Everything has Changed: Education

Everything has changed. And it happened very fast. So fast, that  you might not have noticed if you weren't paying attention. But if you were, then you can see that things will never be the same. However, much of the world is living and going about their business as if the old way of doing things is good enough. The problem is that good enough is now antiquated and subsequently, useless.

It's hard to accurately portray the point that I am trying to make. In fact, much of my time writing this post is spent looking at a blinking cursor. But given my limited time as a professional and therefore lack of "expertise" I have to look to what I believe is the direction things are going based on a very limited amount of data. But my argument is that so many things are happening right now, right under our noses, that will affect our generation in truly significant ways, that it's almost impossible to not see their role in the future, no matter how much experience I can have with them.

The way our society is setting itself up to run, should both encourage, excite, and scare us. Encourage and excite us if we are the drivers and innovators of the future. Scare us if we don't recognize that we have to ultimately be the innovators if we want to, get ahead but to simply survive.  There are a few ways that I believe the world has changed in a way that makes it so it will never be the same, ever. Education, the workforce and energy.

I have the unbelievable privilege of teaching many classes at the university level. It was something that I have always wanted to do and to do this right out of graduate school is something that I feel very fortunate to be able to accomplish. But I entered in at an interesting time. The world of academics is changing, drastically. The ability and the availability to learn has never been easier. Thomas Friedman's article from a few week's ago speaks to this change. The mere rationale of paying for top tier education is being questioned. Knowledge is becoming more and more affordable. Though universities across the country are seeing increases in tuition, the amount of information out there continues to grow. To me, this shows why education is changing. Universities are not keeping up with the demand of how people want to learn.

What universities do have is market power. A well established name and built up capital to control the flow of information, for the time being. But what is becoming more and more noticeable (and what I believe to be the biggest reason for change) is that, we are not teaching the same student anymore. I am in the middle of a book right now about the students that fill lecture halls and classrooms everyday at institutions of higher education. And the big idea that is driven home is that this current generation of students has never been without information. So why should they show up to class and be expected to learn from someone they don't know about info that they could look up on their phones while standing in line at Starbucks.

I'm sorry let me re-state that. Why should students be expected to show up to class and be expected to learn from someone they don't know about info that they could ask Siri about while walking to Starbucks where they used their phone to order and pay for their coffee, no line standing necessary.

And I can tell you, it's starting to show. I have had several interactions where students are disinterested in anything that is being taught by me, or by my colleagues. The shift in learning has gone from gaining a necessary base knowledge, blown through the entertain me phase, and is now at an experiential phase. Students today want to learn by doing, by interacting with the material. And would we ever expect otherwise? I still remember the day my dad sat the family around the computer and said, "this is AOL, we have to watch our time on it because it costs ten cents a minute" Today's student has never, not had the internet and therefore, information. So we to recognize that unless the atmosphere of learning changes, they and ultimately, we are in for a future that looks very different from the one that we are imagining.

I've gone back and forth on this as an educator (albeit a somewhat inexperienced) one. But I realize that if I don't change the way I approach my classroom, I'm helping to lose a whole generation of the future. If I keep putting out information that can easily be looked up or continuously allow students to pass classes because they earned a lot of extra credit, I am failing as an educator. This semester has taught me more about what it takes to succeed than I could have imagined. But what I do know for certain, is that I cannot expect people to learn the way that I did, and therefore I cannot expect to teach they way I was taught. It simply won't work in today's world.

~B


Look for the other two ways the world has irreversibly changed in the next few days.