MIDDLE SCHOOL NEWS
Simon Scoullar
Middle Sub School Leader
I hope everyone is well and enjoying the warmer weather. Multi-Cultural Day was enjoyable for all and thank you to all the Year 9 students running stalls and engaging with the community.
Exams
It is probably worth thinking about exams this time of year. On Demand testing is currently being completed in Maths and English classes and Year 10 students only have a few weeks left of classes before exams and Senior School Orientation.
With that in mind, I have included a few musings by Greg Satell about what our future holds for young people. This is particularly poignant with new subjects next year and post Morrisby;
An education is supposed to prepare you for the future. Traditionally, that meant learning certain facts and skills, like when Columbus discovered America or how to do multiplication and long division. Today, curriculums have shifted to focus on a more global and digital world, like cultural history, basic computer skills and writing code.
Yet the challenges that our kids will face will be much different from those we faced growing up and many of the things a typical student learns in school today will no longer be relevant by the time he or she graduates college. In fact, a study at the University of Oxford found that 47 percent of today's jobs will be eliminated over the next 20 years.
In 10 or 20 years, much of what we "know" about the world will no longer be true. The computers of the future will not be digital. Software code itself is disappearing, or at least becoming far less relevant. Many of what are considered good jobs today will be either completely automated or greatly devalued. We need to rethink how we prepare our kids for the world to come.
Applying empathy and design skills
While machines are taking over many high-level tasks, such as medical analysis and legal research, there are some things they will never do. For example, a computer will never strike out in a Little League game, have its heart broken or see its child born. So it is terribly unlikely, if not impossible, that a machine will be able to relate to a human as other humans can.
That absence of empathy makes it hard for machines to design products and processes that will maximise enjoyment and utility for humans. So design skills are likely to be in high demand for decades to come as basic production and analytical processes are increasingly automated.
We've already seen this process take place with regard to the internet. In the early days, it was a very technical field. You had to be a highly skilled engineer to make a website work. Today, however, building a website is something any fairly intelligent high school student can do and much of the value has shifted to front-end tasks, like designing the user experience.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, our experiences with technology will become far more immersive and that will increase the need for good design. For example, conversational analysts (yes, that's a real job) are working with designers to create conversational intelligence for voice interfaces and, clearly, virtual reality will be much more design intensive than video ever was.
The ability to communicate complex ideas
Much of the recent emphasis in education has been around STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) and proficiency in those areas is certainly important for today's students to understand the world around them. However, many STEM graduates are finding it difficult to find good jobs.
On the other hand, the ability to communicate ideas effectively is becoming a highly prized skill. Consider Amazon. Though it is one of the most innovative and technically proficient organisations on the planet, a key factor to its success - its writing culture. The company is so fanatical about the ability to communicate that developing good writing skills are a key factor to building a successful career there.
Think about Amazon's business and it becomes clear why. Sure, it employs highly adept engineers, but to create a truly superior product, those people need to collaborate closely with designers, marketers, business development executives and so on. To coordinate all that activity and keep everybody focused on delivering a specific experience to the customer, communication needs to be clear and coherent.
So while learning technical subjects like math and science is always a good idea, studying things like literature, history, and philosophy is just as important.
Collaborating and working in teams
Traditionally, school work has been based on individual accomplishment. You were supposed to study at home, come in prepared and take your test without help. If you looked at your friend's paper, it was called cheating and you got in a lot of trouble for it. We were taught to be accountable for achievements on our own merits.
Yet, consider how the nature of work has changed, even in highly technical fields. In 1920, most scientific papers were written by sole authors, but by 1950 that had changed and co-authorship became the norm. Today, the average paper has four times as many authors as it did originally and the work being done is far more interdisciplinary and done at greater distances than in the past.
Make no mistake, the high-value work today is being done in teams and that will only increase as more jobs become automated. The jobs of the future will not depend as much on knowing facts or crunching numbers, but will involve humans collaborating with other humans to design work for machines. Collaboration will increasingly be a competitive advantage.
That's why we need to pay attention not just to how our kids work and achieve academically, but how they play, resolve conflicts and make others feel supported and empowered. The truth is that value has shifted from cognitive skills to social skills. As kids will increasingly be able to learn complex subjects through technology, the most important class may well be recess.