Education's Role in Technological Revolutions - A Conversation with Carlota Perez

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The important thing is to understand what it is about this revolution that requires a revolution in education. Every technological revolution has transformed education. In this paradigm, in this revolution, teaching has to be one of the best fake professionals. If it's not, we won't succeed.

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast with me, Tim Logan. In this week's conversation, I'm focusing in on education's role in technological revolutions with the amazing Carlota Perez. Carlota is a British-Venezuelan researcher, lecturer, and international consultant. She studies the mutual shaping of technical change and society. Society and the lessons provided by the history of technological revolutions for economic growth and development. In her book, 'Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages,' which she published in 2002, Carlota put forward her theory of the emergence and diffusion of technological revolutions and the role of finance in the process. Her long career has spanned civil service, consultancy, academic research, and teaching. Beginning in the 1970s with an investigation into the structural causes of the energy crisis in her home country of Venezuela. Carlota is the Honorary Professor at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at the University College London and the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. She's also Adjunct Professor of Technology and Socioeconomic Development at the Ragnar Nesk School of Innovation and Governance at TalTech in Estonia. Carlota has acted as consultant for several Latin American governments and for international organizations and multilateral agencies such as the UN Industrial Development Organization, the World Bank, the OECD, and the EU, where she chaired the European Commission's Horizon 2020 expert group for green growth and jobs. I hope you enjoy this conversation as we dive straight in.

There's clearly a lot of talk around big ideas about transformation of education, which, which for me philosophically I believe in deeply, but many big ideas in education haven't made much change to the main system for centuries, right?

Well, forget about centuries because it's not true. It has changed a lot over the centuries. Yeah, but there is something fundamental that hasn't changed. I agree.

It's kind of the, the industrial kind of idea. But I guess what people are talking about now is something much more networked and much more distributed about the way that small kind of hyperlocal pods might develop or online networks that span obviously across the globe, et cetera. So these kinds of conversations, which is fine, it's all very interesting talk. But what I and Brad Carter were trying to look at is if we were going to support those kinds of changes in education, how might the financing of it look in terms of the way that public sector money might be used differently or the way that private sector money might be again used differently, philanthropy, who knows, platform cooperatives, that kind of cooperative model. To look at local ecosystems. So a big kind of open questions about actually more on financing education. So the reason I was particularly interested in your work was the focus you seem to have on the role of education as part of that transition into the golden age of a technological revolution. So really that's what I would love if we could speak about a bit is Yes, into the economics, of course, but also, yeah, where you see the role of education in the turning point into the golden age shift.

Yeah, well, I, there are certain things that are very important. One is to recognize that this particular revolution happens to change the most important asset in people's lives. It used to be the home that was the main asset, and you had to to make sure that you had a home so you could then have your car on it, and the whole idea of security, the home was something that you had for your old age and so on. Today, the most important asset anybody can have is education. So now it becomes, it's an asset. It's no longer this thing that the state or somebody gave you. In a way, they have made it terribly into an asset with this new, very expensive way of funding private education all the way from parents are desperate because the asset is your education and your child's education. That practically every family is going to depend on how much they manage to educate their children because, so it's a big shift in terms of the role of education in society. So that's the first thing. Of course, that means that as has happened with each Technological Revolution, education changes completely. The goals, the layers, the structure, all sorts of things. When you think of education in the first revolution and the Industrial Revolution in England, education was Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, all the so-called public schools, which are the private schools, to educate the leaders, the military people, the aristocrats, the landowners, the politicians, the church, especially because the church was still part of power. And then you didn't give any education to children or hardly any, you know, literacy wasn't even necessary to live. You didn't have to have it.

You didn't need it. Yeah. Yeah.

