Call it the effect of globalization and the information age, or perhaps it should be called the effect of the march of technological age on humanity, but whatever you call it things today are changing a heck of a lot faster then they did when we were children. This film points out some frightening facts about what we are facing and what our children are facing on several fronts, two of which are education and information.
Education-
Early in the film the following statement is made:
"We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist using technologies that haven't been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."
To me this means that we are currently teaching our kids the wrong stuff. Instead of frowning on general purpose Bachelor degrees, we should embrace the General Purpose Bachelor degree by teaching students how to survive in the current world and how to adapt to an ever (and quickly) changing present. Bachelor degrees should be much more generalized and students in those programs should learn a great deal more about life--balancing a checkbook, how to type, how to cook, how to learn, how to do research, how to survive in a job market that could radically change in a moment--while Master and Ph. D. should be specialized. This way anyone with a Bachelor's should be prepared to move into a Master's program then a Ph. D. program, and be able to change majors on a moments notice. The role of the bachelor degree becomes the paper and binding of the book while the advanced degrees become chapters.
Information-
From later in the film:
"The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a 4 year technical degree this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study."
The problem is that our students aren't being taught how to effectively find information, nor are they inclined to even look for it if they do. Instead, many just spend their time looking for sources they can plagiarize. We need to start early and instill in our students the basic skills of finding information in the Internet era, the desire to find information (curiosity), and the ethics properly vet and use information.
Conclusion-
The world is evolving around us at a staggering pace. Since the early part of this Century we have seen the rise of Web 2.0 technologies including Blogging, social networking, Wikis, video sharing, photo sharing, and collaborative computing. Not all of us are keeping up, though. For example, the other day I read a post on Flickr.com where the poster stated that they had never heard of a blog, and when explained to them they wondered why anyone would want to blog! Yet this poster was fine with posting photos and collaborating with other Flickr users via discussion groups.
We need to better prepare our kids for today, which will give them half a chance to cope with tomorrow. We, on the other hand, really need to catch up with technology so that we have half a chance of keeping up with the rest of the world.
Watch the film, open your eyes, and learn, learn, learn!
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