Futurist Gerd Leonhard - Imagining + Creating The Future Of Education - E-Twinning 2022 Conference

Greetings. I'm Gerhard Leeuwenhard Futurist in Zurich, Switzerland. Welcome to the online Annual Conference 2022 Imagining Education in the Future. Beautiful, sustainable and together. It's my great pleasure to be providing a keynote for you guys today and have a conversation with you later about the future of education. This is a very, very passion loaded topic for me. I think it's really crucial that we look at how we educate our kids, how we educate ourselves, of course, for that matter, going forward, because the future is rapidly arriving faster than we've ever thought. Many people think about the future today kind of like this. It's not looking too rosy. It kind of looks like everything around us is falling apart. Climate change and of course the war and inflation and everything. But I think really what's happening here is that we're going through a tremendous amount of reboot. We're going to through a reset of society. Also of course, millennials, Gen Y taken over in the next couple years. That's going to provide a huge impetus in my view. It kind of feels like the doors are closing sometimes, but I think they're kind of opening into a new future. The doors aren't closing, they are opening. We're going to solve climate change. It is scientifically and technologically possible. We're going to have technology to solve most of our daily problems like water, food, energy, even disease. So I always say the future is better than we think. The future is not lousy. The future has great potential for the next generation. I want to be a good ancestor. I want to be able to provide a hint into the good future. And I think this is why education is so crucial. It's about shaping that future and giving our kids the ability to, to prosper and flourish in the future. This is so crucial and of course to be happy, to self realize, to do things that ultimately gets them to think about the future as a positive thing. There's a great sign by American futurist Barbara Hubbard. Rest in peace. She said, as you see the future, so you act. And as you act, so you become. That is just so important. This is something we have to ingrain in primary and secondary education and of course later in university as well. We have to have a positive outlook of the future. The future belongs to optimists. We're looking at this scenario, what's happening in technology all around us. We're leaping into the future basically. Very few things are now becoming impossible or still staying impossible. I mean, 30 linear steps, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and so on. Would just get me across the room. But we're leaping exponentially. At 30. Exponential steps will take you 26 times around the world. That's the difference in exponential thinking. This is what Moore's law, Metcalf's law, Wright's law, and so on really describe as technology is leaping. So today we're at 4 and in just 10 years we're at 256. That's almost like 80x of what we are today. And 20 years, that's a million. Think about that for a minute. We're going to prepare our kids for, for a world that's a million times as different as what we have here today, right now with us. And this is something to think about as we're moving into this exponential change scenario, this being four. And we're at the leaping point. The World Economic Forum has described all the things that have changed since COVID and it's been mind boggling basically. Social cohesion, livelihood crisis, climate action, failure and on the list goes on and on and on, challenge after challenge. But of course, you know, being educators, that every challenge is also an opportunity and we grow with it. It's the effort that makes us leap into the future. Doesn't come by itself. The next 10 years will bring more change than the previous 100 years. And really what it is, I call this kind of a perma change. Basically the ongoing discussion about change is everywhere. And that's not going to change. I mean, look around you. No matter where you are in the world, it's perma change, time, climate change, inflation, energy, medical merging with biology and technology, and online banking, digital money. The next 10 years. Great opportunities, I believe much bigger than the challenges. But we have to have the right policy. This is where of course, education comes in as well. This exponential thing is going to be quite a challenge, I think, for us to implement. And if you've been teaching for 20 or 30 years, this is a huge challenge because you've learned what works and what doesn't. And now all of a sudden things don't work the same way anymore. I mean, just look at the music business. When I was a musician and producer for a long time we made records. Today you don't make records. You push a button and it goes up on Spotify or Apple or some podcast or something and you hope to monetize through streaming and through gigs, a whole different thing. But you know, bottom line is today 180 million people pay roughly $10 a month for music. So there is hope on the other end of that equation. So in this permanent change scenario, we have to ask a crucial question. Is the current system of education, whether it's kindergarten or primary, secondary or of course university, MBA colleges, is this traditional model still fit for this exponential perma change world? And the answer, in my view is it's not. We're learning things that used to be true and they still are true. But we're going into the future and we're leaping, right? I mean, in a world that's leaping, we're crawling with education. I mean, we're doing things when I remember, you know, we're learning stuff for later, downloading information for later. And this can continue in a world that's primarily what I call vuca, right? And you probably know the VUC word from the military. It's this kind of chaos. And now we have to learn how