Cosmic Citizens and Moonshot Thinking: Education in an Age of Exponential Technologies

Cosmic Citizens and Moonshot Thinking

Education in an Age of Exponential Technologies

Rohan Roberts

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© 2018 Rohan Roberts. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 08/14/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5039-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-5038-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018907999

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CONTENTS

Introduction

New Perspectives

1.     The Purpose of Education: Creating Übermensch

2.     Cosmic Citizenship

3.     Nationalism, Online Tribes, and Transhumanism

4.     Flow, Passion, and Purpose

5.     Let the Students Think

Future-focused Curricula

6.     The HUMAN Project

7.     The Beginning of Infinity

8.     Big Think

9.     Intelligent Optimism and Education

10.   Nullius in Verba – Take no one’s Word for It

11.   Community Science

12.   Moonshot Thinking in Education

13.   Radical Openness and Ideas worth Spreading

14.   Shots of Awe: Deep Think

An Eye on the Future

15.   Impact of Exponential Technology on Education

16.   From STEM to STEAM Education

17.   Neuroscience and Mind-Brain Education

18.   The Teacher as Entertainer

19.   The Awakened Mind

20.   Future Fluencies, Gig Economies, and the Age of Imagination

Conclusion

Epilogue

For Lara

INTRODUCTION

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.

– Marian Wright Edelman

Our education system is in desperate need of reform. To put it simply, formal education, as it’s done in many schools in most countries, is simply not fit for purpose. Those who disagree with this assessment of the current state of affairs are part of the problem.

There are teachers and senior school leaders who see nothing wrong with the current educational system and who are quite content with how things are done at the moment. These are educators who lack the imagination to envision something better. They also lack the drive and inspiration to create something new.

Most high school educators are good, honest, sincere, hardworking individuals. They enter the teaching profession because they have a nurturing personality and want to have a positive impact on the world around them. However, much as they’d like to see themselves as role models, most teachers aren’t role models – especially not for high school students and older teens. Take a poll of 100,000 older teens and ask them how many of them want to grow up to be teachers. Less than one-tenth of one percent will say they do. Why is that? It’s because much as we’d like to think we educators are role models – we’re not. For most teens, their role models are soccer players, hip-hop singers, Hollywood stars, and reality TV celebrities.

Teachers like to believe they are inspirational. A few undoubtedly are; but, for the most part, we don’t really inspire our students. Because, if we did, they’d want to be like us – they’d want to be us. But the fact is, our students want to be like the entrepreneurs, doers, movers and shakers of the world. In their minds, teachers don’t fall under those categories.

You could say many students love their teachers but it’s also true to say they pity us. They can see what a difficult job it is. And they want no part of it in their future lives. This is a sad state of affairs.

The problem

Many senior leaders and educators like to believe that their school is a nurturing place, a warm and friendly place, a welcoming place where all students are made to feel happy, safe, and secure. As educators, we like to believe this. We tell ourselves emphatically that this is true. But if schools were, indeed, the warm, friendly, happy, secure, welcoming places that we like to think they are, then why do most students leave school and never return? Oh yes, a handful of students might return to meet a particular favourite teacher or two in the first year after they’ve graduated; but for the most part, students leave and never return. You’d think if schools were so awesome, students would be yearning to come back to that joyful space. But let’s not kid ourselves. We know that’s not true. Speak to teenage students, and if they feel safe about being honest, they will tell you that schools are boring, high-stress, vapid places. Given the choice, most of them would choose not to show up. Most high schools are not places of joy, or awe, or wonder.

More so now than ever, students see opportunities to learn in bold, new, and exciting ways outside of a school. They see traditional methods of schooling as outdated and dull. They see many of their teachers as sincere but uninspiring.

The fact is, it’s only a mild exaggeration to say that most schools are factories at best, or prisons at worst. Most high school students see schools for what they are: regimented concrete edifices full of rules and regulations that are controlled by adults with absolute authority.

In addition to the fact that schools are uninspiring places, the deeper more disturbing problem is that there seems to be little consensus about the purpose of education. Some senior leaders seem to think the purpose of schools is to prepare students for university. Others think it’s to ensure students get good grades. Of course, if you press them on their views or challenge them about it, they will halfheartedly mumble something perfunctory about creating good citizens – but many hardboiled politicians and corporate executives don’t really see schools as anything more than factories to create and conscript the next generation of stooges who will resist change and help perpetuate our current ways of doing things in society.