You didn't need it. So you had this leadership layer was educated and a little bit the merchants and the, you know, some of the people who were doing other more complicated things like, like the East India Company or things like that. But basically life was based on something else. What you needed were skills. You needed to know how to weave, how to cook. So you didn't learn that in school. You learned that in the community, in, you know, your parents, you generally followed your parents' job. So whatever it was, you learned it, you saw it and you learned it. As you moved on to the next revolution, you started needing some skills taught, railway engineers. Which by the way, the word engineer comes from engine. And one of the problems that the British had, in my view, that they didn't really train proper engineers like the Germans and the Americans in the third revolution, because they kept on thinking that an engineer was a worker in a railroad. You know, they didn't have the notion of scientific engineering. So what happens in the second revolution is that you have still the leaders learning, but now among the leaders you have the financial people. There is like a layer of people who handles the money of the aristocrats that used to handle it sort of like themselves. So you have education now in the economic direction also, but you also have a layer of people who are educated, who are the teachers, the librarians, the accountants, the, you know, the people who served all the roles, even the milliners, the people who made the hats and the things, you know, they were, They had a certain sort of middle layer reputation, and they were lifted to the good life. Whereas the bottom people, again, maybe for the children, a minimum of reading and writing, you know, just numeracy and so on. Very basic. When you come to the third revolution, which is really a scientific revolution, heavy engineering, because that's the one where you have incredible construction, very complex construction feats, the huge bridges, the tunnels for the railways. You had a very complex set of skills that were necessary for each of the engineering. So you had chemical engineering, you had electrical engineering, the whole of electricity beginning a completely different world. And you needed not only the actual scientists and the engineers that would be able to lead the big companies that were grow at that time, but you also needed Highly skilled workers in each of those areas. So those became what was dubbed the labor aristocracy because they really lived well. They had good salaries and they also had very strong unions because they had something to sell that was very scarce. So at that time, in especially in the US and Germany, you had very clear need for university education for engineers and for scientists. And then there was a whole, I mean, the state-funded universities everywhere in the US, the so-called land-grant universities, some of them, it's because the federal government gave them land and then they used the land as funding for setting up the universities. Those universities were meant to be experimental universities. They were meant to discover new things and to spread them. It wasn't just the university as a place where you taught the people who came to the university, but they also went out in what was called extension services. So if you taught them about agriculture, they would go out and teach the farmers, you know, how to fertilize, how to do this and the other. Everything they learned, they were meant to share, to spread. So there was a form of education, which was practical and which was for the people who strictly needed it for their everyday work. But it wasn't considered an education like you have in a schoolroom. It was the teachers, those who learned, would come out in extension services. So then—

Interesting.

So you have, this is a very important period in educational innovation. Perhaps one of the reasons why Britain lost its leadership completely to Germany and the US, and then after the First World War, Germany defeated, of course, lost a lot of its force, and the US took over as the leader of the world. And basically, Britain was defeated by its education system. Which never really caught up. So then you come to the fourth revolution, which is the mass production revolution that begins with Henry Ford. And there you have, again, a lot of engineering and you need a lot of education. But here you have a three-layer education system. You have the very bottom layer, which is really basically the basic, basic, basic education. So that you could work in an assembly line and not go bananas. You know, you had to be not too educated. In fact, I think in some countries like Germany and France and so on, where the education that was given free was a bit too much for an assembly line, they very early brought the Turks to Germany and the Algerians and Moroccans and so on to France to work in the assembly lines. Because the baccalauréat was for real. People had too much education, so they became this other layer. Completely worked in the services and in the upper layers of companies. You had this pyramid of a lot of people in between. So you had this middle educated layer, which generally had publicly funded education, but good quality. Whereas for instance, in the US, the bottom of the pile, the people who were meant to be in the assembly line or in retail or things like that, they actually were almost functionally illiterate. The very, very poor education, very badly paid teachers, very inferior education harmed people. I think even the consequences now that, you know, things like the populism that can now take hold so strongly, much more strongly in the US than in other parts, I think has to do with this discrimination in terms of education for the lower layers of society, the very badly paid teachers in very— Interesting.

Yeah.

Poor neighborhoods and so on. So you had this other layer of university education, which was not great, which was public. And then you had the layer of the leaders Very expensive private education all the way, and especially the top universities in the world, the highest, most advanced. So the distances in education were enormous. You know, Europe did not go that far. It didn't go so much higher except a few people, and it certainly kept a better standard at the bottom.

Wow, interesting. So you know more about education than I do. Look.