to flip the vuca. We have to go back and say, okay, this kind of definition of our future clearly is going to challenge us when we look at what it means. This whole discussion about volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and now all of a sudden it's flipping the vuca. That's what we need. This is what we need education to do. Velocity, unorthodoxy, co creation, and the good old American word awesomeness. I mean, I live in Zurich, in Switzerland, I'm German, but I love the American expression here, awesomeness. That is going to be so important to teach our kids. We have to be fast, we have to invent, we have to be resilient. I mean, the world is going to be about resilience and that the future jobs aren't going to be ready for us to take or ready for our kids to take. They have to be made. Most of the jobs in the future haven't even been invented yet. Look around you, social media, 21 million people work on social media. Job didn't exist 15 years ago. Hundreds of millions of people will have jobs in the new climate technology, climate change, anti climate change, global warming action plan that's being unrolled from the US and of course Europe, been leading on this for a long time, that is going to be providing a huge amount of new work and new employment. So we're heading into this future that is very much technologically governed and impacted, whether it's cloud computing or 3D printing or artificial intelligence. You know about all these things, and I won't talk about this too much, but you can look it up at Gerd's game changers.com, the technological game changers and that megashifts Digital, which is chapter three in my book the Megashifts. You can download it for free at megashifts digital in 10 languages. So you get more of an idea. But these are the megashifts, right? Cognification machines are getting smart. Virtualization, the metaverse, virtual reality mobilization. I mean basically what's called screenification. Everything is on the screen. Take a look at this. But this is what's happening. We are moving into a world of technology being absolutely everywhere. And of course, if you look at the statistics like this one, you know, we're moving into a world where essentially all of the cost reduction in technology is just mind boggling. How technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, except of course for the iPhone. But this is going to mean that we can do virtual things. We can learn virtually. We're going to be able to afford things that were unaffordable until now. We have this innovation platforms like genome sequencing and mobile connected devices, energy storage, promising tens of millions of entirely new jobs. We have artificial intelligence will help us to amplify what we do and be more efficient. You see paralegals in office and admin support 4.5x as efficient as before. And I talked about this earlier, I mean just this right here is of course the ticket to a pretty powerful future when we talk about what kind of new jobs we have. But we have to get ready for this and how we're going to get ready. We're not going to ready with traditional education. We're going to get ready with new kinds of education, with new ways of thinking, with new creativity, with imagination, not just with the good old logic of the past. You see this kind of paradigm shift that we see all around here. And hat tap to Peter Leiden, my future best friend. Basically we're moving into the mega challenge, where it's going from the economy to climate change change, from carbon to clean, from transportation to electric and culture, millennial centric. I mean, let's zoom in a little bit on this chart so you can see it a little bit better. All these paradigm shifts, Economics, capitalism, work, production. You can download the slide here later and pin it on your wall if you want. But basically, how are our kids going to deal with this? Well, this is all happening now. It got started before, but it's just mind boggling warp drive change. Our kids have to be ingenious, they have to invent, they have to have hope, they have to hyper collaborate, they have to not just know things, they have to make up things. And this is going to be entirely different. Our Education is suitable for a world that's organized. This world isn't. It's chaos, it's fast opportunity. It's not survival of the fittest anymore, but survival of the friendliest, survival of the most collaborative. We could see that right now playing out in front of our very eyes. Nobody around the world can stand by themselves when it's about issues like war, when it's about issues like economics and food. And I mean, we're all connected on this one planet for the time being. Maybe that will change in 20 or 30 years. But we have paradigm shifts and we have to concede with that. We urgently need to reboot education to accommodate these paradigm shifts. And clearly we're moving into a world that's kind of like Minority Report, where we are able to go inside information and pull it out and do miraculous things with technology to learn and understand stuff much, much faster. And this was an amazing, foresightful clip from back then. Science fiction is becoming science fact. And very soon we're going into the sort of virtual reality metaverse scenario. This is Facebook's workplace scenario of the future with holograms and all this. Of course it's futuristic, not quite here, it's going to take some time. But I mean, clearly we're seeing those opportunities and learning and education and training. I believe virtual training will be everywhere, but it will not anywhere close to substitutional form for the other ways of training. It'll be a hybrid world. And clearly people are learning with other people. We're learning from each other and we're learning with each other, not just through screens. Screens are a good way of approximation, but they're, in my view, not a substitute for the reality behind the screen. But