When we say “school”, most of us imagine a building with hallways where you can still smell the enamel on the walls, a ringing sound reminiscent of a bomber’s alarm, dividing the day into precise segments between which it is possible to eat a snack, and a blackboard – now more often interactive than chalk. At first glance, not much has actually changed. And that’s the problem.
School, as we know it, was created during the Enlightenment. At a time when information was scarce and its transmission was a key tool for civilizational progress. A child came to school to learn something that he would not have otherwise been able to: how the world works, how to count, how to write, what history is. The teacher was the bearer of knowledge. The school was the place where knowledge was transmitted.
This model had its logic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was revolutionary. It still worked quite well in the mid-20th century. Information was limited, access to it was difficult, and its systematic mediation made sense.
But today’s children don’t need information.
There is an excess of information. The Internet is a storehouse of facts, instructions, explanations, videos, simulations, courses. A child has access to a larger volume of data in a few seconds than a university professor had thirty years ago. The problem today is not a lack of information. The problem is how to navigate it. How to distinguish the essential from the unessential. The true from the manipulative. The important from the unnecessary.
And yet the school structure is still built as if the main goal was to convey as much information as possible.
The children we teach today will live to see the year 2100
Let’s try to imagine a timeline for a moment.
Today’s first-grader will retire sometime around 2085.
Today’s ninth-grader will have the main part of his career between 2040 and 2060.
These are not distant sci-fi horizons. This is a reality that is already happening.
And we teach these children as if their working life began sometime around 1998.
What did school look like in 1995?
What did we consider modern back then?
A computer classroom with several desktop PCs. Teaching how to work with a floppy disk. Enthusiastic explanations of what an e-mail is. Copying articles from an encyclopedia into a notebook.
Back then, we felt that we were modern. That the world would no longer fundamentally change. That technology had advanced and now it would be more about small improvements.
Today, it seems comical.
But we have exactly the same feeling today. We think that now we know where the world is headed. That changes will be gradual, joyful, and everything will only get better. That “it will somehow continue”.
In one debate, a debater told me, “Of course, there may be some black swans, but we can’t rely on them…”
But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding. Black swans may not come. They will come for sure. Each of us has experienced several in our lives. Financial crises. Pandemics. Technological breakthroughs. Wars. Social shifts that we couldn’t have imagined. And let’s be aware that their frequency is increasing. They are more frequent and their consequences are more extensive.
We don’t know what the next ones will be like. We don’t know when they will come. We don’t know how big their impact will be. We don’t know if they will turn our world upside down for the better or for the worse (and more likely). But we do know one thing: They will come. And they will probably come more often and more forcefully than they have in the past.
If that’s the case, then one of the key competencies that schools should develop is readiness for change.
Not knowledge of a specific list of facts that will become obsolete.
Not the ability to repeat the curriculum for a test.
And certainly not the ability to stand somewhere, where any employer needs it today.
But the ability to withstand uncertainty.
What should be the backbone of education?
When we ask what should be the core of basic education, the answer is not in any list of curriculum.
It is in personality development.
In the ability to respond to change.
Our students will need mental resilience to stress and unexpected burdens.
Financial literacy.
Information literacy – the ability to critically evaluate sources, recognize manipulation, work with data.
And the key will also be the competencies related to the fact that we live among people and humans as a species have reached the level they are at thanks to cooperation:
So cooperation. Communication. The ability to resolve conflicts.
School is a place where we are supposed to learn to live with ourselves and with others.
Yes, they are called “soft skills”. As if they were soft, secondary, unimportant. In fact, they are skills harder than many pieces of knowledge. These are the competencies that underpin the ability to survive and succeed in a world that is constantly changing.
This should be the backbone of elementary school. Knowledge has its value in education – as a means to develop these competencies, not as a goal. It is the material on which these competencies are trained.
Every debate about framework and other plans that revolves around how much time to devote to which subject in elementary school is automatically outside of time reality. It almost doesn’t matter. I return to what was written above: Let’s take them as material that will help us develop our personality, that’s what it’s all about. Not about educational subjects.
It’s not about whether school worked before
We often hear the argument: “We had it that way and it worked.”
Maybe. But the world we entered us, was different. More stable. Slower. More predictable.
There is no point in nostalgically evaluating the past. Even if the school of that time functioned perfectly for its time, it does not work today.
We see this in the loss of motivation of children.
In the first grade, it is still mostly possible. Children are naturally curious. They want to discover the world. They are willing to accept the authority of the teacher.
But in the second grade, something breaks. Children begin to understand that a large part of what they learn has no relation to their future. That the world around them changes faster than the school curriculum and information in textbooks. That teaching is often neither meaningful nor fun.
Then comes resignation.
Bad results.
Disinterest.
Mobile phone addiction. (BTW. And that’s why no ban will work. Let’s give children the opportunity, let’s offer a buffet of experiences and possibilities for interesting things to do. That works – a ban doesn’t.
It’s convenient to say that the children are to blame. Or the parents. Or technology.
But what if the problem lies elsewhere?
What if the school simply doesn’t offer anything worth paying attention to? What if the mobile phone is just a symptom – an easily accessible alternative to something that doesn’t make sense?
Schoolchildren are not stupid. They very quickly evaluate whether an activity is relevant to their lives. If they evaluate that it is not, they start saving energy. This is not a moral failure. This is a natural reaction.
There is no way back
If school is to start working again, there is no way back to its old form.
There is no point in increasing the number of tests.
There is no point in tightening discipline in the hope that this will bring back motivation. No, it won’t.
You can’t just “add computer science” and think that we solved the problem.
We need a different school.
A school that realizes that its role is not to fill heads with information, but to develop people.
A school that takes seriously the fact that the world of 2050 will be different from the world of 2025 – and that we don’t know how, and it will probably be more different than we think now.
A school that, instead of the certainty of the past, offers training in the uncertainty of the future.
This is not an easy task. But it is an inevitable task.
Because black swans will come.
And the children who are still mostly sitting in their desks today will stand up for themselves.
The question is not whether the world will change.
The question is whether we will prepare them for it.