, but they will also be facilitators of learning, orchestrators of learning, partners with those students in learning. They won't be upset at all if a child comes to school and has more information on a topic than the teacher, because they’re partners in learning. They almost teach each other.

Then, I think we need to prepare our students to understand not only how to use technologies but to understand that they are the ones who will need to develop new generations of technology. All many of these energized young kids need is someone to tell them that maybe that can be done, and they’re off and running. Occasionally, when I'm doing a speaking engagement, school systems will say, we've met with the teachers and administrators and community people. Maybe we should also have you meet with our fourth, fifth, and sixth graders or with high school or college students? These kids just come alive thinking about the future, because that’s where they'll be living their lives.

Here’s an economic growth opportunity for your community, for your state. It has to do with the web, the Internet. There’s a new web-hosting industry developing. The one we have now, this whole World Wide Web, is built on stacks of computers in lots of different places. It’s sort of haywired together; it’s grown like topsy – but this web-hosting business is forecast to become a $28.5 billion business by 2005 compared to a $3.5 billion business in 2000. I ask you, does that carry any economic growth opportunities for you and your community? Does it have any implications for how we educate our children, what they need to know and be able to do? So that’s one opportunity that grows out of some of these trends.

Another of these trends – Knowledge creation and breakthrough thinking will spur a new era of enlightenment. I believe we’re going to move from information acquisition toward knowledge creation. Here’s how all this is going to work, I believe. We need to help students learn across disciplines, to grab a chunk of information over here in the physical sciences and a chunk of information over here in the social sciences and bring the two together, fuse them, and create new knowledge. That’s how ideas, institutions, and whole industries develop. Now, if I say teach across disciplines, people get a little upset. They say, if we divert our teaching we’re not going to do well on those high-stakes tests. So if we say, learn across disciplines then we can be as creative as we need to be in helping students do that. Some of it is logistic and some of the challenge is semantic.

We need to apply what we’ve learned from cognitive research--from brain research. I was walking by a meeting room yesterday, and there was a great big picture of a synapse up there on the screen, firing away up there. We know that the brain, more than anything else, creates connections. We need to give the brain things to connect. We need to build on students’ strengths--on those multiple intelligences that Howard Gardener has identified. There are some people who complain we teach to about two of those intelligences and everybody else – good luck.

I also believe we need to consider making futures studies a basic part of education. I go to meetings in this country and other countries where kids are involved in programs such as Project Citizen, where they identify issues in their community. They sort them out, do the research on those issues and then come up with solutions to the problems they face in their own communities, their countries, or even the world. Then, they develop suggested public policy. Often, they take the policies they've drafted to city hall or county government or the state. The officials are sometimes floored. They didn’t know our kids were capable of doing this type of forward thinking. In some cases, they actually adopt the policies.

I think we need to show the connections between what we’re teaching and how it’s going to be useful in the outside world. If we can’t show some connection, then we need to ask, should we be teaching it? The answer probably would be yes, we need to be teaching it anyway. But we need to be answering that question.

That becomes difficult in education sometimes, because a lot of us have spent our entire lives working in education, and we’re not sure exactly how what we're teaching might be useful in a current setting. That’s one reason why we need to have lots of connections in the community, so that we can draw that information in and share it with our students, or draw the people in who can share it with the kids. Here’s another jolt for Marvin Cetron. Marv says half of what engineering students learn as freshmen in college is outdated by the time they’re seniors. So if we freeze the system, it’s a quick downhill slide.

Now let’s take a look at some industries that are developing across disciplines. Bioinformatics, for example, is the fusion of high-powered computers and medicine. It's revolutionizing medical care. Another example is telematics. Soon, we'll be buying our cars because of their telematics – the global positioning system; MEMS, miniature electronic measurement systems, built into each tire and so the tire pressure can be displayed on your dashboard. There are other ways to look at these telematic cars. Did you know that about 56 million cars will be fitted with communications navigation systems by about 2005? Any economic growth opportunities there? More than a million cars now have General Motors’ ONSTAR GPS system. Already, we can, on board, ask our global positioning system to find an Italian restaurant. It will not only find the nearest one for us, but it will draw us a little map on the screen to tell us how to get there. If you have to go to a bathroom, it will probably tell you where it is on that map. There's a small SOS button. If something goes wrong, just press that button and a voice will come on and say, "What’s the problem? Where are you?" Well, they don’t have to ask where you are because they can figure it out by using the satellite connected global positioning system.