what happens here clearly is we have revolutions. First, the digital revolution, the connected cows. Here in Switzerland, the cows are even connected for better automated milking. The sustainability revolution. Green is the new digital. If you haven't noticed, this is the number one trend in the world. And then finally we have this kind of human revolution. I sometimes call that the human renaissance, where all of a sudden we're saying, this is great, we have all this tech, but we really do need it to be human centric. Look what's happening in social media. Who still trusts Facebook? We use Facebook. We don't really have much of a choice. I don't. But most people do. And now is the question, do we trust them and what are we asking from them? People, planet, purpose, prosperity. Protecting humanity, protecting our data, protecting ourselves. That's becoming a big topic. Digital revolution, sustainable revolution. Human revolution, a human renaissance. And that's going to be amazing for education. Look for education to get funding, a lot more funding than ever before in the next couple years, no matter where you are on the planet. Eventually of course, you'll have big enterprises also dealing with education that's already in the wings and for example in the Middle east and so on. But basically the next Google will be in education and secondary and of course universities, but also primary everywhere. And we have to make sure that we're on the right track there. I mean, we're going from the work revolution, digital sustainable, green everything, to the education revolution. And make no mistake about this, if I'm talking about the green revolution, I really talk about a revolution. In a few years we're going to look at the oil and gas industry as essentially akin to criminal activities because what we have now is climate emergency. And we're going to spend a lot of money, Some people say $150 trillion to solve this problem, because we have to. And we can solve the problem in the next decade. Solving in the sense of not getting to 4 or 5 degrees warming, it'll be a long time process until we can reverse that. But clearly we're living in a world where we are surrounded by technology, men and women, of course, sorry, I don't only have a man here. Big data, cloud computing, mobile devices, 5G, 10G. In 20, 39 billion people will be online at high speed Internet and at much lower cost as today. It will be like air, basically. So I think it's safe to say that business as usual is dead or dying because everything changes when we do this. Look at how people buy things now. It used to be the store, now it's online and even social, selling social retail in China through social networks, becoming a very big deal and of course environment and how we do everything. Business as usual is dead or dying. We can see that all around us. And of course that also means work as usual is dead or dying. We're going to make up our own jobs, we're going to work virtually, we're going to work in the cloud, we're going to be independent of countries and territories, but at the same time we're going to want to see other people. So there'll be this hybrid move as to how we can work and all the new jobs that are unfolding. Dell Technologies once published a report two years ago, 70% of all new jobs are not even invented yet. I mean our kids, kids going to school are going to have to invent their own job not like us. These jobs don't exist. You make your own job. And one can only hope that we have more hybrid jobs in the future with equal opportunity around the world and a sort of Social Security infrastructure that is global. But work as usual is dead or dying. That means education as usual is dead or dying. We need to change education to be with that new paradigm of work, to get people excited about the future. We don't want people doing this, right, saying like, you know, I don't like the future. I would rather sort of hide out somewhere, right? We don't need that from our students and people in school. And basically it has to be, you know, we have to look at this and say, well, great education means seeing, hearing and visioning and creating the future. I mean, we have to understand the future first, not predict it, but observe it and then create it. I mean, this is the most crucial thing in schools, is creating the future, not just waiting for it. The future doesn't just fall down on us. It's not created in Silicon Valley or in Beijing. Well, it is created in the sense of kicked off, but it's really up to us what we're going to do with it. We have to be aware of the future. We have to have a future mindset, as I call it. Because one of the key challenges here is humans and machines are kind of converging. I mean, we're basically looking at more and more machines doing things that we used to do, what's called the singularity in 2050, where machines could do pretty much anything that we used to do. But that could be a blessing. Think about all of the dirty, dull and dangerous world work that we could give to machines and what they could be doing with this. It could also be tough because basically the reality is that pretty much anything that can be digitized, automated, virtualized will be. It's the end of routine. And that is, for example, filing taxes, doing financial advisory work, driving a car to some degree is routine, of course, welding, working in a factory, and so on. A lot of people will be freed up parenthesis in this process to where we have to move on to different jobs or get paid not to work, which is the basic income discussion we've had in many countries, including Canada and here in Switzerland. But really what is happening is that technology creates abundance, data, information, explicit knowledge. Technology has that. I mean, I can sit down right now, I can ask IBM, Watson about the future, about the future of pretty much anything. And then I can say, well, what would happen if I