How we envisage schooling in the 21st century (2006): the SSAT pamphlet on how schools must change

Emeritus Professor Hedley Beare Centre for Educational Leadership, The University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia

How do you imagine schooling in about 2020?  Your internalised mental image - wittingly or unwittingly, it matters not which - is the template you use as the base for your actions and behaviours. So this is not to ask what changes will occur to your school but rather what ‘big picture’ is driving your conception of what all schools will be asked to do in the next 10, 20 or 30 years. That image inevitably affects your planning and your career decisions.

How we envisage schooling in the 21st century is one in the series of pamphlets sponsored by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT). A pamphlet, we discover from the dictionary, is an unbound monograph. It can be produced quickly, taken apart and used in a variety of ways; a document to be worked on, and worked with. It must be simple, in marketplace language, and relatively short – the kind of publication you can read at one sitting. But it must also contain enough detail to form the basis for action and planning. Pamphlets are a clever invention in terms of format, cost, size, distribution, and in getting a message out.
 
How we envisage schooling for the 21st century is almost too big to be a pamphlet, but this particular pamphlet has a difficult story to tell in a succinct and compelling way. It is urgent that people not only hear its message but also put it into practice, and quickly, for time is not on our side.

I have been making this point for a long time now. More than a decade and a half ago, I wrote a monograph entitled An educator speaks to his grandchildren (ACEL, 1990) and I am still asked for copies of it. Yet of the two offspring to whom I addressed the little book, Ben is now 17, and Rebekah is 20 and at university (Beare, 1990: 18). I made the case even then that teachers would operate in new international conditions and in a world no longer dominated by European frameworks of thinking. Of all the professions on earth, teachers collectively have to be futurists, and they dare not despair or be negative, for whether they like it or not, they influence daily the attitudes and formative ideas of the significant citizens of the next few decades.

The new world order

… the Earth is now accepted as a single, highly interactive and connected system … The simple thesis of ‘How we envisage schooling for the 21st century’ is that the Earth is now accepted as a single, highly interactive and connected system, pulsing with the creative energy of the universe. Einstein and quantum physics made that clear to us. Thomas Berry described the earth as a self-emerging, self-sustaining, self-educating, self-governing, self-healing, and self-fulfilling community consisting of all the living and non-living beings of the planet.

When the independent scientist James Lovelock put this idea forward in the first of his Gaia books 25 years ago, he warned that we were on the way to exterminating the human species from the planet. We had time to arrest the trends, but we would have to act cooperatively - and fast - in order to do it. Now an 86 year old, he has written his sad sequel, entitled The revenge of Gaia (2006). Now that people are starting to comprehend what an interactive, interconnected planet looks and feels like - global warming, serious climate change and illegal immigration have made that clear - Lovelock wonders whether we have left it all too late. Gaia may win and annihilate the human species.

Nor are we lacking hard-nosed reliable evidence. Nuclear physicist Ron Neilsen, in his Little green book (2005), has taken, topic by topic, all the main and important trends and calculated the areas where we are beyond the point of no return and those where we could still reverse the trends towards disaster. It is a sobering read! French polymath Ervin Laszlo, in his new book, The chaos point (2006) – subtitled ‘The world at the crossroads’ - argues cogently that this generation of school children will be faced with a breakdown or a breakthrough; they have only two options. The UK’s former Astronomer-General Sir Martin Rees has recently published a deeply informed and cogently argued book entitled Our final century: will the human race survive the twenty-first century?

So, with the new awareness, a new overarching explanatory metaphor has taken over, and almost everything else is caught up in the same explanation. As has always happened in the past, the new metaphor becomes ubiquitous and multi-faceted. Schooling and, importantly, knowledge itself, are now almost universally being described, articulated and practised in conformity with this metaphor. In historical terms, the description of the Earth and the cosmos as a machine operating within fixed rules was an invention of the industrial revolution. It has been supplanted by the depiction of earth as a single, live organism with interdependent members, the health of the whole (an appropriate extension of the metaphor) depending on the health of the parts and how harmoniously they interact.

Population

Let us therefore consider four dimensions of Earth’s interconnectedness which impact on how we envisage schooling for the 21st century.