The things we do wrong

Currently, the way we do things is wrong on many levels. For starters, we teach students within four walls. This is just abhorrent to contemplate. For most of the time our species has existed on this planet, children (and humans in general) were outdoors. They spent their childhood playing and their adolescence learning skills, trades, and behaviours from their peers, mentors, and adults in the tribe. Today, our youth spend the best years of their life in a building.

We teach all students everywhere essentially the same thing: English, Maths, and Science. No one says these aren’t important. But why do many schools insist that these are the only things that are important? Why do we insist that these subjects must be core – and not music, or philosophy or moral studies?

We teach students in pre-determined chunks of time. Usually between 45-60 min. Day in and day out, this is the structure and this is the routine. Creativity, joy, and innovation will not arise from a daily routine like this. This system is dull, uninspiring, mundane, predictable, and cruel. Imagine if we told teachers that their work day would involve them being in an office from 8:00am-3:00pm with one-hour blocks of training. They’d see the same instructors and the same facilitators day in and day out. It wouldn’t matter if they liked the instruction or not; it wouldn’t matter if they found the sessions useful or not; it wouldn’t matter if they hated the style and method of instruction delivery or not; - they would be expected to show up and conform and do it six hours a day, five days a week, 40 weeks a year for the next 12 years of their life. Stop for a moment and reflect on the horror of that situation. All of us would feel sorry for any teacher who was put in that predicament. Why does our empathy not extend to students, who essentially find themselves in a similar abhorrent predicament?

Students have little or no say in the organisation, structure, and future plans of schools. Yes, there are student councils and student voice group, but for the most part these are perfunctory, and mainly exist to either tick the right boxes during school inspections or to offer the right soundbites to parents and the school’s publicity brochure. For the most part, students have next to no input in what they are taught and how they are taught – and by whom they are taught. Imagine a system where students were allowed to rate their teachers, in the same way that adults rate movies on Netflix, apartments on Airbnb, hotels on TripAdvisor, airlines on Booking.com, and car rides on Uber.

At the moment, most schools start at 8:00am. This is to meet the convenience of the parents, teachers, and rest of society. But anyone who is aware of the body clocks of teens and their sleep patterns will know that starting school so early in the morning is bordering on cruelty. Many students need to wake up far earlier than 8:00am if they have to walk or catch public transport to get to school. It is common for students to have to wake up as early as 5:00am and rush to school – often without a proper breakfast. Add to this a lack of a full night sleep, is it any wonder that so many high school students are walking zombies in school? It’s not their fault, it’s our fault. We are forcing students to adapt to our way of doing things. A compassionate system would adapt to the needs of the students, and not force them to conform to our convenience.

We have a system in which students come to school Monday through Friday (or Sunday through Thursday in the Middle East) with up to two months off in summer and nearly a month off in winter. Who said this system is optimal for learning? What if we had students attend school three times a week instead – and used the other days in more creative ways to learn? Is it wise to have 8 weeks off for summer with students doing practically nothing? (This is a relic of Victorian times when children were expected to toil in the fields during summer and help with the harvest. It is no longer applicable in the 21st Century.) Can we not think of a system where students and teachers had holidays that were scattered across the year? The point is, we won’t know for sure unless we try – and the problem is no one seems to want to try anything different at all. We are either too scared to rock the boat – or too apathetic to affect change.

The problem is worse than we think

The problems with schools and the education system in general are deeper and more profound than we realise. CEOs, hiring agencies, and captains of industries are all unanimous in affirming that schools are not preparing students for the job market. You could say schools are not creating students who have the necessary literacy, numeracy, and scientific skills for the real world. But worse than that, even if they excelled at all those skills, they’d still not be prepared for the challenges of the world.

Another problem at schools is cheating – in all its forms, including plagiarism. Speak to students about this and they don’t feel bad. They know the system values grades and not effort or sincerity. So, they do what they have to do to get those grades using the least possible effort. The problem is not the students; the problem is that we have an assessment system that is unfit for purpose and encourages students to cheat.

We have a system in which parents, teachers, universities, and senior leaders are obsessed with exam grades and standardised testing. But the problem is worse than this: it’s that the standardised tests don’t test anything of real significance or lasting value.