was able to use Technology to predict and help me and figure this out. For example, being a doctor or a dentist, that's going to change the structure of our jobs a lot. We have to move up the food chain and do things that machines can't do. That's not so difficult. As machines become more intelligent, parenthesis, I would say smart, right? They may take over most routines, like for example, in the laboratory work or analysis of X rays or MRI machines and so on. But human only attributes will become basically super valuable. Compassion, empathy, storytelling, foresight, negotiation, creativity, imagination, intuition, design. I mean these things are. That's what we do. That's what humans do. Here's a couple. Here's a list of jobs that may be unfolding there. A social well being, an agent, an ethics specialist, a job and training inventor, a rewilderer, somebody who is like leading people back to nature. And of course tens of millions, like I said earlier, new jobs in this entire revolution. Digital revolution, of course, and the sustainable revolution and the human revolution, which is going to bring education to the peak of activities again and be a great revival, I think, for most of us in this turf. So AI, artificial intelligence would change the job market, of course, because the dirty, dull and dangerous jobs can be done by machines. And some of those are down here. Public administration, transportation, storage, obviously manufacturing. But look at the growth up here. Health, scientific, technical, communications, hospitality and education. I think that is actually underrated on this chart. We're going to see lots and lots of new development here. Machines are for answers and humans are for questions. That's something we have to keep in mind. We need to ask more questions in education. We need to have an environment that encourages, not just swallowing information so that we can use it later. Humans are for questions. We have to discuss and debate and think holistically and I think across disciplines, across topics and subject matters. That is going to be so crucial because this is the bottom line. We're not going to compete well with machines. If you work like a robot, a robot will take your job. And we don't want our kids to work like robots and we certainly don't want them to learn like a robot. Because if you work like a robot, you will end up working for the robots. So what we need to do is to take a step away from this and say, what does it mean to have education that's not robotic? Futurist polymath, Buckminster Fuller, a really amazing guy that I learned a lot from his books, including Spaceship Earth that you should read. He says all children. This was 1971 right. All children are born geniuses, but most of them are swiftly and inadvertently de genius by grown ups. That's what we do in school. We de genius our kids. That's not a good idea. Of course, that's not happening in every school. There are exemptions. Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and of course many, many places around the world. But we need to put the genius back into education and not just focus on functionality and performance. So we have to go away from this idea of instruction to the idea of discovery and creation. Marshall McLuhan, famous media theorist and futurist, says education must shift from instruction to discovery. The probing and exploring, the recognition of the language of forms. Again, that was 1974. We're finally going to get around to this because technology makes that possible. But we have to have the right policy, the educational policy that allows discovery and creation, not just rote learning. Because, you know, the reality is machines will do things like cloud biology, finding new medications, testing out things, you know, the road work, the commodity work that we really shouldn't be doing or shouldn't, mustn't be doing in the future, even though some of it may be entertaining. Right, here's a new pyramid, very important, the pyramid of work right down here. Data, information, intellectual knowledge that is kind of machine turf. Machines know things. You heard about deep learning, machine learning and so on. But the other stuff that's on top of it, right, the deeper knowledge right here, the tacit information, the things that we just know, the understanding, the wisdom, the purpose, the consciousness, the human agency, that's what makes us human and that's what we have to teach. And how do we teach that? Well, we don't just teach it by reading books, we teach, we teach that by interaction. This is the human only turf. That's why that's so important that we teach that to our kids. How to be more human and how to do sort of more project based learning, which has been discussed a lot in the past. Practice, context, subject, technology, theory, all in one, inclusive, holistic. There's no secret that many things like Rudolf Steiner education and anthroposophical education have already probed in this direction and given us a blueprint. And it's also quite clear that if you're looking at what's happening in the U.S. for example, many leaders in technology come from art school. It is going to be about art and science, as Steve Jobs said, to bring them together into this kind of new future. And so really what it is is this combination of STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, and we've Always fared well by doing a lot of work in there. But on the other hand, that's bring back the humanities. I mean, this is what it's all about. It's about humanity, ethics, creativity, imagination, opinions, foresight, creativity, making up stuff, creating things. We're going from the extractive economy of logic to the creative economy, the experience economy. And so important when we're looking again at this idea of problem based learning, learning and applying to solve the problem, not just learning something that we can pull out of our head later. We have