Let’s take a look at some emerging careers, and ask yourself, do they have any implications for our schools, for the way we educate our kids. Here are a few of those careers. Artificial intelligence technician. Automotive fuel cell battery technician. Computational linguist. Information broker. Leisure consultant. Medical diagnostic imaging technician.

Other emerging careers: web cataloguer, fusion engineer, image consultant, space mechanic, cryonics technician, virtual set designer, tissue engineer, smart home technician – and the list goes on and on. I don’t often quote Faith Popcorn. She’s got a fairly new dictionary of the future, and she says that by the year 2015, more than half – some people even say 80 percent of us – will be working at jobs that don’t even exist today. Stephanie Pace Marshall, one of the people I admire so very much – president of the Illinois Math and Science Academy, former president of ASCD, has been an adviser to every one of these studies we’ve done on the future of education. Stephanie says the current story is that intelligence is a defined and fixed capacity. But the new story is that intelligence is learnable, and the potential and the capacity for learning are inexhaustible and expanding.

So here are some things I think our schools need to consider. One, I think we need to create intellectual entrepreneurs. You show me a student, you show me a person, who is curious and persistent, and I’ll show you a person who probably will be pretty well educated for the rest of her or his life. We need to move students from fragments to relationships, toward breakthrough thinking. We need to help our students trigger ideas. Wouldn’t it be great if at the end of a class we’d stand up and ask the class, "I want you to think about what we discussed today – does that trigger any ideas for you?" And then, at the end of the class the world would be smarter than it was when the class got underway, because we got these kids to think about implications. That's what we're doing today. We're asking you to think about the implications of these trends. We’ve got to move from the static to the dynamic.

I’ve been doing some work in Argentina. As you know, they're going through a difficult time economically and need to think about the country they would like to see in perhaps 2010, their bicentennial year. Otherwise, it is easy to fall into pessimism, and that's not very constructive. At one of the conferences where I was speaking, I mentioned the street kids I'd noticed around Buenos Aires and many other places in this country and in cities such as Istanbul, Moscow, and Saigon. I speculated that these kids must have to be very entrepreneurial to survive. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could enable them to use those entrepreneurial skills in a really positive way. They could possibly become some of our great leaders, because of the experiences they’ve had in simply surviving. They could be very sensitive leaders of the future. The idea sparked a fairly significant discussion.

We’re moving, as Herb Rubenstein, who’s also a futurist, said the other day–from a knowledge era to a leadership era, where leadership is considered as essential a skill as reading and writing. I thought, does that have some implications for those of us who are educators and for our schools?

I’m going to go through a couple more trends, and then I’m going to turn you loose with some questions and we’re going to have discussion.

Another trend. Scientific discoveries and societal realities will force widespread ethical choices. We’re going to move from the pragmatic – whatever works and the expedient – whatever’s easiest – to the ethical, what’s the right thing to do. I’d like to have us think for a moment about some of the big ethical issues our kids are going to be facing during their lifetimes.

We currently have about 6 billion people on the face on the earth – in fact, it’s about 6.2 billion right now. By 2050, the estimate is – and this is a conservative estimate – that we’ll have about 8.9 billion people on earth. That’s a 50 percent increase in 50 years. Of our current six billion people who live on this planet, 2.8 billion of them, about half, live on less than two dollars a day. Of that number, 1.3 billion live on less than one dollar a day. Those of us in North America can say, oh well, we’re Americans, we work hard, we work smart, we deserve what we have. You may justify that; that may all be true. But are we nationally secure and is the planet secure with half the people on the face of the earth living on less than two dollars a day? I don’t think so. I think our millennials may even see that as an ethical problem. Are our kids capable of dealing with problems of this magnitude as they move into their adulthood.

