The Future of Education and Labor

Abstract

Along the fourth industrial revolution, fueled by the recent technological revolution, we need an educational revolution. This revolution has to be a revolution driven by creativity and social intelligence. This revolution has to implement holistic approaches into our system of teaching, learning and research. This revolution will provide experts in synthesizing knowledge and in bridging the towers of knowledge. If we do not follow this path, we will lose the race either against the machines or against the big data companies, which already identified education as the most important business of the twenty-first century and are about to take over the educational sector following shareholder interests instead of societal interests in a democratic society of free men and women. In the ancient Greek society – which many western politicians often refer to – the free (at that time only male) citizens spent their time with thinking, debating, writing, deciding on societal issues, exercising or perceiving arts and sports, and caring for people beyond base and servile work. The base and servile work was done by slaves. In our times, we in fact could think about having a society of free women and free men who dedicate their lives to shaping their private and sociopolitical as well as the socioeconomic sphere and to actively participating in jointly developing the cultural, political, and economic environment where they are living in. In the modern free version of the ancient Greek society, more of the (boring) work could be carried out by machines, computers, robots, and artificial intelligence, while people could focus more on the interesting work.