Dr. CJ Meadows, who chairs a conservation organization and homeschools her four adopted and biological children from different countries, argues education must shift from factory-model schooling to self-directed learning. She proposes students "collect the dots" by exploring interests, then connect them to solve real problems, and warns 45% of current jobs may disappear due to automation.
Chapters
How is design thinking saving endangered tigers? Can worms be a major global health asset? We tackle these discoveries and more as we explore education on this edition of The Business of Everything. We're joined by Dr. Cj Meadows from the SP Jain School of Global Management. She's part of the frontline of the changing face of education and is adapting new ways of thinking like natural innovation and cross-disciplinary thinking. Does universal basic income have limitations? Can silk fibers really make vaccines universally available? Let's find out more. Before we get into the vast topics that you cover, can you tell me a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to lately?
Oh, thank you. I'm also the chair of a kind of an innovative organization that combines tiger conservation, ecotechnologies, and people programs. I also homeschool my kids. The best way to learn is teach, so I was just in Calcutta teaching with another one. Another one does sports. Around the world, and my own personal passion to relax is to feed and photograph sharks.
Indeed, that is quite a vast area of interests and occupations. You are very much involved in the alternative approach of education and how to prepare for the future of work, and being a mother of 4, I'm sure you're very involved personally as well as professionally. Can you tell us maybe a bit more about what you're doing?
Absolutely, I do this all day and I do it all night. I mean, the future of education is indelibly tied to the future of work. And what we've been talking about for some time and now actually seeing really happen is open networked organizations, people with portfolio careers, portfolio jobs, people who change what they do constantly and have a constant need for learning. So at the the Future of Education think tank, we've taken a peek into the future of work and said, okay, well, what does that mean for developing ourselves and solving problems and being innovative? Who are you? How are you designed? What inspires you? What do you care about? What do you want to spend your life on? What are your talents? So by looking inward and starting there and following what you find interesting, What you choose to study may not make any sense. What you choose to do for a career may not make a lot of sense, but go ahead and collect the dots because looking back, you should be able to connect them and create something in a way that no one else in the world can.
It's hard now to see what the future takes us from a workplace perspective to what might be relevant then and isn't now.
And that's one of the things that we need to think about in education. There's a very big difference between hunting and gathering. So when you gather, you collect the dots, you collect them based on yourself, your interests. It changes how you see the world. Then you'll create with what you have at hand, the people, the ideas, your skills that you've built up beforehand without knowing why. But there will be holes and you'll need to hunt. For the missing people, the missing pieces.
When do you think is the perfect time for someone to put themselves back into question? Are they on the right path? I mean, this approach is somewhat revolutionary in terms of education.
Good time is now.
The good time is always now.
Good time is always now. The future is now. This is yesterday's future, and you'd better be building tomorrow now. Education had been— it was designed out of the industrial age, factories. And we created programs that make cookie-cutter people to go into the factories and be cogs in wonderful machines that made terrific advances. Now some of that work is gonna be done by bots. As a matter of fact, up to 45% of jobs will disappear. Okay, well, what will people do then? We still have needs. Well, you know, a lot of our needs are not being served, not being fulfilled, whether they be societal needs or conveniences or products or services, etc. So we will need, most of us, to have a lot more education in innovation, in need-seeking and identifying those needs, in developing ourselves as unique resources that can also work with others as unique resources.
With the future of learning comes also the assessment aspect of learning. How would you assess this alternative way of education? We are so used to a percentage or point-based system where everyone is, like you say, a cookie-cutter version or a better or worse one. What are your thoughts?
Terrific question. I mean, there are several different things to assess. There still is a role for knowledge and there is still is a role for putting information and knowledge in your head because that's how you will— that will frame how you see the world and that will be the stuff at hand when you're going to create something new. So first of all, go ahead and do knowledge-based assessment, but don't spend so much time on things that bots are going to do or that you're really not the person to do. Study things for which you could be the best in the world, or at least the very best you in a way that you want. So knowledge assessment still can be done. Peer assessment— you know, some of the best insights that I've had about myself and my work have come from other people. Another thing is people learn very, very well when they're actually doing something, but you need to put the reflection cycle in after. So The world of the future of work and learning needs to be together. It needs to be integrated. You learn knowledge, you practice, but then you apply it to something that you're developing. And you have an ecosystem around you, mentors and coaches who've been there before, judged by panels of industry people, not just academics. And then when you come out the end with some creation, Is it something that's going to fly in the world? Or is it not going to fly, but you make great learnings and can go back to the beginning? So assessment by yourself in reflection, by other people, by bots who can test your knowledge, and by the marketplace at large.
It plugs in very nicely— sorry— into the way the marketplace is currently being structured. Ja. We did come from the last 20, 30 years of titan-like industry. Big corporations would take very brilliant students and indoctrinate them into their system. Ja. And over time it's been revolutionized by startups coming up, hiring brilliant dropouts from universities with no degrees.
Ja.
And turning them into prodigies.
Well, you see, organizations began to get into a— they started to go into a period whereby they would reorganize and realize, no, this isn't quite right, so then we'll reorganize again. Oh no, we need to unfreeze, re-change, and re-freeze again. But I think that cycle, which takes a lot of time and energy, should be coordinated by our technology Our organizations, I believe, will work a lot more like ecosystems and marketplaces, and your job and the structure of the organization will be more fluid. It will be more organic. It will change all the time, every day, on a continual basis. But that means then, since work and learning are integrated, you need to be learning and changing on a continual basis.
So I understand you've got a very modern family.
I've got a very crazy family, if that's what you mean.
To say that, can you tell me a bit more about the current family structure you have?
Oh, absolutely. So it's very, very normal in— there's a mom and there's dad and there's, well, there's 4 kids, so not 2.4. And we're all from different places. So I'm from the US, my husband's from the UK, and the kids are from Vietnam, Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia with different family names. We speak different languages, we have different passports, but we come together as a real family that loves and supports each other. 3 of the kids are adopted, one's a test tube baby, and 3 of them are currently homeschooling with Oxford Online Learning from the Oxford Online Trust. One of them is about to join them from an international school. So yeah, I go do Future of Education all day and then I gotta go do it at night.
I was gonna say, with the way you work in the global future of education and thinking, it must be amazing to have such a variety of a family to talk to.
It's fantastic. Well, yeah. And you know, out of the 5 basic human temperaments, we have all 5. One of them is 2. And if they can learn to survive at home, they can go out in the world and do anything with anyone. The youngest just went out with me to Calcutta to the Loretto School. So they have 700 non-paying students and street children along with 700 paying students in a truly excellent school. The students do a lot of teaching of each other. So my 14-year-old and I went over and we were doing— teaching English in the day program and after school with the Rainbow Program. And she learned about teaching. She learned about learning because that's— teaching is the best way to learn. The other child is a sportsman in one of the fastest-growing sports on the planet, and one reason he wants to homeschool is so he has the flexibility to attend international tournaments and rallies. With a set program in an industrial-age school, he can't do that.
It does give the flexibility to learn while doing and, well, keep doing and keep learning, right?
Exactly. You learn with your experience, you reflect on it, you collect new ideas into your head, and then you go put it to use, etc., etc.
