I’ll make you a bet: I can produce a list of every capital city in the United States in a fraction of the time that it would take you to recite them from memory.
Would you take that bet? If you see an iPhone in my hand, I sure hope you would decline.
This silly example makes an important point. We now live in a world in which knowledge is cheap and in the palm of your hands.
There has never been such a low barrier to accessing trillions upon trillions of data points, as the almighty Google search can almost immediately unlock the answers to just about any factual question.
But Google pales in comparison to artificial intelligence machines like IBM’s Watson, which famously played Jeopardy against the two most successful human contestants in history — and destroyed them. Think about what will happen when Watson and Siri get married and reside in the palm of our hands.
If knowledge is so cheap, why do schools still require children to memorize information?
I answered that and many other questions on Feb. 5 at the first Milwaukee Jewish Day School ED Talk: The Future of Education. Indeed, MJDS is transforming its approach to learning to meet the future needs of today’s child.
Learn to innovate
The following question drives our change process: What do we know about the future that should influence how we educate children today?
By “future” I mean 20-plus years from now — when our current kindergarteners are either in graduate school or out in the job market — not a 10-year timeframe that brackets elementary and high school.
Our society is at a technological tipping point. The fields of automation and artificial intelligence will soon change our world into a post-industrial society.
Some jobs and even entire industries will disappear and be replaced with new ones — like the printing press, the assembly line and the semiconductor, among other examples.
A seminal study from Oxford University in 2013, entitled “The Future of Employment,” uses economic and mathematical forecasting to predict which jobs are “at risk” of being eliminated due to advances in automation and artificial intelligence.
It concluded that 47 percent of jobs are at risk in the next 20-30 years.
If almost half of all current jobs are at risk, schools today must understand why. Even more importantly, they must educate children to be successful in the jobs that are most likely to still exist or be created in the future.
The best part is you don’t need a crystal ball to know what kinds of jobs will still exist in 20 years. You just need to understand what machines are highly unlikely to be able to do in the future. Stated differently, you need to understand which “intelligences” are uniquely human.
Two uniquely human intelligences rise to the top: creative intelligence— the capacity for originality, problem solving, artistic expression, etc. — and emotional intelligence— complex human interactions, empathy, communication, etc.
While robots and drones will almost certainly be able to perform even more complex tasks in 20 years, researchers do not expect them to be endowed with creative or emotional intelligence. In a word, they will not have the ability to innovate.
We need to teach our children to become the innovators of tomorrow — and by “innovator” I am not talking only about only in science, technology, engineering and math. The creative process is much broader and richer.
What does this mean for the elementary or middle school classroom today? What does this mean for MJDS?
At MJDS, creative and emotional intelligence are lived and practiced daily through our core Jewish principles of avodah (work), tzedakah (charity) and gemilut chasidim (deeds of kindness). We believe this foundation will help us as we teach children to become innovators in two ways:
First, at every grade level, we must teach children the key 21st century skills (skills that education guru Tony Wagner calls the “Seven Survival Skills”):
Second, at every grade level, while teaching the seven survival skills and other subjects like math, reading, Jewish studies and science, students must own their learning.
• Because children cannot maximize critical thinking and problem-solving skills unless they are solving authentic problems that matter to them.
• Because children cannot learn to collaborate while sitting quietly in desks and listening to the teacher.
• Because children cannot develop agility and adaptability, or innovate unless they have the freedom to explore and inquire — and fail — on their own.
• And because children must be passionate about what they are learning, be able to analyze and access information and let their curiosity and imagination run wild to completely engage in the learning process.
Brian King is head of school at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School. To learn more about MJDS Ed Talks, visit MJDS.org/future.
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