The problem isn’t just that there are vast numbers of uninspiring and underqualified teachers. It’s that even if all our teachers had the right degree and were able to deliver outstanding lessons it still wouldn’t make much of a difference because they’d still be teaching to the syllabus, they’d still be focusing on exam grades, they’d still be following traditional methods of teaching, and they’d still be incapable of taking a truly revolutionary approach to teaching and inspiring.

Teacher don’t like to believe it, and senior leaders like to think students are exaggerating, but the fact is, schools are high-stress environments. The problem is exacerbated because so few people in power see the importance of making school relevant to real life and solving problems in the real world. Stress, depression, and suicide are a reality in our learning environments today. And a lot of it has to do with young people being forced to spend the best years of their life seeing the same teachers in the same building, day in and day out, learning stuff that they know is meaningless (If you doubt this, watch Are you smarter than a fifth-grader and note how little adults know about even fifth grade stuff.)

In the developing world, the dropout rate of students is not a cause for concern because many of them see education as the best way out of poverty. In the United States, the dropout rate is a cause for concern. The problem, however, is bigger than this: it doesn’t really matter if students complete their high school degree or not. It makes little difference to their ability to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, ethical individuals, and moral, upstanding, responsible citizens. Students get a lot of these values and skills outside of school or even after leaving school.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with many schools today is that they don’t take into account the fact that we live in a world of exponential technologies and accelerating change. They don’t take into account advances being made in neuroscience and Mind-Brain education. They don’t focus on multi-disciplinary education and on taking a cross-curricular approach to problem-solving. And they don’t have clarity about what the purpose of education should be. The problem isn’t just that teachers are teaching the wrong things – it’s that many of them lack the imagination to even articulate what the right things are.

The Purpose of Education

So what is the purpose of education? That is the question this book sets out to explore. Of course, there is no single absolutely true and definitively correct answer to what the purpose should be. But the central thesis of this book is that education should be about creating moral, ethical, compassionate, kind, empathetic individuals who are focused on solving the grand challenges facing our species. Education should be about nurturing students who are committed to fighting injustice and cruelty. Educations should be about creating students who are aware of their place in the world, have an expanded sense of self, know their role in society, acknowledge their connection with all life on this planet, and are cognisant of their place in the universe. In other words, this book seeks to explore how the purpose of education should be to create responsible, aware, and involved Cosmic Citizens who are able to take a big picture perspective of life, love, existence, and purpose.

Over the last several millennia we have seen a positive trend in almost all spheres of life. We are living longer, healthier, wealthier, and safer lives than ever before. We’ve massively increased our access to education, healthcare, information, transportation, and means of communication. We’ve made massive strides in the rights revolution – women’s rights, children’s rights, animal rights, and civil rights.

However, even though the world has been getting better, it should give us pause to realise that in spite of all the progress we’ve made, we still live in a world where people voluntarily vote in demagogues who stir up the worst feelings of xenophobia, racism, and misogyny among their people. We have much work to do to eliminate poverty, bigotry, prejudice, and hatred of the other. Tribalism and nationalism continue to decrease globally as we increasingly acknowledge our similarities and common origins. However, there is still much work to be done.

There are no quick-fixes, no magic wands, and no silver bullets. Fixing human society and helping humans transcend themselves is a long-term endeavour. However, it has to be said, that the only realistic and long-lasting way to do this is by fixing our educational system. How we do this, is precisely what this book seeks to explore.

Whatever the problem (climate change, poverty, unemployment, women’s rights, fake news, racism etc.) the solution is education. Not the vapid and uninspiring mainstream education we have today. But a radically new approach to education. What does this look like? This book seeks to explore that. Through interactions with corporate leaders, interviews with principals, meetings with parents, and surveys of students, this book considers how the best and brightest students perceive their education and what they would do (and have done) to overhaul their education system.

The first section of the book is focused on discussing new perspectives – about cosmic citizenship and universal values, tribalism and transhumanism, skepticism and critical thinking, and what it means to stand at the beginning of Infinity.

The second section considers novel curricula co-created with high-functioning international students in Dubai.

The third section takes a look at the future and considers the role of Neuroscience, the latest research from Mind-Brain Education, the importance of STEAM Education and taking a cross-curricular, inter-disciplinary approach to learning, the changing role of teachers and the importance of Existential Intelligence in a world of Artificial Intelligence and automation.

SECTION 1

New Perspectives

CHAPTER 1

The Purpose of Education: Creating Übermensch

For students to become innovators in the twenty-first century, they need a different education, nor merely more education. – Tony Wagner

Educationists like Ken Robinson, Tony Wagner, Mark Treadwell, Marc Prensky, David Sousa and many others have all said it in different ways and with different emphases: the current education system is broken.