to be resilient, agile. I mean, this is the world that we're in, the complete Vuca world. That's not going to change. No matter where you live in the world, you're going to need to invent. How do we get our kids to invent and to get excited about the future and try to make a very, very big difference? We're not going to do it by teaching kids, or adults for that matter, to be hyper efficient. Efficiency is great, but in the end, efficiency is only correct if it has the right target. You know, we're going to go from this idea of efficiency and performance and optimization to human agency, consciousness, imagination, intuition, empowerment. How do we teach that to our kids? Well, we have to let them try things. We have to allow for errors, we have to allow for opinions. We have to develop personalities, not just skills. This is not going to be about knowing how to program or how to, how to do a spreadsheet or how to do any sort of technical thing. That's good to know, of course. Is it good to know, for example, languages as well? But we have to understand that in this world, again, like I said, we have to go away from this idea of responding to this by having more rote learning, velocity, unorthodoxy, co creation, awesomeness. That's going to be the new curriculum. Which way we have to go. Imagine the future, says CK Prahalad, may be more important than analyzing the past. Companies today are no longer resource bound, they are imagination bound. And to that I would add countries are imagination bound. It's not going to be about what we produce and what kind of, you know, how much oil we have or what kind of military power we have. It's going to be about our imagination. And this is what we have to teach our kids. Imagination, creativity, humanity, consciousness, human agency. There's been a great saying by some Zen masters saying that basically knowledge is useless without wisdom and wisdom is useless without consciousness. So this is something we have to bring into our education, not just pursue Sort of book knowledge. So here's a couple bullets to send you off into that field that we can discuss later. First, prioritize imagination, intuition and human only skills. Prioritize in the way of saying okay, of course everybody has different talents. It should be stem and hacky, like I said earlier. Humanity, ethics, creativity, imagination. Bring back the humanities, make the scientists also do humanities, make the humanists, also study engineering. That would be a complete education. And when we have kids, we have to figure out exactly what is their talent, which way are they headed? What should they be learning to be able to invent? It's going to be about holistic thinking, about creativity, about the mindset, the future mindset. Being able to understand and shape the future. Cultivate character, personality, not just logic and iq, eq, emotional quotient, not just iq. That's going to come together and create a really powerful future in our schools when we have the bandwidth to accommodate it. Teaching less subjects are more about life problems, projects, holistic thinking. In Finland you already have schools now teaching projects that involve theory and technology and discussion and politics and beliefs and all of that together. That's the kind of thinking that we need, a holistic way of looking at the future. Also different kinds of degrees, maybe less grades and more sort of readiness certificates or project based things where we make up things, where we invent things. Pursue the flow. Being in the flow means you can get what you need when you need it. Not download just in case. For example, memorizing all of Wikipedia, which a machine can instantly do, would be very helpful. But we need it to be just in time so we can just look it up. I mean, yes, it's important to have basic knowledge, of course. I mean, I'm a futurist, that's what I strive for. But it's about the flow. Being able to create things from the flow that is going to be so essential. And I say in my book, we need to embrace technology but not become it. We're going to use virtual reality, augmented reality. We're going to learn remotely, we're going to teach remotely. All these things we have to learn. We have to embrace technology in the truest sense of the word. But we should not become technology. We should focus on what we are, not what the machine is. This is a tool. Technology is a tool, not a purpose. We're using technology for a purpose that we have to define so that tell us the Greek word wisdom. That is ultimately what we strive. And of course happiness is not a technological accomplishment. We're not going to find happiness on the screen. It's something we find in ourselves. So awesome. Humans on top of amazing science and technology. That's the ticket to the future. This is what we must teach kids. This is what kids have to learn. This is why we have to redo our curriculum and think about how we get this out to people and kids so that we understand which way they're going and what the opportunity is. So last year, I made a film about this called the Good Future. It's not just about education, but it's at thegoodfuturefilm.com you can watch it there. One key statement again from my good friend Buckminster Fuller. We are to be architects of the future, not as victims. We don't want our kids to be victims of the future. We want them to shape the future, to understand the future, to make the future. We want them to flourish. We don't want to accept that our kids will not have a good future. And this is what we need to get ready and for them to get ready for the good future. So thanks very much for listening, and thanks for your time. And here's my book, Technology versus Humanity. You can find it pretty much everywhere in 10 different languages. And now I want to get your questions, and we're going to switch back and have a conversation and get to the bottom of it. Thanks very much for tuning in.