Underlying all else is the demographic of the planet’s human population. Consider the following. In 1961, the world’s population stood at around 3.1 billion people. At the beginning of the new millennium, 2001, five years ago, the population had climbed to 6.2 billion. That is, the world’s population has doubled during the working life of many of us. To give this figure some perspective, human beings, humanoids, have been on the planet for millions of years (some estimate six million years), but it was not until 1804 that the world’s population topped one billion for the first time. It tripled by 1960, that is, within just 150 years. It has doubled again in the past 40 years. Even if we were now to introduce population control measures worldwide (and how could we do that?), the world’s population cannot decline until 2070 and by then it will be at least 10 billion. Left uncontrolled, it could be over 12 billion by 2050. Does this generation of school children know how to confront that issue? What options do they have? None of them can avoid the consequences of that demographic.

And note where the global increase is occurring. By 2025, India will have overtaken China as the world’s most populous country. Both are my country’s near neighbours. Australia’s nearest neighbour, Indonesia, is the world’s fourth largest nation, but also the world’s biggest Muslim country; but it will be overtaken by Pakistan (another Muslim state) by 2050, with Nigeria and Brazil coming up fast to rival both. Nigeria will have over 300 million residents by 2050.

Neilsen points out that over 90 per cent of the world’s live births now occur in less developed countries and, because they lack birth control measures, they account for 98.6 per cent of the world’s population increase. Even now, just six countries, none of them in Europe, contain half of the world’s people.

Consider some of the consequences. Firstly, there is a gross imbalance in wealth, resource usage, and living conditions across the planet, a fact which fuels terrorism. At present, just three countries – USA, Japan, and Germany – account for half the world’s industrial production, while China contributes only about 6 per cent. It will not stay that way.

Secondly, it is estimated that half the world’s population is under 25! Think of that in educational terms. This generation of school children must live with, cope with, and solve the problems of, an overloaded planet. And thirdly, there is a massive change under way to the world’s cultural centre of gravity. European thinking and Western nations’ practices, not least in areas like education, schooling, post-school training and university courses, are unlikely to remain the dominant patterns across the world for much longer. 

The global environment

The second major trendline is the effect population pressure is having upon the world’s natural environment. We no longer need to be persuaded about global warming. We know that the planet’s melting ice-caps will cause the sea levels on the planet to rise; create higher tidal rises and falls; threaten those who live on tidal flats, flood plains and river estuaries; and will displace millions of people from their homes, and even submerge island nations like Tuvalu or Nuie.

It also means that severe natural occurrences like cyclones, drought, and floods tend to create human disasters in their train. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami caused widespread human disaster and death because human beings have overpopulated the coastal fringes around the Indian Ocean. Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, killed people and destroyed houses in flat areas that we knew were below the river levels at the mouth of the huge Mississippi-Missouri river system. Recent earthquakes in Turkey, Pakistan, and off the coast of Java resulted in deaths to people living in areas known to be liable to such hazards.

One thing is clear. Across the world now, human activity involving chauvinism, ethnic purity and inter-racial enmities anywhere, are lethal for the planet, and for this generation of students presently in schools. When the world is considered an interconnected, transnational, multicultural, multi-faith community, which is vigorously interactive, it affects the way we view politics, the languages we speak, the places we visit, the persons we marry, world trading patterns, employment prospects in a borderless world, international dysfunctions like terrorism, illegal population movements, ethnic rivalries, and the unevenness between provisions for rural and city communities.

The world’s cities

A third factor is urbanisation. Cross-national social and economic changes, like colonisation, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution have always produced new but consistent patterns for the world’s major cities. A study by DEMOS of four burgeoning cities in the UK (Glasgow, Cardiff, Sheffield, and Brighton) found them characterised by highly collaborative, creative and networked models of production’, which capitalise on proximity, easy access to local, tacit know-how, full of enterprises that are anti-establishment, anti-traditionalist, highly individualistic and small, and in which its proprietors prize freedom, autonomy and choice. Twenty-first century cities are becoming places where people and ideas mingle and mix, address diverse audiences, attract newcomers, and where knowledge and ideas are created, tested, shared, adapted and disseminated. And big cities like Paris, London, and New York are the best places to be!