Let’s not mince words. Let’s not skirt around the issue. With the exception of a few progressive independent schools, the current education system is abysmal. It is not fit for purpose.

Saurav Nair (16) is an Honours programme student who goes to a school rated ‘Outstanding’ by the Dubai School Inspection Bureau. He had this laconic response when asked about what he thought we needed to do to fix the educational system: Scrap it all.

Education expert in residence at Harvard, Tony Wager, echoes what these students say. In his book Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People who will Change the World, he points out that One problem with the traditional approach to learning is that the way in which academic content is taught is often stultifying: It is too often merely a process of transferring information through rote memorisation, with few opportunities for students to ask questions or discover things on their own – the essential practices of innovation. As a result, students’ inherent curiosity is often undermined.

Denial of the problems

There are numerous teachers and school principals who deny that there is any problem with education as it is today. But these are educationists who are incapable of seeing the big picture. They are content with the limited scope of the narrow curriculum they deliver. They are satisfied with the mediocre success and modest accomplishments of their students. These are educators with small minds, limited vision, and an unenviable imagination. Under no circumstances should we allow their complacency to direct the future course of education.

The current education system – with its demented focus on exams and grades, its stifling obsession with teaching to the syllabus, and its factory-style method of treating children like assembly line spare parts – was fit for purpose in the 19th century. What we need is to literally overturn the education basket, empty its contents, and start afresh. Of course, there are many challenges to making this happen. There will be mealy-mouthed politicians who will hesitate to acknowledge the scale of the problem. There will be recalcitrant principals and head teachers who have no vision of where education should be headed. There will be lazy teachers who want to continue teaching the way they’ve always taught. And there will be blinkered school inspectors who will continue to obsess over test scores and persist in extolling the virtues of standardised testing. But we must be bold enough to take a stand. We simply cannot allow small-minded and parochial individuals to stand in the way of improving our educational systems – no matter how influential they may be. The stakes are much too high for human society and for us as a species.

However, it’s all well and good to recommend a revolution in education. We’ve got to have some idea about what will replace the old system. Anarchy is not the solution.

Schools still overwhelmingly focus on teaching maths, science, languages, and social studies. But simply knowing stuff is no longer enough. We’ve got to first acknowledge that the smart phone and the internet are game changers. Ray Kurzweil (whom Bill Gates calls the best predictor of future technologies) says the smart phone we hold in the palm of our hands is a billion times smaller, a billion times cheaper, and a thousand times more powerful than the supercomputers that the Pentagon had forty years ago that were the size of a building and cost $50 million to build. That’s a billion-fold improvement in price-performance and miniaturisation. Today, kids have the kind of computing power and access to information that was unfathomable even two decades ago. We’ve got to start seeing the smart phone and the internet as an extension of the brain – an external cortex, if you will. We are now outsourcing our cognition to our devices. We no longer need to store banal facts and straightforward information in the neurons of our brains. We can store them on the hard drives of our phones or on servers in the cloud.

So, with Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and smart agents and search engines, anyone can know stuff. Knowing stuff is no longer important. What is important is being able to make creative connections and being able to take a multi-disciplinary approach to problem-solving. Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist says, Going forward, the world will increasingly be divided between high imagination-enabling countries, which encourage and enable the imagination of their people, and low imagination-enabling countries, which suppress or simply fail to develop their people’s creative capacities.

Learning v/s making a difference

Memorising facts is no longer as relevant as it once was. We shouldn’t be asking students what they learnt. We should be asking them the following questions: What difference you made? What impact have you had? How have you contributed to the sum total of human knowledge? How have you exercised your creativity? What have you produced? How have you become active creators of content instead of passive consumers of ideas? How have you become a better person than you were yesterday? These are the sorts of questions we should be asking our students. Not What did you learn?

Kirk Phelps says, What you study is not important. Knowing how to find those things you are interested in is way, way more important… Helping students find their passions is far more important than teaching facts or imparting information.

What is required is a bigger vision and higher expectations of our students; and we need clarity about the purpose of Education.

