World Economic Forum 2016 (Davos) The Future of Education: Lessons in Uncertainty - Thoughts
'How do we educate the young to deal with the uncertainties of modern life and take ownership of their own future?' was the description for this webcast I watched during the 2016 World Economic Forum. As a huge advocator for global education and improving our current education system, the discussion runs parallel to where I believe the future of learning and education should be heading towards: exploiting and integrating technology better to aid learning, being taught the ‘new skills’ that are relevant in this day and age though not forgetting the old ones, allowing equal opportunity for access to education globally - not letting the geography of an area strip a child's chance at an education etc. However criticisms I have are that yes it's all well and good to simply talk about this, and yes identifying issues and weaknesses to improve on is a good start, but anyone can do that.
The discussion lacked ways of implementing many of these new ideas and any in depth solutions to these problems, though in the last 5 minutes of the discussion, speakers were hastily asked by host Susanne F. Wille (who wanted to prove people such as myself wrong who say it's all talk and no action) what actions they were going to take when they walked off stage. With the exception of Gordon Brown (who said he was literally going off to a conference after this to plan to announce a plan on how to provide the opportunity for education to 1 million Syrian refugees by end of 2016 and all Syrian refugees by 2017) other speakers’ plans seemed lacklustre. What I mainly hoped to see were ways to improve the current curriculum and syllabus (at all levels of education be it IGCSE, A levels etc.) and ways to improve the quality of teaching and teachers by raising the status (or perhaps wages?) of teachers.
Link to webcast: