The Automation Age: What You Should Know, Isn’t What You Think
By Etienne R. LeGrand, CEO, Vivify Performance
We’ve welcomed machines into every facet of our lives at home, work and increasingly at school. The Smart Machine Age (SMA) of automation and artificial intelligence is upon us. As we run toward smart machines with arms open wide, I wonder if our education model is aligned to meet the needs of this new age. Are we equipping students for an active life in this new age and as it will exist in the future?
Most students today use iPads and computers to perform classwork, teachers use smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant as teaching tools and school districts use technology to plan bus routes, screen applicants for teaching positions or predict when a piece of equipment is likely to go bad. On the horizon are “smart tutors” that with the help of artificial intelligence, can help schools differentiate instruction for different types of learners.
U.S. Educators Called to Do More
Our education system’s embrace of these new time saving, smart technologies is a good first step even as they represent the tip of the spear of the effect on our lives. As machines become more adept performing routine tasks such as planning bus routes, picking investments and diagnosing disease and as machines become smarter, many experts wonder whether there will be a need for any human input at all. This is why so many observers believe that technology’s potential to disrupt our economy is so unprecedented.
According to a recent study by a research group affiliated with the Economist magazine, the U.S. isn’t doing enough to prepare students for the automation age. The U.S. ranks ninth behind Estonna when it comes to upgrading curricula and teacher training for the labor market of the future. While this is not the first time our economy has faced technological disruption – weavers fell prey to spinning jennies during the Industrial Revolution and large swaths of manufacturing was wiped out during the Information Age, the pace of change is vastly different from times past.
If machines can know much more than we could ever know, what skills will allow us to remain competitive? As unknown disruptions to the labor market become better known, which jobs will remain, which jobs will replace those lost, and who will qualify for these jobs?
When the Economy Changes, So Must Education
As smart machines continue to upend the utility of simply knowing things and as information is more and more ubiquitously available, education must teach kids how to learn so they are equipped to learn continually over their lifetimes. In the Smart Machine Age, employment will less often involve the acquisition of facts, but rather how we use those facts to make meaning. Kids and adults alike will need to learn to think in ways that cannot be imitated by networks of machines.
It is our humanness that can set us apart from machines and allow us to thrive in the SMA—our ability to listen, work as a member of a team, empathize, lead others, and think creatively and critically. In a 2016 survey of employers, technical skills ranked in the middle of the survey below strong work ethic or initiative. These uniquely human skills valued by SMA employers not only have implications for who gets hired to do what work. They have implications for what is taught, who gets to teach it, and who gets to lead.
A decidedly more people-centric, humanistic leadership and teaching styles are needed if kids are to acquire and hone the skills and behaviors that can set them up to remain relevant in this new age. Styles that inspire and nurture kids to flourish and become better versions of themselves. Approaches that inspire them to be curious as they take steps to discover their interests, passions and purpose. An updated curriculum and teacher training may be necessary, but more important are different mindsets, habits and behaviors to encourage and inspire the human connection that is essential to learning.
Charging ahead to adapt legacy curricula into personalized learning and project based learning and to train teachers to deliver this curricula without changing the culture to enable the acquisition of new habits, skills and behaviors kids and adults both need to acquire and hone in order to thrive in this new age may make us feel that we are being responsive and moving forward. But, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that any step is a forward step, if we end up even further behind.