Many educators believe that the purpose of high school education ought to be to prepare students for college. But Dick Hersh (former Director of the Center for Moral Education at Harvard University) thinks college is overrated: College has increasingly become merely a sorting and credentialing mechanism. What you get out of college is largely a function of accident: you manage to get into the right program or you have the right professors or you take initiative on your own. It’s unconscionable that so much is left to chance when we know what is powerful learning and good teaching.

Many adults who consider in retrospect what they gained from college will point out that the relationships they formed, the conversations they had with their peers, the experiences of being independent and managing their own time and money were far far more valuable than the information they learnt in lectures or the piece of paper degree they received at the end.

It is my view that the purpose of Education should be primarily to help students become upstanding citizens who will help solve the problems of the world. This is not airy-fairy thinking. This is not la-di-dah sentimentality. When we zoom out and look at the big-picture and contemplate the fate of the human species and all life on this planet and consider the grand scheme of things – then there can be no other purpose of education.

So I say again, the purpose of education should first and foremost be to help students become upstanding individuals who take a cosmic perspective and focus on solving the problems of the world.

In his Captains of Spaceship Earth video, Jason Silva references Peter Diamandis: The new definition of billionaire is he who will positively affect the lives of a billion people. In an interview with BigThink, Diamandis elaborates:

"If you want to be a billionaire, then you’re fortunate, because it’s never been easier for a common person to ascend to such great heights:

"A thousand years ago the only people who could impact a nation or region were the kings and the queens. ... A hundred years ago, it was the industrialists, the robber barons who could build the railroads, the steel mills and affect the economy of a region or solve problems. Today it’s all of us.

"Anyone driven by a dream to solve a major problem could potentially do enough to impact a billion people. All it takes is the right amount of knowledge and the right amount of tools. Today we are lucky to have access to extraordinary exponential technologies that only governments and corporations had 20 years ago: artificial intelligence, virtual reality, 3D printing, cryptocurrencies, crowdsource platforms, peer-to-peer systems, etc. The marketplace is being flooded with technologies that present innovative solutions to age-old problems. The persons who effectively take advantage of these new technologies will hold the keys to launching bold, hugely profitable projects that will define and create the future of business.

The most dramatic (positive) change in our global economy is about to occur between 2016 and 2020. Three to five billion new consumers, who have never purchased anything, never uploaded anything, and never invented and sold anything, are about to come online and provide a mega-surge to the global economy. While most of these individuals are in Africa, India, China, and the developing world, and their income is low, when aggregated, this represents tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy… What are you going to sell to them? How are they going to compete with you?

Diamandis explains that the Rising Billion are the poorest people in the world living in the most populated places in the world. These billion new minds are coming online and will impact the future economies of the world and add their voice to the global discourse in ways that were never imaginable before. The question educators should be asking is how can we prepare our students to be part of this phenomenon in meaningful and constructive ways.

Marc Prensky starts a chapter of his book, The World Needs a New Curriculum by asking readers to imagine the Minister of Education of a hypothetical country making the following announcement:

In the coming year, education in [our country] will be completely new and different. It will not be about subjects and grades at all. Education will be about—and only about—improving our country and our communities.

When we talk about Education needing a revolution – this is the kind of bold vision and dramatic change we need to see: the creation of problem-solvers and visionaries.

Once we acknowledge that the purpose of education should be to develop upstanding cosmic citizens who will solve the problems of the world then we can focus on other priorities related to the purpose of education:

1. To create individuals who are scientifically literate and can think critically

2. To create individuals who are self-reliant and can survive independently as adults

3. To promote creativity, kindness, innovation, collaboration, and curiosity

But how do we teach this? Marc Prensky recommends getting rid of the MESS (Maths, English, Science, and Social Studies). These are proxies for what we want to teach our students and are actually are harming them more than they are helping them. He explains, Algebra, for instance, is a proxy for teaching symbolic and abstract thinking. Geometry is a proxy for logic. Social Studies are proxies for human behaviour and conflict. Languages are proxies for communication skills. Literature is a proxy for learning about human behaviour. And science is a proxy for inquiry and skeptical thinking.

We don’t need proxies. Instead, he recommends focusing on the following in whatever particular area is of interest to the child:

Effective Thinking

Effective Action

Effective Relationships

Effective Accomplishments

Currently, schools and teachers feel they don’t have the means or the wherewithal to change what they teach. The syllabus is prescribed by various boards (CBSE, ICSE, IB, GCSE, English National Curriculum, American Common Core etc.) They feel their hands are tied when it comes to changing what they teach. Instead, schools and teachers find it easier to change how they teach.

