Technology has changed the way we educate our little ones, but the bottom line remains the same and goes back to our most basic instincts.
In 2020 it became obvious that education was facing a crisis that would affect the economic future of the planet. In his book “Against School Education”, Stanleyt Aronowitz explained that “during the 19th century the concern of teachers, law enforcement officers and political leaders was what to do during the working day with unemployed youth. An alternative was prison by day. But some, like Horace Mann, insisted that public school would be a more productive way to contain restless youth. Thus, according to education specialist Sir Ken Robinson, the current education system was born, “as an alternative to prison.”
In some ways things have not changed much. According to a report by the United States Department of Labor, 65% of boys and girls who start primary school in 2019 will have a job that does not yet exist. Not only did they not know what would happen in the future, they were not prepared for the changes either. In those times, 80% of the jobs that will be carried out from 2025 will require technological knowledge, but in Spain only 9% of graduates specialize in STEM (acronyms that in English mean Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) of agreement with the United Nations.
A solution was necessary. And urgently. The answer came from the past, as it often does. In ancient Rome, children from humble backgrounds, those whose families could not afford a private tutor, attended a ludus, an academy of learning. At the root of these academies was also the word playful: in many cases learning was a game. And from that moment on, an entire education system was developed with that concept as the basis and technology as the main tool.
The creation of the internet produced, more than half a century ago, a new Gutenberg moment: knowledge became democratized. This made the borders between institute, university and career slowly erase. At that moment we go from understanding that learning calculus is training, and that learning to think using calculus is education. But there was an obstacle. According to the report «The Microsoft Education Future Workforce», almost 60% of young people between 16 and 18 years old claimed to know more about technology than their teachers, and 71% that they learn more at home than in class about this topic . The key was not only to use technology, but also for it to be supported by content, the axis of education. Who started the revolution was, on the one hand, the educational expert from MIT, Woody Flowers, and, on the other, Samsung. Flowers made a simple change: joined the best universities in the country with Pixar, Disney, Google, Apple and produce the best educational content. The little ones learned history, mathematics or languages from the hands of the characters of their favorite movies or their heroes of the past.
More than 4,000 students
The other side of this balance was Samsung, which in 2018 began to bet on bringing the most advanced technology to more than 4,000 students and 700 teachers. Through virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence, the Korean company analyzed the professions of the future and the knowledge necessary to perform them and provided the necessary tools to students and teachers so that the former could acquire the knowledge and the latter could identify the skills of each student and had the right elements to stimulate. Thus, young people immersed themselves in their own individual stories, in which history and biology were combined with calculus or geometry with geography and genetics with the aim of creating their own roadmap.
