American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist

Education must prepare students for a fast-changing world, argues David Edwards for Wired. The world must handle 2 billion more people over the next 20 years along with a stressed food supply and climate change. “The many rich and varied human cultures of the earth will continue to mix, more rapidly than they ever have, through mass population movements and unprecedented information exchange, and to preserve social harmony we need to discover new cultural referents, practices, and environments of cultural exchange,” he writes. “In such conditions the futures of law, medicine, philosophy, engineering, and agriculture – with just about every other field – are to be rediscovered.” Students must prepare to learn, adapt, imagine, discover and communicate. Learning by discovery is practiced by some after-school programs and universities, where competition and collaboration combine to motivate. He points to culture labs around the globe, which “conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs.” – YaleGlobal