To a certain extent, changing how we teach has had a positive impact (e.g. collaborative learning, flipped classrooms, gamification, catering to VAK learning styles, emphasis on differentiation, acknowledging multiple intelligences in the classroom, using a range of formative assessments etc.)

However, if we’re going to see a positive impact in the world, if we want to create Cosmic Citizens who will help solve the problems of human society, take our species to the unchartered frontiers of deep space and into a glorious future, and if we’re going to prepare them for a post-Singularity world, then we’ve got to stop focusing on HOW we teach and start focusing on WHAT we teach.

In other words, we’ve got to change our Core.

Changing the Core

Why should we change our Core? – Because as things stand, the educational system is a form of harassment and bullying (particularly in middle and upper high school). I wouldn’t go so far as to use the extreme expression child abuse but on days when I encounter a student full of despair at how lacklustre his education is; when I receive tearful emails about how much a student loathes her school; when I peer into a classroom and see how dejected, bored, and uninspired students are by what and how they’re being taught; then on those occasions, the phrase child abuse does cross my mind.

Zoe Weil, co-founder of the Institute for Humane Education says, To take human beings at arguably the most curious and creative time of their lives and systematically dull and sometimes crush their curiosity and creativity is not only bad for children, it’s bad for our world. School simply should not be a stress-inducing, unfriendly, uninspiring place. It should not be an endurance test or a battleground. For too many children and too many dedicated teachers, however, it is all these things and worse. Given that learning is inherently enjoyable, it is shocking that we have turned school into a place that routinely lacks meaning and joy.

A child’s teenage years are difficult as it is – many of them are plagued with self-esteem issues and body image concerns; they’re coming to grips with hormonal and biological changes; they have to navigate the difficult world of high school relationships and all the drama and politics that go with it; they have to deal with being expected to behave like adults when their brains aren’t quite adult yet; their sleep patterns are all over the place… and on and on it goes. Add to this tumultuous set of problems an uninspiring education with its narrow focus on Maths, English, Science, and Social Studies (the MESS – as Marc Prensky refers to it) then we start to see why education as it currently is in many schools is a form of bullying. We force these students to spend what should be the best years of their life confined within concrete walls; we force them to learn subjects and information they have little interest in and no use for in their future. Is this a form of hazing? I’d say it is.

Most high school students feel that they are forced to learn subjects they have little interest in. Yes, many schools offer their students options. But these options are often limited or are in blocks that limit the choices of the students. Raya Bidshahri, studied Neuroscience at Boston University. She has this point to make: One of my problems with higher education is the lack of customised degree programs. Personally, for a Neuroscience degree, I’m also forced to pay to take courses in Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, Statistics and many more courses that I haven’t used even once. Instead, I would have liked to fill those electives with Philosophy, Business, Writing or any other elective that I feel would have been useful to my particular career path. There just isn’t much encouragement for students who have inter-disciplinary tastes or unique interests. The next issue is this whole grading system that doesn’t test how you can think or innovate, but rather how good you are at rote-memorisation.

Tannya (21) a student in Brandeis College in Boston agrees: Schools with a liberal arts focus (such as Brandeis, Vanderbilt, and a lot of the Ivies) force you to take courses in various subject areas: at least one Science course, one Math, a few writing intensives, one public speaking, a physical fitness course, a non-western course…etc. If you don’t fulfill these requirements, you can’t graduate. But even though these are appealing and encourage inter-disciplinary learning, the system is still forcing us to take the courses, which defeats the purpose of catering to each student’s unique interest.

What should we teach in high school?

A strong case can be made to stop teaching subjects in individual silos (English in the English box, maths in the maths box, science in the science box and so on). Instead, we must start taking a cross-curricular approach to learning and a multi-disciplinary approach to problem-solving. This approach may seem unappealing to many teachers because they see themselves as subject specialists and they haven’t the faintest idea how to teach another subject. However, if we start seeing teachers as guides and facilitators, then they wouldn’t have to be specialists in every subject; they’d just need to focus on pointing students in the right direction, inspiring them, and encouraging them.

