How Education Is Likely to Change In the Next Decade or Two

One simple difference between a functional and dysfunctional society is how effectively it raises children to be productive adults. You have to evolve your education to keep up with the economy. Ideally, that education doesn't just keep up with but actually drives economic progress.

Two things that make this more challenging than ever are increases in life expectancy and the rate of economic change. 

10 year old kids are in fifth grade. Their peak earning will probably be in about 40 years. So we have about 7 to 15 years to prepare them to be productive in the year 2060. That's kind of ludicrous. The longer we live, the farther out is the target we're shooting at in terms of preparation.

Meanwhile, economic change is accelerating. One of the great things about globalization is that we now have 7.5 billion people engaged in invention and entrepreneurship. One of the bad things about globalization is that the odds that the technology we're using this year, the company we're working for this year, the processes we're using this year ... are still the company, technology and processes we're using in a decade are incredibly low. 

We're not just shooting at a target 40 years out. That target is moving faster than ever.

I suspect that two of the dimensions to how we'll change education to accommodate this reality will be this. 

1. We will eventually adopt a model of lifetime education. 10 year old kids will already be spending 5 to 15% of their time at "work." They won't just learn principles. They will begin applying those to the creation of value for their community. 60 year old people will be spending 5 to 15% of their time in "school." They won't just be applying old principles. They'll be learning new ones.

2. We will teach entrepreneurship and innovation. Stanford has Sand Hill Road on its campus. Sand Hill Road is to venture capital what Wall Street is to stocks. That combination of education and financing helped to create Silicon Valley. (Terman, one of the visionaries who saw Silicon Valley before it existed, introduced two of his students who he thought should collaborate to create a business. The students? Bill Hewlett and David Packard.) The notion that schools will be launching pads for new businesses (and new government agencies and schools and social inventions we have yet to think of) will become common. Skills and ability for technological and social invention are something that will still be valuable in the year 2060 even if AI has automated the jobs of driving trucks or programming, say. And making school and work coincident means that both will evolve more quickly to keep pace with the progress we're trying to drive.