No, no, no, no. The important thing is to understand what it is about this revolution that requires a revolution in education. Exactly. Because every technological revolution has transformed education in every way. It has gone— obligatory education has gone up with every technological revolution. Up to what age are you forced to have education? What type of education? And the content. Mass production education was about discipline and learning to answer questions. And you know that 2 2 is 4 and it cannot be 4.5. It cannot be 3.8. It can only be 4. So everything had to have an answer. So you have exams where you have a precise answer. There were even, uh, exams where you had A, B, C, D, or 1, 2, 3, 4, and you had to choose which one was true. And there was no this a little bit and that a little bit. So the thing is that now we have to learn the opposite. We have to learn how to evaluate alternatives. We have to learn not to answer the exams of the teacher, but how to ask the questions from Google and how to ask the questions from, you know, how to find the information you need and then how to judge the alternatives.

Yeah.

How to know, then you also have to have projects. You don't just obey whatever, even in, you know, big companies, they don't just tell you go do like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. You are actually supposed to innovate. You're actually supposed to think and to be creative and to be imaginative. Here in the 1980s and '90s, there was a transformation in assembly work, having people work, do teams and things, copying the Japanese model. And the Japanese model was all these things about participation and all that. And this sort of shift to China made, not only made middle-income jobs become low-income jobs, but also went from jobs that were being enriched to jobs that were way back down, except the fact that they generally have a computer in front that tells them what to do.

But one of the big questions for me is, It's about the content of what the children and young people and university students need to learn. But there's also, there's also the organization of it. And one of the things I've heard you talk about is the shift from, so from kind of the consumerist idea of bureaucracies to networks being a key unit within the new, the way that the new technological revolution is, is organized. Do you think there's a need for education to reflect that in terms of the way that education is organized, moving away from these kind of large-scale mass kind of industrial factories of children or factories of university students into something more, more fluid, more kind of networked and ecosystem-focused, you know, those kinds of ideas seem to be talked about quite a lot right now.

Okay. What I really think, I really think that that's not the problem. I really think that the problem is what type of things do you need to learn and what are the circumstances under which you would learn them best? So let's say that you want to learn something very, very, very highly super technology, scientific, whatever. And there are maybe in the world 20 people who are capable of teaching that. Well, we have the possibility of having those people Do MOOCs, do it online.

Yeah.

So that everybody in the world can have access to this incredible knowledge, which is of course not patented because they won't give you, but I mean the scientific knowledge that you want to learn and be organized in such a way that the absolutely best top teachers in the world will be the ones who give the information. And then you can organize in whichever way you want. But you need to participate. So you would need to have groups. You would need to have, you know, flip the classroom, that idea where the teacher becomes a facilitator of a discussion and of answering questions and doing all these things. So for very complex things, and you will probably have very small groups, but only because depending on this very high scientific stuff, there are only so many people who want to learn it. So you can have little groups. They can be online, they can be live community, they can be whatever you want. You can also learn on your own, which is a shame, but it can be done. There is now the whole, you know, all the facilities for you to learn whatever you want doing the exercises. And if it's organized nicely, then you will also be able to interact with people and not just the robots. And you can make groups yourself. You can, let's study together this thing and then we'll do it together. So I think to begin with, we are now in a different world in terms of where the information is. Then what to do if it's a very simple thing like arithmetic or whatever? Well, then you have to do the opposite. You have to have fantastically imaginative things that are online so that it becomes so much fun to learn because it's not just teaching you, toblas, toblas, one, two, three, four. Fantastically artistic, imaginative, so that children love learning. You've got to get children to love learning because it's so much fun. It's so exciting. And then to do things and you tell them to go now do an experiment with a bean and a thing and a glass and it grows and you know, and you learn about all those basic things. You have to teach them using the fantastic means that we have to really be almost better than any teacher. Yeah. Up to a point.

Yeah.

Because there's a whole range of other things like learning to work in teams, like learning precisely to research, to do research. Yeah. To do projects, to choose between alternatives, you know, which are not things that you can teach at all. Except by practice. You've got to get the children and the young people and the whatever age, because it's at every, every age that you need to do that. We've got to have very warm, well-paid, because teaching in this paradigm, in this revolution, teaching has to be one of the best paid professionals. If it's not, we won't succeed. Because it is one of the most difficult. However, right now we are living with a legacy of unions, people being treated like workers, which are just the minimal of anything. So they have to unite and fight. And anytime you say that they have to take courses, they feel rightly that they're being maltreated and they fight against being judged on how much you learn and so on. Because I mean, it's bad enough, the way teachers are treated, you know, it's like the lowest layer of workers.