Instead of focusing on subject content, we’d focus on skills. Here are the top 12 skills and abilities we ought to focus on in a 21st -century school:

1. Critical thinking & problem solving

2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence

3. Agility and adaptability

4. Initiative & entrepreneurship

5. Accessing and analyzing information

6. Effective oral & written communications (and graphic visualization)

7. Curiosity and imagination

8. Systems and Design Thinking

9. Cross-curricular thinking/multi-disciplinary problem solving

10. Project Management

11. Resilience and Grit

12. Ethics, Empathy and Self Knowledge (of one’s passions, strengths and weaknesses)

However, there’s still a case for content to be taught in schools. The question is, what should this content look like? The areas of focus below would be a good place to start. What a different world we’d be living in if students left high school having a better understanding of these questions:

1. Who are my role models and why?

2. What is my passion in life?

3. What is my purpose in life?

4. How do we solve the grand challenges facing our species?

5. How do I appreciate my connection with all life on this planet?

6. How can we create ethical and just systems in the world?

7. What is my role as a responsible citizen?

8. What does I mean? (Who am I?)

9. Why is music important?

10. How do we eliminate poverty, racism, intolerance, and bigotry?

11. How do we prevent demagogues and despots from wielding power and control over us?

12. What are our cognitive biases and logical fallacies?

13. How do I distinguish between information, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda?

14. How do I do proper research?

15. How do we prevent wars and avoid conflict?

16. How do I advise friends with depression?

17. How do I cope with stress?

18. What is the importance of travel?

19. What does it mean to be spiritual?

20. What is effective scepticism?

21. What is effective altruism?

22. How do we live in harmony with our environment?

23. What are the advantages and disadvantages of different political systems?

24. What mistakes from history do we not want to repeat and why?

25. How do memes and ideas spread?

26. What is culture and how does it influence us?

27. How are we manipulated by the media?

28. How do we restrict and control the power of corporations?

29. What movements, activisms, and social causes should we care about?

30. What is the impact of technology on our mental health and everyday lives?

31. What are the values of the Enlightenment?

32. What did we do right as a species over the last 6,000 years to reach this level of technological sophistication?

33. Who were the most influential philosophers, prophets, thinkers, scientists, musicians, dancers, entrepreneurs, inventors, poets, and writers and what can we learn from them?

