Last week at our Take A Peek At Prep morning I had the
great pleasure of speaking briefly to a group of mums who are about to embark
on their child’s 13 years of schooling next year. One of the things I mentioned was how much
the world is changing. The world that we
know and enjoy today is not the one that our current Junior School students
will graduate into in a decade or so. ‘Duh! Of course!’, I hear you say.
But it’s true isn’t
it? I went through school in the 70’s
and 80’s, finishing Year 12 in ‘85. I
can still remember my Year 4 teacher standing in the doorway of our classroom smoking!
I have vivid memories of teachers hitting kids with sticks across the
knuckles and of the then ‘old-fashioned’ desks we had that still had holes for
ink wells in them. My generation was
still using classroom equipment that was designed for a very different era, my
mum’s era.
Anyway, my school days
were different than my children’s by a mile.
My children have gone through school though in an interesting time of
change. Both of them were Primary School
kids when the iphone and ipad came along.
They remember a time before 1:1 laptops and ipads in schools. The old-fashioned computer lab is a thing of
the past, a room full of massive boxes and huge monitors used to look and feel
so modern, now it just looks like yesterday.
LCD, retina display laptops are everywhere, kids are using touch screens
and even cabling is now irrelevant with the ubiquitous use of wifi. I can’t remember the last time I actually
plugged something into a network point.
WiFi, Bluetooth, the cloud, smart watch, I don’t even look at my phone
for texts now, I look at my watch.
Man. The shift is so fast, so sustained, so
overwhelming. And it’s all in
schools. If there is one institution
that has to be at the very front of what
is happening it is schools. WE are the ones responsible for emerging
young adults into this crazy world.
Preparing them for life that we remember as their parents, would be like
my teachers in the 70’s and 80’s preparing me for a life of ink wells and
slates. Unconscionable.
Anyway, back to my
original point. I have a confession to
make. I was wrong when is spoke to that
group of mums last week. I informed them
that their child may never need to actually get a license because we are
already well on the way to self-driving cars, that the Google Car has done over
a million kilometers already by itself.
It’s 5 million.
In 2009 Google launched
the self-driving car project. By 2015 it
had done a million kilometers (well a few of them had collectively), now, just
3 years later that number has jumped exponentially to 5 million
kilometers. The project is now called
WAYMO and is an independent company whose sole aim is to get autonomous
vehicles on our roads. They exist, they
are being used, it’s amazing. 5 million
kilometers completed!
We have to be so
careful that we do not cling onto our past.
We have to be so careful as parents, as educators, as a community that
we are right at the front of our understanding of this stuff and that we are
preparing our kids for their future
in this world.
Collaboration,
innovation, self-direction, synthesis.
These, and more, are the soft skills that our kids need now and moving
forward. The iphone is 10 years
old. It changed the world. Anytime now the Google Car is going to hit
us, it will change everything once again.
I couldn’t wait for my son to get his P’s so he could pick me up from
the pub. Your child may never need
theirs. What will they need instead?
Thank goodness that
some things don’t change though. Good
schools still need good teachers, children still need stable and supportive
families, our bodies need good food and appropriate rest. We all need people in our lives both to care
for us and to care for. Little kids
still need play-dough and plastic scissors, big kids still need Physics and
Shakespeare, teachers need to be in supportive relationships with mums and dads
and mums and dads need a pat on the back for all the things they do out of love
for their kids. And we all need to be
loved by He whose name is Love.
Buen Camino