We’re going to be facing all the issues surrounding genetic engineering, the genome, global warming, and access to fresh water. It's very likely that many of our future wars will be fought over access to fresh water; it's becoming more and more of an issue. In fact, mini-wars are now taking place between and among states about access to fresh water. More of these ethical issues--dealing with crime and corruption and books-cooking. We’ve seen that happen with Enron, Andersen, WorldCom, and other somewhat similar affairs. Still other ethically charged issues: clashes among cultures and civilization; violations of human rights; production, distribution, control of weapons; introducing life forms on other planets. As you all know, during the past few months, we have discovered that there indeed is water on Mars. So don’t you think that within the next couple of years somebody is going to suggest that we re-establish an atmosphere of some kind on the planet Mars, no matter how thin, and perhaps introduce life forms, or reintroduce other life forms. Should we do that? Is it strictly a scientific decision, or are there ethical implications? These are some of the issues that our kids will be dealing with as they grow into their adulthood.

So what are some of the implications for our schools? We need to model ethical leadership in our schools. We need to clarify the schools’ role in teaching about ethics – I didn’t say we should tell people what their ethical code should be, but they need to know there is such a thing as an ethical code.

We need to expand civic and character education. How about including an ethical component in most courses. Maybe you’d like to do something like what we earlier suggested with “triggering ideas.” At the end of a class period, maybe you ask, "What are the ethical implications of what we’ve been talking about for us as individuals – for our schools, for our communities, for our world?"

As educators, we need to be concerned about reputation management. When there is an ethical breach in a school system, everything else seems to go right out the window. Everything seems as if it is almost pulled to a halt, because it becomes such a big public issue. Look what happened to the companies we mentioned earlier like Enron, Andersen, and WorldCom, and many others. We need to help students, educators, and communities understand that ethical behavior is essential; the price of crime, corruption, and inappropriate behavior runs very, very high. There are plenty of lessons out there today and I trust that your teachers are dealing with them.

Okay, the final trend. Competition will increase as industries and professions intensify their efforts to attract and keep talented people. We are moving from an era of unemployment to an era of hyper-employment. The latest unemployment figure is 5.8 percent (February 2003) – up a tick. It got down to 3.9 percent in April of 2000.

We are not very competitive when it comes to drawing people into careers in education. We need to make a greater investment in preparation and professional development programs. We need to become more competitive. Often we find what some people call unacceptable working conditions, such as high standards coupled with inadequate resources. Some people sense of a lack of respect. Here is another jolt that jumped off the pages of Ed Week at me: 49 percent – nearly half – of 1992-1993 college graduates who prepared to teach while they were in school had actually ever worked in a school four years later. We have lost nearly half our teachers before they ever got to their first classroom.

We have a lot of elephants in the room in education. The issues are so big that we either don't see them or don't want to talk about them. We have to bring the elephants out so we can see them and deal with them. And we have to deal with them as a society, because education needs support to get the job done. Our future depends on it. We need to help our students understand that education is also a career option. And we need to understand that we may be competing in an international marketplace for the skills and talents we need.

Now those are the trends. People have been on my case since September 11, 2001. They have been asking what trends I've seen developing since those planes crashed into the World Trade Center? I’m not going to tell you that there are trends moving in one direction or the other – but there are a number of tugging trends, and I want to share just a few of those with you.

Justice is tugging against revenge. We could have an all-day discussion of justice versus revenge – for some people revenge is justice. We are a country that is built on the philosophy that all things are possible. After 9/11, we were oppressed by our own fears. People stopped flying and were cowering in their homes. They stopped investing. The future became less sure. Doubts and fears flourished. So we’ve got this tug: oppressed by our own fears versus all things are possible. Are we going to get back to a philosophy that all things are possible? Because that’s what has driven the country. In many ways, that is a philosophy that drives democracy.