34. What does it mean to take a cosmic perspective?

35. What does it mean to be a global citizen?

36. What is my personal message to the world?

37. How do we react to global climatic catastrophes? (Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes etc.)

38. What are my Human Rights?

39. How does the monetary system work?

40. What does it mean to be successful?

41. What does it mean to be a critical thinker?

42. What are my intelligences and skills?

43. How do we prevent or respond to acts of terrorism?

44. How do we live sustainable lives?

45. How to be kind, compassionate, and generous in relationships?

46. What are the basic first aid techniques?

47. How do I survive without technology?

48. How do we weigh evidence and guard against fake news?

49. How do I cook food?

50. How are drugs different from medicines and what impact do they have?

51. Why do manners matter and how do I react in foreign countries with unfamiliar etiquette?

52. What do I want out of a job or a career?

53. What non-traditional subjects are important? (E.g. Mindfulness, Self-defence, Philosophy, Future Studies).

54. How do I cope with failure and deal with rejection?

55. How do I effectively manage time?

56. What learning strategies work best for me?

57. What are the laws of my land and are they just?

58. How do we show love and affection without being ashamed or embarrassed?

59. How do we deal with the opinions of people we don’t like?

60. What are the qualities of a good friend?

61. Why is it important to pay taxes?

62. How to network and find mentors?

63. How to apologise when I make a mistake?

64. How do handle money and how to spend it wisely?

65. How to take a healthy and wholesome attitude to sex?

66. How to eat healthy and exercise regularly?

67. How to dress and/or apply make up?

68. Why do religions exist?

69. How do I become a lifelong learner?

70. What are my favourite books and why?

71. What happens to us after we die? (And to birds and animals).

72. How big is the universe?

73. How do I negotiate, debate and argue with someone in a productive way?

74. How do I lead by influence?

75. How do I empower those around me?

76. How do I express my gratitude?

77. How do I brand and promote myself?

78. How can I contribute to the marketplace of ideas?

79. How can I be original and unique?

80. What does it mean to be a person of integrity?

81. Why is it important to keep my word?

82. In what ways can I have a positive impact on the world around me?

83. How do I become less materialistic and less consumeristic?

84. What are tricks that adverstisers use?

85. What are my preferred learning styles?

86. How do I develop my multiple intelligences?

87. What is beauty?

88. How do we improve capitalism and democracy?

89. Why are some countries poor and others rich?

90. How do I avoid being bored?

91. How do I overcome shyness?

92. Why is it ok to be an introvert?

93. Why are some people cruel and nasty?

94. How do I cope with envy and jealousy?

95. How do I deal with anger?

96. How can I be comfortable with how I look?

97. How do I deal with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)?

98. How do I cope with anxiety?

99. How can I be comfortable with my sexuality and that of others?

I am convinced that if we have thousands and millions of young minds coming out of high school in a position to answer the above questions we will be able to overcome poverty, corruption, war, injustice, and cruelty. We will be able to fix our broken education systems, our dysfunctional political systems, our unfair economic systems, our exorbitant healthcare systems, and our inhumane and fatuous criminal justice systems. We would see a whole new generation of humans living fulfilled, successful, joyful lives, in which they have a positive impact on the world around them and on the world at large.

Of course, there’s no definite or absolutely correct list of things we ought to teach students. Let’s take it as a given that students will be taught language and mathematics and science – they just don’t need to be taught these as separate subjects. What if we took an interdisciplinary and cross curricular approach? Finland has got rid of subjects and is focusing on issues.

Let’s consider the issue of Racism and see how we can take an interdisciplinary approach to it:

Language

Students could learn about language by reading books, passages and extracts about the issue, and writing blog entries, essays, articles, poems etc. about it.

Research

They could read encyclopedia entries, speak to their family and friends, surf reliable sources on the Net, and find newspaper articles about the issue. They could also analyse real-life case studies and invite appropriate guest speakers to discuss the issue.

Critical Thinking

They could take part in debates, talks, or organizing in which they explore the different facets of racism.

Networking

They could reach out to philosophers, thinkers, community leaders, politicians, university professors, local celebrities and glean their opinions on the matter.

Art and Design

They could create pamphlets, memes, multimedia posters, paintings, and digital art to highlight their views about racism and also analyse paintings, posters and propaganda material associated with racism.

Multiple Intelligences

They could convert the information about Racism into different formats – including podcasts, blogs, vlogs, flowcharts, songs, poems, articles, stories, interpretive dance etc.

Science

They learn about the neuroscience behind emotions associated with racism and bigotry and the neurochemical reactions taking place in the brain during episodes of anger, hatred, disgust, resentment, intolerance and other emotions associated with racism.

Sociology / Anthropology

They consider the reasons why some humans are racist and how different tribes and societies react to foreigners or aliens or the other.

Psychology

They could learn how to advise, guide, counsel, empathise with victims and perpetrators of racism.

History

They focus on historical examples of racism and the impact it had on the lives of its victims and perpetrators.

Philosophy

They could inform themselves about the views of philosophers and thinkers from different cultures in different eras.

Future Studies

They could envision what future societies would look like in which racism was allowed to flourish or was completely annihilated.

Film Studies

They could analyse films and TV shows with a utopian or dystopian view of racism and evaluate how the issue has been treated. They could make their own documentaries or short films on the issue of racism.

Theatre Studies

They could write and perform a play based on the theme of racism or revolving around true incidents of racism from history.

Digital Learning

They could create website, wikis, and blogs and use other web 2.0 tools to highlight their understanding of racism.

Mathematics

They could make a statistical analysis of incidents of racism in different towns and cities of the world and calculate average rates of incarceration for crimes committed in the name of racism. They could create flowcharts

Coding

They could write codes to analyse or identify use of racist language on social media like Twitter or Facebook or in a literary passage.

Law

They could analyse and evaluate current laws and statutes about racism and frame new laws if they disagree with the old ones.

Today, we have the technology and the wherewithal to get rid of the traditional subjects we currently focus on and take a radically different and dramatically more effective approach to what and how we teach our students. We have got to wean ourselves from subject-based teaching and focused on the skills, inter-disciplinary knowledge, and habits of mind that our children need to acquire to succeed in the 21st century.

At the high school level, students don’t need to be specialists. They can afford to be amateurs and generalists in their teenage years. Specialisation can come at a later stage in their life – after they learn to be good, kind, compassionate, generous, human beings and cosmic citizens capable of blue-sky thinking and seeing the big picture.

What is needed is to focus on changing the Core and focusing on Lifeworthy Learning – a phrase coined by founding member of Harvard’s Project Zero, David Perkins. Essentially, Lifeworthy Learning is learning that will probably be of use in the individual’s future.

David Perkins suggests there is no agreement on the answer to this important question. He points out that there are