Is it too late to prepare your students for the future?

I hope you are sitting comfortably. Because by the time you have got to the end of this page, you won’t be. I write this because I thought I had a reasonable understanding of the rate of change in our world, and that there was plenty of time for me as an educator to prepare our children for the future.

It turns out however that the future is already here. And to get the quote correct “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003” ― William Gibson.

To get a taste of the rate of change, watch the following videos.

The ‘Building the Lucky Country – Digital disruption Short fuse, big bang?‘ report published by Deloitte in 2017 identified that  ‘One-third of the Australian economy faces imminent and substantial disruption by digital technologies and business models‘.

Expect retail employment opportunities to decrease even more. This image shows someone printing their own toy building blocks. Photographer deliberately not credited because I am not sure if they are printing the blocks legally.

I hope your head was left spinning – as mine was when I stumbled across the first video. I read extensively in this area and thought I was fairly much up to date with technological change. Not so.

The take away message is that change now seems to be exponential and unpredictable. The way for educators to prepare our charges for their ‘now’ (forget the out of date concept of ‘the future’) is project based learning. Another words, ‘long live’ STEM education!