What should we be teaching students now to prepare them for the future?

Yuval Noah Harari believes we have no idea what to teach young people to prepare for the future. I disagree.

Image: Midjourney

There’s been a clip of the historian and best selling author Yuval Noah Harari doing the rounds this past week that has got some traction. It’s from an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show and it’s of Harari saying “Today, nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years.”

Harari certainly has a point. It’s not just the pace of technology innovation that’s changing faster than ever before, but the transformational potential of this innovation. We are developing technologies that are allowing us to redefine our planet, our society, and even ourselves, at a depth and scale that is unprecedented. And as we do, we’re rewriting the rule book on how to thrive in the futures we are creating.

From this perspective, Harari feels like he’s on the money. Certainly, some of the skills that were needed in the past are quickly becoming redundant, and even some past ways of thinking and understanding are looking increasingly irrelevant. And so if you approach education as teaching facts, figures, and how to do stuff, he’s probably right.

Have you checked out the new Modem Futura podcast yet with Co-hosts Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy?

Of course, education and learning are far more than this. For decades now there’s been an emphasis on how we learn as much as what we learn. There’s still a lot of “stuff” that’s taught of course, and much of this is necessary — the type of stuff that allows people to keep the world running and to solve problems when it falters.

But this is only one dimension of modern education. Educators have known for quite some time that in a dynamic world it’s important to help students learn how to become effective learners — to have the ability to be adaptable and to thrive in the face of change.

In other words, there are almost definitely elements of what we teach now that will still be relevant in 20 years time. But Harari’s comment did get me thinking about how we should be approaching what we teach (and how) in a more forward-looking way — especially at the undergraduate level.

This is, not surprisingly, something I’ve thought quite a bit — it’s an occupational hazard of being an educator and someone who studies the intersection of technology, society and the future. But Harari’s comments did challenge me to see if I could boil my thinking down into a few areas that are likely to be as relevant in 20 years as they are now.

This is what I came up with:

1. What it means to be human

If we don’t have a good grasp of who we are — individually and collectively — we’ll find it increasingly difficult to create a future that is responsive to this. This will get increasingly difficult as emerging technologies have the ability to threaten or alter the essence of what it means to be human.

Of course, the question of what it means to be human intersects with a multitude of existing areas of teaching — art, history, philosophy, science (social and natural), and many others. But it also provides a lens through which to develop new skills and understanding that transcend these.

2. What it means to flourish

Understanding who we are is important, but it isn’t enough to support a durable curriculum. We also need to understand what it is means to flourish as individuals and as a society, assuming that this is something people aspire to.

This demands a broader understanding of what flourishing looks like and — importantly — what it does not look like. It also requires insights into how we can learn from the past as we face the future.

Again, this cuts across a number of existing areas of teaching — especially in the arts and humanities. But to have long term relevance there needs to be greater integration across disciplines, especially when asking what it means to flourish in a technologically advanced future.

3. What it means to be part of something bigger than us

Because we live in a closed system (planet earth and the solar system), we have to understand the deeply complex dynamics between individuals, communities, societies, nations, environmental systems, the planet, and the space surrounding us, if we’re to flourish in the future. And all of this needs to be approached from the perspective of how innovation and technology perturb and drive these dynamics (as well as being deeply integrated with them in many cases). Without this understanding, we have no hope of flourishing — either as a species or as individuals.

This touches on a vast array of areas that are currently taught, from environmental science and complex systems, to economics, political science, responsible innovation, and a whole lot more. And while the specifics of these domains may change over time (as they have in the past), a transdisciplinary understanding of what it means to be part of a series of much larger intersecting complex systems isn’t likely to go out of fashion any time soon.

4. How to maintain balance

So far my areas of what to teach have concentrated on the “what” that students should know. But of course there’s also a need to be able to translate this into practice, and so the last three areas address the “how”.

First is the broad area of how to maintain balance while being part of a complex and dynamic system. Here, balance doesn’t refer to stasis, but is more akin to maintaining a degree of dynamic stability and agility within a world that’s constantly changing.

This is an area of learning that draws on sustainability. But it also intersects with political science (including geopolitics), economics, social science, the natural sciences, innovation theory, and more. It’s also an area which creative problem solving is integral to — another skill that isn’t likely to go out of fashion in the next 20 years or so.

We already teach many elements of this area. But we probably need to find new ways of integrating and extending these elements to ensure that what we teach now has relevance in the future.

5. How to create opportunities

One of the challenges of maintaining balance within a complex planetary and super-planetary system is the need for new knowledge, insights, and ideas that, in turn, lead to solutions to new and unusual problems. Here, one thing that is certain is that knowledge that has sufficed in the past will not always be sufficient in the future — something that I suspect Harari was hinting at.

In other words, we need the ability to create opportunities where none previously existed (or spotting them where they were previously hidden) as we open up pathways to the futures we aspire to.

This is a skill set that we already teach, and that students learn and exercise all the time — whether through research, innovation, the creative arts, or other avenues. But I suspect that if they’re to continue to be relevant, we will need to rethink how these areas come together to build an integrated foundation of learning that is resilient to change — including the art of how to learn.

6. How to build positive futures

Finally, none of the previous domains will be worth much if we don’t also teach how to build positive futures. This is probably where what we teach now is most lacking, and needs the most though. There’s also a deep urgency here given the rate at which emerging technologies are changing the world.

This is where I strongly believe we need to teach how to navigate advanced technology transitions. It’s an area that we have some of the components of, but are still lacking many of the underlying theories, models, understanding, and practical skills that are necessary to take over 8 billion people on an increasingly stressed planet through technology transitions that range from AI and quantum technologies to advanced gene editing, radical human augmentation, the blurring of real and virtual worlds, and many, many more.

If we can develop an understanding of what we should be teaching that will empower our students to be lifelong participants in collectively building a better future — and how we can ensure that the foundations of this teaching foster creative agility and adaptation — we’ll have at least some idea of what to teach young people now that will still be relevant in 20 years.

Of course, the devil is in the details — as always. But as just one framework, this strikes me as providing a way of ensuring that what we teach now is durable, despite the accelerating rate of change we’re facing.

But this is just my perspective — what am I missing, and how else might we approach ensuring what we teach equips our students for a future that will be very different from the present?