Other tugging trends. Economic growth tugging against environmental sustainability. Renewal versus righteousness. That’s always a tug: “Oh, you can’t tell me because I’m always right.” But we have to renew our institutions. Unilateral independence versus interdependence. Here is another one: economic advantage/conspicuous consumption tugging against spirituality. I’m not just talking about religion. People are fascinated to find out that they can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and then all of a sudden they are standing back saying, “But my life is falling apart.” They are asking, who is this person inside this wired hulk? And they are then going out to discover who they are.

We have another tug between “America, Inc.” and “America the Idea.” We need to make it clear that it is America the Idea that makes America, Inc. possible. Enlightened corporations understand that fully. They understand the concept of social responsibility and corporate citizenship.

Here is another tugging trend. "United we stand!" You know that after 9/11 the posters went up everywhere. We had belt buckles, T-shirts, bumper stickers – and they all said “United We Stand.” Here's the tug. Will it be united we stand for our highest aspirations, for freedom, for democracy, for the elevation of the human spirit? Or will it be united we stand for the lowest common denominator – survival of the fittest? Our direction will depend largely on our education. What are the implications for our schools? This is a tug we are facing, even today, all over the world.

I'm sure you're asking what we can do with all this information. I’ve been talking about a lot of trends, and there are many other trends, in addition to the ten we've discussed today. I would suggest that we all consider ourselves strategic futurists--that we all take on the futurist role--because that’s where our kids are going to live. I suggest that we do parallel planning--that while we do our planning for the next six months, or year, or two years – whatever term is right for you – that we have another diverse group of people engaged in generative thinking. That group is not making the plans. They are constantly looking at trends, looking at issues, and they're asking, "What are the implications for us…for our schools…for our students – what they need to know and be able to do?" Then, they feed their thinking, their generative thinking, back into the planning process. They're playing that entrepreneurial, leadership role we've been talking about.

How might you structure this type of thing in a school district or other education system? Well, you might appoint a district-wide/institution-wide “trends council” – that diverse group that engages in generative thinking. Then periodically survey staff and community to unlock the genius that you have inside the system and in your community. That very process will help you gain further insights, establish ownership, and tap all of that knowledge and experience that is already out there. Then, appoint a staff trends action team. The possible implications of trends and issues then come to that group. The staff trends action team would consider all of these possible implications and make suggestions for possible policies, programs, and so on. That thinking, those suggestions, then go to the leadership team and may find their way into policies, into plans for the next two or three years. The process itself will help us stay close to the people we serve and to benefit regularly from the genius of our community and staff. It will help us constantly renew the system and engage in the process of creating a future.

All of that can only happen if we work together as a community, internally and externally. Let me tell you about my hometown of Manchester, South Dakota. When I was a kid there were 45 people in my hometown. Today there are nine people. When I was growing up, we did not have running water. We had a town pump in the middle of the main street. If you wanted water to take a bath, to drink, to wash clothes, you filled a bucket at the town pump. If you wanted hot water, you put the water on the stove and heated it. Well, there were times in the middle of winter when the temperature would nose-dive to 25 to 35 degrees below zero. Guess what! The pump froze! Now, we had people in my hometown who didn’t like each other – we said they weren’t on speakin’ terms. But in the middle of the winter when the pump froze, they all showed up in the middle of Main Street to build a fire to thaw out the pump. Why did they do that? Because water was essential to their lives – they couldn’t live without it.

If we hope to maintain a free and democratic society, a free market economy – if we hope to have a future as a world – then education is our town pump. We can’t do without it.

Today, I’m a very lucky person, because I have had the opportunity to be with some of the most outstanding educators on the face of the earth – some of the members and people who are involved in ASCD. I am in awe of what you do, and I thank you for the privilege of being with you. Thank you what you do each and every minute of each and every day for kids, for education, and for the communities you serve.

Contact Information: Gary Marx, President, Center for Public Outreach, 1831 Toyon Way, Vienna, Virginia 22182, USA. Phone: 703-938-8725. Email: gmarxcpo@aol.com

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