Don Tap­scott, author of Wiki­nomics, talks to The Tele­graph about his views on the future of learn­ing.

The old-fashioned model of edu­ca­tion still preva­lent in today’s schools, involv­ing remem­ber­ing facts ‘off pat’, was designed for the indus­trial age. […] This might have been good for the mass pro­duc­tion econ­omy, but it doesn’t deliver for the chal­lenges of the dig­i­tal econ­omy, or for the ‘net gen’ mind.

Chil­dren are going to have to rein­vent their knowl­edge base mul­ti­ple times. So for them mem­o­ris­ing facts and fig­ures is a waste of time.

This quote brought to mind the fol­low­ing state­ment from Shift Hap­pens, win­ner of SlideShare’s World’s Best Pre­sen­ta­tion Con­test in 2007:

Accord­ing to for­mer [US] Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Richard Riley, the top ten in–demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are cur­rently prepar­ing stu­dents for jobs that don’t exist yet, using tech­nolo­gies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve prob­lems we don’t even know are prob­lems yet.

This reminds me fur­ther of another quote on edu­ca­tion from an unre­lated arti­cle; that “uni­ver­si­ties have for­got­ten that the rea­son they exist is to make minds, not careers.”

These are impor­tant points; ones that can­not be over­looked when policy-makers look at evolv­ing our edu­ca­tion system.

via Seed