I recently watched a talk (video at bottom of this post) that he gave to school students in London. The focus was on how education needs to change to better prepare children for a future that is unknowable and uncertain.

In his bestselling book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval makes prophecies which are at one level enlightening, but often frightening. He writes extensively about how life and humans have changed over the centuries. What is very obvious is that although everyone agrees that change is constant, few people realise that the pace of change has increased a lot in the last fifty years.

Here is an excerpt from his book:

If you lived in China in 1018…it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be forty, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look like in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain-computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.

Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

My early career was spent shuffling money around in London (legally). At the time, people my age would pride themselves on knowing how the financial markets worked and how to build financial models on Excel. In just ten years, the same knowledge will get you a first interview, at best. The world of finance has changed so much – if you want to get a top job in finance, you better know how to code (at least a little), understand how technology works and be able to understand statistics (needed) and calculus (depending on which part of the markets you work in).

Want another example? Look at crypto and the entire ecosystem that has spawned since Satoshi Nakomoto first put out his whitepaper. In less than 15 years, the crypto ecosystem is worth a whopping $2 trillion! Irrespective of whether you think crypto is a ponzi scheme or the best invention since physical money, that is staggering growth in a very short span of time.

In short, the world is changing. And fast.

Yuval’s worry (and mine to a certain extent) is that with the way education is done in 95% of schools, we are preparing children for a world that will no longer exist.

Doing is becoming more important than knowing. Communication is becoming more important than cramming.

So what does one do about it? How does one stay relevant? How can we educate children such that they don’t end up on the rubbish heap of the ‘useless class’ as Yuval calls it?

Most policy makers and experts agree that so-called soft skills are going to be increasingly important in the future. Collaboration, creativity, communication and critical thinking (the 4 Cs) are often touted as the most important skills of the future. Almost everyone agrees on this, but our current educational systems and curricula hardly reflect this. If you chose a school at random in Bangalore and visited them, you’d find 8th grade students steeped in individual study, repeatedly practicing problems in order to prefect the method of solving them, and generally trying to stuff as much of their textbooks into the storage device inside of their heads. This doesn’t in any way sound like collaborative activity or an activity involving much critical thinking.

One of the main arguments for why education needs to change is because knowledge doesn’t stay relevant for life. In previous generations, it was sufficient to go to school, then pick a major in college and do that for the rest of your life. Often at the same company. The knowledge gained in school and college usually was sufficient to tide you through a career, usually with some tweaking and polishing over time. Good luck with trying to get through life like this in the 21st century.

So what is the most important skill going forward?

It is the ability to learn and to reinvent oneself again and again. If one assumes that the world is going to continue to change, then it is guaranteed that in time, whatever knowledge you have will either become irrelevant or be in need of regular updating. Most times, this will come as a shock, but such shocks are already taking people by surprise in various industries. With automation becoming more ubiquitous, the rate at which people are being made redundant (in more ways than one) is leapfrogging the rate at which humans can learn new skills in order to take advantage of opportunities that come up as a natural consequence of such disruption.

In such a world, emphasising technical skills which may or may not be relevant in the long run sounds like a recipe for disaster. Especially when you spend the first two decades of your life engaged in such activity.

So what should we emphasise?

Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invest new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

Yuval Noah Harari

So how can you prepare children to deal with change? In my humble and (as yet) inaccurately formed opinion, principally, in three ways:

1. Exposure: Giving children exposure to as much of the world as possible and helping them tie threads together is fundamental to making sense of an increasingly complex and changing world. School still focuses on traditional careers – all syllabi assume that 80% of children will go into engineering, law, medicine or accounting / finance. Fortunately, the world has expanded. Children have a lot more choice than was available twenty years ago. Curricula have to change to reflect this expansion of opportunity.
2. Mental and emotional fluidity: Learning how to learn sounds nice. But what does that even mean? Aren’t we all learning all the time? The older one grows, the harder it becomes to learn new skills. Humans suffer from commitment bias. When a person has invested (time, money and effort) so much in learning engineering and then working as an engineer, they are going to do everything they can to maintain the status quo when faced with a situation where their current skillset is becoming obsolete. So coming round to the idea that you will probably have to (and should) reinvest yourself every few years requires a very different way of looking at the world. Instead of looking at learning and education as an ‘investment’ that one makes in the first 2 decades of life, we need to accept that learning is a lifelong endeavour and very much a part of adult life.
3. Creativity: When the world changes, it usually expands. This expansion happens because when industries are dead and buried, it is usually because of innovation in a related sector which has been successful in creating a world order which the market deems more relevant. But this process starts happening well below industries actually collapse. When it comes into public consciousness, it feels like a watershed moment, but it very rarely is. The seeds of change are often invisible and hushed. In a world where constant disruption will always give rise to new opportunity, it pays to be able to think creatively and innovatively.

Point 1 above is relatively easy to do. But it requires schools and educators to think very differently about their place in the world. School needs to become a place where children get a peek into how wonderfully vast and expansive the world is – in terms of culture, opportunity, and fields of work. Points 2 and 3 are obviously harder to do. How does one teach mental and emotional fluidity? And how do you teach creativity?

These are hard questions to answer. And even harder to implement. Which is why I will stop rambling here and leave those for future posts!

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As part of the theme, they did a number of experiments which helped them understand the properties of sounds waves. At the end of the theme, a couple of children did a project showcasing what they had learnt.

Here is a project from Tanya. She described 7 facts about sound that surprised her as they went through the theme.

And this is Kiran’s video. He describes wavelengths and vibrations in great detail.

Pretty cool huh?! The children have now moved on to the theme on light, so it sure is a science filled theme for them!