As a consequence, the admired cities are changing into hugely interactive places with physically different configurations from the old industrialised cities. You can understand what has happened to suburbs by asking how many of the people in your street are your closest friends, or where the school to which your children attend is located. Consider the growth of ‘call centres’ and ‘IT service centres’; when you contact with them, you often find they are located in another city, another state, or another country. (The service personnel often ask you, ‘What city/country are you calling from?’).

… it is inconceivable that those who have attended schools in the privileged world can insulate themselves from the global problems …Just as surely as the nature of the city or metropolis changes, the schools will also change, along the same lines as, and dominated by, the same metaphor-in-action. But there is a horrendous side to this same trend. If you want to see the effects of the dysfunctional cities, those struggling to cope with 21st century developments, consider the city appendages called slums or ghettoes. These urban conglomerations are unintentional, unplanned and clearly toxic in overwhelming ways. Mike Davis’ book The planet of slums (2006) is excoriating. Half the world’s urban population will live in them by 2025 and their escalation is breathtaking. Since 1950, the population of Mexico City (the world’s biggest city now) has grown from three million to 22 million; Seoul from one million to the same figure; Sao Paulo from 2.4m to 19.9m; Jakarta from 1.5m to 15.9m (more than a 10 times increase in 50 years) and Manila from 1.5 million (the present size of Adelaide or Perth) to 14.3 million. Davis calls their inhabitants the world’s ‘surplus humanity’ (Davis, 2006: 174). Imagine putting enough schools and teachers into these contexts! Furthermore, it is inconceivable that those who have attended schools in the privileged world can insulate themselves from the global problems thrown up by the populations of those living in the world’s sick megacities.

Schooling

So how do you envisage schooling in the 21st century? As always happens with huge social shifts like these, schools become subsets of the movement. Schools are even now being described in terms of an interactive planet where cities, in particular, are becoming new kinds of places. Schools are an integral part of the collaborative, interactive trend. So UK’s former Education Minister, Estelle Morris, has predicted ‘the end of the stand-alone school’. The best schools, she said, ‘will be those who have multiple partnerships and give a personalised level of service’. She also pointed out that, as a career group, we now have the best teachers we have ever had on earth. Like other graduate group with built-in specialisations, they will seek portfolio careers and options no less varied than is the case with any other highly credentialled group (Morris and Beare, 2006).

If you want to see the extent to which education will change, and how rapidly, think of the revolution occurring before your very eyes, over the simple hand-held multi-function communications device we used to call a ‘mobile phone’. This is literally revolutionising the interaction patterns of the generation who are now in school.

How we envisage schooling in the 21st century gives much more detail about the paradigm shift in schools, and fleshes out the educational developments with greater clarity. But there must be a greater sense of urgency now, for this century’s human enterprises are subject to exponential and fast developing trends, not all of them benign. Further, there is a new genre of books appearing about managing the styles of business and enterprises of the 21st century, deliberately going beyond even the management treatises written around the year 2000!
     
The picture drawn above may look too big for your local school to handle, but it isn’t, for the SSAT pamphlet provides a framework within which to tackle the issue. We are all involved because we contribute to the trends. As one sage observed, every snowflake will vehemently deny that it was responsible for the avalanche.

References

Beare, H. An educator speaks to his grandchildren. 1990. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Administration (ACEA).
Beare H. How we envisage schooling in the 21st century. 2006. London: Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. (SSAT).
Davis, M. Planet of slums. 2006. London: Verso
Laszlo, E. The chaos point: the world at the crossroads. 2006. London: Piatkus.
Leadbeater, C and Oakley, K. The independents: Britain’s new cultural entrepreneurs. 1999. London: Demos.
Lovelock, J. (2006) The revenge of Gaia. 2006. London: Allen Lane.
Morris, E and Beare, H. Directions for schooling in the 21st century: two perspectives. Occasional Paper No 95 (May 2006). Jolimont, Victoria: Centre for Strategic Education.
Neilsen, R. The Little Green Book: a guide to critical global trends. 2005. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.
Rees, M. Our final century. 2003. London: William Heinemann.