Yeah.

So you can't have that anymore. We've got to change that. We've got to pay them well, let their organizations be very strong, but not to fight for measly thing and against training, but an excited and, uh, exciting thing.

Yeah.

Of learning to do things in a new way.

Yeah.

And that way you are going to not only help the ones that are still there be happier with their job and willing to learn and to do because it's fun and because it's nice and because they feel respected and appreciated. Not, we're gonna do tests to see who's good and who's not. And then the ones that are not good enough, we're gonna fire them. Or you only get a salary if you do. There is all this aggression, like really not realizing that those people are the future, that they handle the future because it's in their hands that we put our children. It's really crazy. So this other thing which has to do with what it is that teachers are really going to teach from now on, they will, of course, help learn all the things that people can learn with all the new means and so on. But they're mainly going to teach people to innovate, to live, to work together, to think of big projects, to improve things. The thing is, we should have started changing things 30 years ago because we've had this in our hands since at least since 2000, really change things, start raising salaries and so on. But we continue to mistreat teachers and to underestimate them. Underestimate them and undermine their morale. And, you know, we couldn't be worse. I think it's been criminal against children what has been done against teachers.

Can I ask you about the government tilting the playing field? Because, you know, you talk about this, about how the private sector has been dominant and neoliberal economics, etc. But your He seemed to have a very strong perspective that the government needs to intervene to tilt the playing field. How does that factor into education?

Tilting the playing field means simply that you get society to go synergistically in certain directions. So in the previous one, the playing field was tilted towards the suburban home, the car, the two parents and two children, and the wife working at home and the husband working outside, and enough salary for them to have a good life and the children going to school regularly and probably going to university and this, you know, and buying the whole framework of what government was doing. So they backed the mortgages, they gave unemployment insurance so that people could continue paying the house and the car and the refrigerator. They gave pensions so that people could spend their money, all they earned every month, because they knew they would have a pension in old age. Which is very different from before where savings was super important. And of course, then there were the jobs that were there. The government gave the education most of the time free for all the basic things that would make the labor that was necessary. And there was also another direction that was given, which was the Cold War. And I'm talking mainly about the most advanced countries. There, of course, you needed then very high education, very scientific, so that you could do the most extreme technologies, which are many of the technologies we now have. So you needed high excellence education. And that was also provided not by government necessarily, but if you have the demand, that gives a direction for universities to work because there was this demand. In the space and in military technology and so on. So those were the two directions then. I think now we need to have smart for digital, green to save the planet and to be able to survive, fair, which of course it was also fair. That was, I mean, all these things that I told you about are precisely how all the blue-collar workers were lifted into a sort of middle-income lives. And global. And I say global because I don't think the advanced countries can survive without demand from the developing world because the consumer demand is taken over by China and Asia and it's not going to come back with employment. It'll come back with robotics if it does at all, whatever comes back to the advanced world. So the advanced world needs new countries coming in so that they can do sustainable engineering, capital goods, all sorts, you know, and sort of have a greater, you have a positive sum game between the emerging countries, the developing countries, and the advanced world. So now we need to do what was done because the workers were lifted in order to give demand, to create demand for mass production industry. So you had mass consumption. Now we have a global industry that needs global demand. And in that sense, the very specific directions that people would feel in their daily lives would be green and smart, and to move all things digital into green so that you go from products to services, strong shift from products to services.

Yeah.

By using ICT for all that. Or things like hydroponic vegetables grown in the cities around communities and so on. So people would stop eating frozen, tinned, canned, refrigerated, all that, which is very anti, and start eating really fresh food that can be grown hydroponically very close. Doesn't have to be imported from. And of course, that's another reason why it's also necessary to develop the developing world so that they have enough demand for their own production. And because we're going to cut off a lot of the imports from the third world in materials and food and all that, because it'll be able to be produced locally. Meat can be produced in a lab, so you don't need to import. So it's a major change. Of course, if you don't do that, then you're going to have migrants like mad and you're going to have— it's crazy.