I was on a casual internet wander the other day when I come across a quote:

Art encourages children to think, developing skills and confidence as they go.

Which got me thinking. In their early years, children muck around with lots of art — play dough, clay, painting, colouring, sketches. You name it, and a preschool going child dabbles in some form of art on a weekly basis. 

And then at some point in the primary years, arts gets the cold shoulder. Children spend less and less time on anything artistic as they grow older. And they spend increasing amounts of time perfecting more technical skills like math, science and coding. 

On reading that quote, I was motivated to dig deeper. As luck would have it, I landed upon a few papers written by researchers who tried to answer the following question:

Does arts education and training transfer to skills enhancement in non-art subjects?

In countries like the US and others in Europe, the inclusion of arts in the curriculum seems to hinge on the answer to this question. 

Yes, that’s right. 

Policy makers need to be convinced that art learning leads to the development of cognitive skills in other academic areas like math and reading in order to justify it as a part of the curriculum. In other words, inclusion of the arts in the curriculum seems to depend on whether arts can lead to improvement in test scores. 

But that misses the point entirely, doesn’t it? Art in any form is an inherently creative endeavour. Whether you talk of dance, music or the visual arts, they all require creativity, innovation and pushing the boundaries of what’s been done before. 

The right question to be asking is whether art has a unique influence on learning in the broadest sense, rather than limit the discussion to test scores and other easily measured metrics. 

Most fields are creative

Whether you talk of math, science or music, performance at the highest level involves (and requires) high levels of creativity. The application of science at the highest levels if a deeply creative undertaking. Look at the traditional K-12 science curriculum though, and you’d be inclined to think otherwise.

The typical child in 2021 is introduced to science as a collection of theorems, formulae and calculations. No wonder most children need to be goaded into studying science at the highest level. They see it as a dry and lacking in inspiration. Take the case of Mathematics and the proportion of ‘haters’ grows even more. 

Most top-flight mathematicians don’t sit on their desks solving sums all day. If you get onto Youtube and listen to a talk or interview involving a mathematician, you will immediately realise that the math you did at school is very different to the math professional mathematicians do.  

So if the top brass in almost every field point to creativity as their strongest skill, then why is so little importance given to it in school? 

We don’t fully understand how the brain works

Part of the reason is that despite the substantial leaps in our understanding of the brain and how it works, we don’t quite know how different parts of the brain work together to create new discoveries, ideas and insights. 

What we do know from a number of studies is that practising the arts (any art) does lead to enhancements in cognitive processing i.e. those who practice art have a higher degree of cognitive processing in domains related to their art. For example, studies suggest that children who are exposed to musical training early on tend to become fluent and faster readers than children who aren’t. 

However, these findings are not necessarily causal. In other words, does the part of the brain involved in musicality also play a role in assisting reading? Why would one lead to the other? We don’t quite know.

The scientific case for arts inclusion

What we do know beyond doubt is that the more our senses are stimulated, the better our retention and the better the learning. Part of the reason for this is evolutionary — we evolved in a multi-sensorial environment. The stimuli we received ever since we came into being combined visual, auditory and olfactory stimuli. 

And then all of a sudden, we learnt to tame ourselves, and stuffed our children into classrooms where the dominant mode of learning was and still is text based. The human brain remembers images by a factor of 6x better than it remembers sound or text. And yet, we hardly have any interesting visuals accompany the drab textbooks that children are forced to study from. 

At its very base, visual arts bring into being our most dominant sense — vision. When children engage more than one sense, the learning is more likely to arouse emotion, which then increases the chances of it producing longer-term learning in the brain. 

The same is the logic for including music and dance in the curriculum — when more than one sense is stimulated, we tend to feel more in sync with the activity, which results in deeper learning and better recall.  

‘Why are the children doing so much art and craft?’

This is a question we’ve been asked occasionally by parents. We do a lot of art and craft in school — in fact, I don’t know of too many other schools that do as much craft as we do. But the reason for doing it is clear. The act of creativity brings out emotions which few other activities do. When children are emotionally attached to their work, they are bound to connect with the topic being studied on a deeper level. 

Every theme we do incorporates lots of projects, art and craft work. Art is a universal language; and bringing as much of it as possible into the school curriculum helps with giving children a base from which to explore various topics in depth. 

Imagine the following situation. You are trying to teach children about light. Some children don’t really show much of an interest in the physics of light. How do you get them to become interested? Bringing art into the classroom is one surefire way to ignite the passions of even the most disinterested learners. There is something special about art in its ability to give humans a unique view of the complex world that they live in. 

Some recent examples from school

At TSJA, we have always believed that visual arts can complement learning effectively. All our themes incorporate an art and design element, with the various grades engaging in projects at a level appropriate to their skill level. 

Just recently, the third and fourth graders started a theme on the weaves and embroideries of India. The theme involves matter on the differences between natural and synthetic fibres, types of dyeing, patterns, texture and colour. As part of the theme, the children engaged in making tie and dye. Below are a few examples made by the children. 

Even though school is currently online, it was clear to see that engaging in this activity really brought the theme alive for the children. One father of an 8 year old boy remarked, “I didn’t think he would show much interest in this theme — but he seems to be enjoying it a lot”. 

In parting

Some of the most successful people owe their success to their ability to be creative. And I’m not talking only about designers and artists. Many successful inventors and businessmen talk about the importance of creativity in helping them gain access to new ideas and insights. 

Even if it doesn’t lead to improvement in test scores, a curriculum that involves arts greatly aids children in expanding their understanding of the world. In many cases, art can become the bridge that connects seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge. 

Do let us know your thoughts in the comments!