How to prepare today’s students for the job market of the future?
It is necessary to teach them how to deal with themselves and how to interact constructively with others, as well as how to solve complex problems in partnership with technology.
Students who are in school today will live in a world very different from the current one, in several aspects. For example, a good part of the activities that today are developed by human beings will be automated. New activities and professions will emerge and the interaction between humans will remain fundamental to give meaning to the constant social and technological evolutions that we will go through. In addition, we will partner closely with machines to solve more complex problems, using a huge amount of data. This is the scenario designed by Fernando Shayer, one of the founding partners and CEO of Camino Education.
In this uncertain and rapidly changing world, schools need to teach students to learn continuously. “This includes developing at least three major categories of competencies: relating constructively to people, valuing the most human in us; working in partnership with the machines, each adding the best; and work with large-scale data, ”says Shayer.
According to him, it is very likely that machines, with artificial intelligence, will increasingly be able to solve very efficiently problems that today are solved by men. "If, previously, they only solved simple issues, today they are already able to solve complex problems and, over the next few years, we imagine that they will learn to deal with a wide range of complex issues".
However, there is a very sophisticated and difficult to formulate algorithm, no matter how much data you have, which concerns the interaction between human beings. “Even though the machines can be used to produce and offer services, the end user will always be a human being. There is an affective space of relationship and belonging, and the creation of joint meaning, which is exclusive to the human being ”, says the executive director.
Appreciation of the human side
For these activities, what is human in the human being – emotions, concerns, doubts, creativity and imagination – will be much more valued. “In the pedagogical model of the industrial revolution, which is applied today in many schools, school success is training professionals whose differential is knowing content. The underlying man model is that of the rational, in which emotions hinder learning and production. The more the student learns and reproduces content alone and in silence, the better, the less he 'has a problem', says the director. “In the model of the digital revolution, in which the contents are widely available and the machines are more productive in computational tasks than human, the school will be increasingly demanded to form individuals who are differentiated by their socio-emotional skills, in addition to knowing relevant content. And the pedagogy that answers these questions should value the interaction between students and the practical and critical application of content, in solving problems. ”
For Shayer, the competence of working with machines until now has been developed in the school environment in a very restricted way, often limited to the use of devices, not to mention schools that still prohibit, at all times, the use of smartphones and tablets by students. Education needs to take a step towards inserting the machine in the students' daily lives. "Knowing how to work with digital media, for example, and being able to ask the right questions for the machines, is something that has to be learned because it will be very important in the professional future of these students".
According to him, it is at this moment that the third fundamental competence is inserted: knowing how to work with data, that is, dealing with the science of establishing criteria to separate data, mining those that are useful and transforming them into useful information for decision making and problem solving. “Until today, we left school without focusing on that, on how to work with a huge amount of data and turn it into useful information. There is a science to do this, and it must be brought into schools. ”
For him, these three categories of competencies will certainly be very relevant for the future and need to be part of the schools' pedagogical project now. “In the digital active learning platform Cloe, for example, we work in this direction, to support schools and educators to make their students interact with each other, using digital technology to solve real life problems in all subjects”.
