Food For Thought: Are we preparing our students and children for these challenges?

The first media clip is a podcast by Rebecca Solnit. (Please listen to the first 26 minutes as I'm certain her provocative thinking will engage you all in deeper thinking, especially Andrea and Jody, as she ends her dialogue by saying perhaps Librarians should run the world.)  Rebecca Solnit is an American author who often writes on the environment, politics, place, and art. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including the Guardian newspaper and Harper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column founded in 1851. She is also a regular contributor to the political blog TomDispatch and to LitHub. She is particularly concerned about Climate Change. In this podcast she questions our modern way of living, raising many questions about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and where it is all going?




Rebecca Solnit raises questions about power and who is running the world. In this 9 minute conversation Russell Brand and Yuval Harari discuss this exact question and explain how leaders and politicians today have far more power than in the past but conceal that from us so we don't really know who has the power. By doing this Brand feels it allows the rich and powerful few to exploit the masses in their countries. Although this is obviously a socialist few of the world, the global economic statistics and models regarding income distribution do support the fact that a very small percentage of the population of most of the world's countries hold the majority of their countries wealth. They conclude that to have successful change one has to clearly identify where the power lies and to have a vision.

My final provocation for this week is a 12 minute keynote that Yuval Harari gave to students about the Future of Education. This speech, without being too scary, does point at the impending challenges that AI will present for the next generations. I shared this video clip at the recent Cognita Asia Leadership Conference and through it, and a number of provocations, encouraged participants to ask how are we preparing students for this changing world and what are we doing about changing our schools. Participants were encouraged to make changes to their classroom and have that grow to change their schools. As you know, I see our present education system as broken and not needing fixing but needing changing entirely. Going back to the Solnit podcast she explained why humans don't want to change regarding things like Climate Change even when making the change could benefit us all. I feel the same about education, if we could revolutionize school to be fit for the purpose of preparing students for the future, all stakeholders; students, parents and educators could be richer in their everyday lives.

We are on a journey together and must not stop moving forward. However, linking all these sources together we must ask ourselves where will power lie in a future world when authority lies with AI and Big Data? Who controls the power that accompanies AI and what can we do to create an educational system that adequately empowers our students to face the challenges to their freedom, well-being and happiness that are likely to arise in the future.