With increasing automation and robotics, as well as a hyperconnected global labor pool, the future of work frequently comes up as an issue for Homelanders or Generation Z. After the Millennials was recently commissioned by the educational non-profit Knowledge Works to do a nation-wide generational...
SXSW came and went, and in the weeks surrounding this mother of all conferences, Austin was abuzz with events that forebode what's to come in the future of education. The weekend prior to SXSW an event called STEAM3 set off. STEM is better known an...
I keep turning back to a scenario project I did with a group of 1st graders in 2011. This was a regular class at a public school in Austin where the goal was to inspire the children to think creatively about their own future and...
Future graduation attire?[/caption]
Appealing to the hearts and minds of the Homelander kids (post-millennials) happens by addressing their taste for technology and modern communication devices. Growing up with touchscreens as the main window to the world, these kids are seriously steeped in a lifestyle and educational agenda that revolves around digital - where technologies are used as learning devices (educational platforms), often through gamified experiences, as well as study objects (coding, programming). For-profit university Ashford University does a good job at mining this sentiment in a commercial featuring children caressing their devices like they did their teddy bears a few years earlier. The message is clear: To be relevant and effective with the class of 2025 education needs to live in the tablets and smart phones, or soon bionic lens projections. The commercial revolves around catchwords like "smart" and "bright", words recent surveys show cling well in the ears of kid today. So much in fact, that smart as an aspirational goal is overpowering any other superhero power that previous generations of kids used to idolize.
I like to think that I learned to code as a kid. Well, really I didn't, but if you wanted your family’s Commodore 64 or Atari to do anything, you actually had to use some sort of commands and know basic programming language. This was back when Bill Gates was in his 30s, when Wham churned out holiday hits and we teased our hair until it defied gravity. I remember getting all giddy when I learned how to change the font color from fuchsia to lime green in Pascal – or was it Basic?
Most personal insolvencies these days are caused by expenses related to the two service industries we depend on the most in our modern society – healthcare and education. And not surprisingly some of the most disruptive technological and social innovations are happening in these two areas as well.
Much of the skyrocketing healthcare costs in the United States have been attributed to lack of preventative care. Obesity rates have climbed in response to insufficient physical exercise and nutritional ignorance or at least by our slant toward self-deluding eating habits. Health monitoring and simple checkups add to the costs and time spent in doctor’s offices.
If you're a parent like me you regularly crash into sleep in one of your children's' beds after putting them to bed around dusk. Then you wake up a few hours later and drag your sleep drunk self into your own bed where the night trolls start spinning your head with worries that have built up earlier in the day. There are the bills you didn't pay, the email you sent your boss that just didn't come out the way it should, the pile of unfolded laundry that keeps growing.
And then there's THAT thought, the very reason why you collapsed under the feathery weight of a little chapter book about unicorns or whatever. The only part you remember from your reading session is that your child was struggling so hard keeping her eyes open and comprehending the little words that just seemed to float all over the page. So despite having forced yourself to fiercely focus on a fantasy-equestrian pastel colored world just so that you could quiz your daughter about the contents of the book, you both got more caught up into a mundane mess of pronunciation challenges and counting page numbers than deciphering any meaning at all. And just when you opened your mouth to give your daughter a tired lecture about how important improving her reading skills will be for the upcoming state mandated test, you remembered that your little girl has already spent 7 hours of the day in school cramming facts and another hour or so doing homework in between the hustle and bustle of activities after school. So you remind yourself that tomorrow is another day to visit libraries and bookstores, and another chance to pick kid-friendly books off the shelves that might - just might - captivate her interest and eventually enable her future academic success.
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When I asked my 8-year old daughter the other day what she wants to be when she grows up she gave me a metacognitive answer I did not expect from somebody her age. "Mom, you know how children my age often dream of becoming popstars, but they know that it's probably never going to happen? Well, I'm one of those children who have those dreams. So in my dream I will become a popstar, but in the "real world" I'm going to be an engineer and find ways to get more clean fresh water for the world. Maybe by taking the salt out of the seawater".
Of course at age 8 few people really know what they want to do with their lives. I probably changed my mind at least thirty times growing up, and so do children today. Yet I feel that the signals they pick up from their environment today will have an impact on their future choosing. My own children and many of their friends have been learning about water conservation and the perils facing the global climate pretty much from they learned how to talk. Today teaching children about environmental protection in preschool and elementary school seems as important as teaching them basic manners and academic pre-skills. And that is not even mentioning the lessons you learn from the increasingly severe summer droughts in central Texas!
Yet if current trends continue by the time this generation reach college, the best and brightest minds might very well be sucked up by Wall Street firms and big
Compared to the countries we increasingly compete with in this globalized world, American educational test scores stink. Everybody knows it and everybody is getting busy looking for culprits and solutions. Which can only result in one thing: nobody can agree to what the cause is. We don’t challenge our kids enough! We challenge them too much! Teachers aren't held accountable enough! Teachers spend too much time with accountability standards, so student time suffers. We get frightfully wooed by ruthless Asian tiger mothers and we begrudgingly confess our kids are turning into lazy slobs because we don’t drill enough violin practice at an early age. And then we let out sighs of relief as soon as Finland becomes the country in vogue. Laid-back Finland, with their school kids loafing around their classrooms in slippers after entering school at the advance age of 7, all while making top PISA scores. And without even undergoing the rigor of standardized testings!
Source: http://www.allvoices.com/cartoons/c/71772450-tiger-mother[/caption]
‘Tiger mother’ Amy Chua refuses to let her children go to play dates and sleepovers. She protects them from the evils of TV and computer games. She protects them from a whole world outside of violin practice and top grades. Are these types of parents really the opposites of indulgent Helicopter parents or are they rather the extreme version of them?
Amy Chua is hardly the first remarkable Tiger mother. As she proclaims herself, Chinese parents and parents who are first generation immigrants, are often much more authoritarian than ’Western’ parents. So why is she getting so much attention in the media? Good timing is probably the answer.