So what is that? What does that look like in your view in terms of the Global South? And because if they don't have the fiscal stakes to be able to provide the public money for the appropriate investment in public sector education, we then get into this kind of aid dependency cycle, right? With, with the North giving aid and then the aid being used to pay teachers, but that's recurrent expenses, which doesn't—

so what, as a longer term solution, how does Well, the longer-term solution is everybody developing, but I mean, that's a longer-term solution. But the shorter-term solution, I think we need to create probably through a financial transactions tax for every bit of money, well, anything over $5,000 that moves across the globe to make an institution that will fund green projects and could fund things like education. Countries would apply. To get the money like they do now with some of the development banks, with the World Bank.

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Development or whatever. We need to have new taxes, obviously. Thank God they just did this little step to start taxing these companies that have trillions and have them in the Bahamas and so on. And of course, we have to get rid of the Bahamas. We have to do something to help them survive without these things and Panama and all these countries that live off tax evasion. That cannot continue. I mean, you can't allow society to be so— So basically, I think there's going to be an education industry that will be very different from this several layers of— Education today is like an oil refinery. Some come out raw, like asphalt, and then you go and then you get gasoline, kerosene, gasoline, gas, and so on all the way. And you come out and you have, you are gas.

Yeah.

You are gasoline. Yeah. You are diesel. People get something from school that says what the rest of their life is going to be like. That obviously cannot continue. We've got to have lifelong education and therefore we've got to be able to enter and come out of education anytime we want. And that can be paid, that can be with vouchers, can be with whatever. Uh, maybe labor contracts will have to include a voucher. You know, you have a right to have so many days of education a year paid by the company. We can discuss what it is that you're going to learn, but every year you're gonna learn something. It will be one thing that can happen on one end. On the other end, the state also giving vouchers or giving something so that people can be, But then as a counterpart, all sorts of educational entrepreneurial ventures where people will be teaching all sorts of things. And it'll be like you have advertising all over the place, like it used to be for cleaning things and for all the advertising for education.

A marketplace.

Probably going, yeah, market for education that will be. So you have the the basic, which I think the state has to provide. Then you have, I think this business of having people pay so much for a university education is completely counterproductive. It's got to be a much more reasonable thing. But then also the payback, more like the British where you only, you start paying 2 years later and only depending on your salary, do you actually pay it back. And if you never, you know, then you don't pay. It's okay to charge because of course what we should definitely have free is really baby care. You know, we need to have very early education, well organized, high, high quality for children, the highest quality for children and very highly paid. And with training that doesn't stop, the teachers being trained all the time, the most important people in society, we have to admire, we have to adore them. We have to make a big thing of the people who are teaching our children. At up to 10, it has got to be the best imaginable for everybody, not just for the rich.

Yeah.

Because this whole thing of the bad public school with badly paid teachers and that, and private schools with badly paid teachers, but I don't know where, which is horrible. Nobody pays well. So up to then, and then from then on, we have to find all sorts of ways of I think even high school could be something you could have, like something that you put in the bank. I learned so much to put it in the bank as an imaginary asset, like cryptocurrency.

Yeah, like a digital wallet. So people are talking about these credentials, like digital credentials in wallets.

Yeah. So anyway, some crazy— we've got to invent some crazy—

Wow.

Society gave you these skills and now you're going to use them and you have a right to have for yourself just so much. And then after that, you start turning back so that other people can get. So I think that from 16 onwards, maybe everything that's given, or even from 14, you don't have to be paying it. You just have to put it somewhere that you owe. You have this debt, which is a debt that doesn't have to ever really be fully paid, but it can be sometimes in some cases, of course. But then, of course, the thing is, how do you determine and how? So it's very complicated. We have to find the system that will not draw lines. And I'm all for Universal basic income, for instance. I think all of the advanced countries should have that. So that's one way of having people be able to have education. But, you know, they have enough food, transport, shelter, just so much. And then you can go to education anytime you want. You can develop your skills as a musician, as an artist, as a writer, whatever, because you have this possibility. So all citizens have a right to have that. So we have to lift anyway.

Yeah, but we need to be imaginative about how we use it, use education to lift people. So no, thank you. I really appreciate it. You know, I'm sure it was a whistle-stop tour of centuries of education, but it's just amazing.

It's amazing.

Thank you, Carlos. I mean, such good ideas and I just, I wish we could sit and actually start designing them together because that would be the best thing, right?

Yeah.

Lovely.

Thank you.

Very good. Okay, all the best.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

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