Education for the 21st Century

Abstract

What skills will students need to succeed in the 21st century? Mr. Posner tries to look ahead and suggests that our current education policies may be leading us in the wrong direction. A CARTOON from Gary Larson's weirdly insightful feature, Far Side, shows doting parents watching their son play Nintendo while visions of his lucrative future as a Nintendo master dance in their heads. Would this be less funny if instead of Nintendo their son were doing long division and his parents had visions of his lucrative future as a long divider? Before you answer, let me tell you that I know several talented engineers who can trace their careers back to their interest in video games. For them, there was a natural progression from enthusiasm for the games to wondering how such games are designed and implemented to wanting to make games of their own. I've never met anyone who was similarly motivated by long division. I asked one of our engineers, a graduate of MIT, when was the last time he had used long division. He said that, in fact, he had used it only a couple of years earlier, when he and a fellow alum decided to determine whether they still knew how. (They did!) It is a tricky business trying to guess what experiences will motivate an individual to intellectual achievement or what skills or bits of knowledge will wind up being important in a person's life. There are at least two major factors that complicate such predictions. One is the absurd diversity of human beings. I am intimately acquainted with four children who share a common ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic background. In fact, they were born of the same parents and raised in the same house. And yet with respect to talents, interests, rates of development, and personalities, these children are completely different. By the of our society, each of these children is weird. I'd feel sorry for their parents, except that all the parents I've ever known, including my own, have equally strange children. (Remember Stephen Jay Gould's message: norms are not real.1) It seems likely that the propensity for diversity is a consequence of natural selection. It has been fundamental to the ability of our species to adapt to radically changing environments, particularly those of our own making. The second major factor that complicates the prediction of what skills will be important -- and the one on which most attention seems to focus -- is technology. How many of the skills we spent so much time learning are now done better by machine? Suppose Gary Larson's kid were shown solving differential equations. The cartoon would still be funny. Symbolic math software available for your personal computer is orders of magnitude better than you and I are at solving equations. Automatic spell checkers have eliminated the need to memorize the spelling rules we spent so much time learning. How important is handwriting these days? How long do you think it will be before speech recognition reaches the point where manual entry of text in any form is unnecessary? And search engines have revolutionized and simplified research. None of this technology has required breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. It's all just ordinary information processing in a world where people can carry billions of bytes of memory and gigaflops of processing power in their briefcases. Soon the same computing power will be available with just a cell phone. And I assure you, this process is not going to stop. Do you think composition is beyond automation? I've seen the future in a website that automatically generates Dave Barry columns.2 You seed it with some humorous tidbits, and it does the rest. How long will it be before editorial style is automated? …