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For years, we have started to react to an environment that is moving faster every day. We have read books, attended conferences, conducted countless training courses. We have spent many hours in long meetings of the management team or the innovation team, we have discussed innovation in many faculty meetings. We have implemented many innovative initiatives in our school or university. We even have a director of educational innovation. We have invested in technology and, perhaps, in new furniture or in the changing of physical spaces. And yet we have the feeling that this is not what we want, that we are still very far from reaching a turning point for change.
We are even physically and psychologically tired, stressed, at a saturation point. If this lasts a long time, will we be able to make it? But above all, is this the path that will lead us to where we want to go? Could there be a lot of the hustle and bustle, but nothing essential or of real change?
“This is a new OS operating system. A new paradigm of education.”
They told us that we lived in a “VUCA environment” (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) and that we had to react to it. But what if this has only just begun? Professor Yuval Noah Harari, in his latest book, 21 Lessons For the 21st Century, explains that we are entering a UTRU (Unprecedented Transformation and Radical Uncertainties) environment, meaning that we are already in a world that is going towards unprecedented and radically uncertain transformations. We have a new environment, different, disruptive, that leads us to an uncertain and very different future. As my friend and colleague Lluís Tarín says, “The future is not what will come, it is happening now, and we can learn from it.”
I recommend reading Harari’s book (especially chapter 19 in which the author reflects on education), as well as his two previous works, Homo Sapiens and Homo Deus. However, I do not have enough space in this post to explain the reasons and the depth of the changes that his book poses and that, for sure, we will live. I find particularly relevant the advances in biotechnology, information technology, and artificial intelligence based on algorithms that create machine self-learning and that is able to analyze astronomical amounts of data in real-time in a globalized world; we are in a world full of opportunities and challenges (or dangers, as some see) with increasingly blurred borders between the physical world and the virtual world.
“These profound changes, which we are partly already seeing, will reveal themselves above all else in the next five or ten years and will fully affect the way we think, live, work and relate. And, of course, they will fully affect education.”
If we go from seeing our world as VUCA to seeing it as UTRU, and if we convince ourselves that education is going to be, without any doubt, the sector of our society that will change the most in the coming years, we will agree that we will not be able to keep repeating or increasing what we have done so far in our school or university to improve education. That would be unsustainable and, besides, it probably will not get us to where we dreamed of going. We can make a technological simile to explain it better: We are not facing the issue of more and better applications (pedagogical innovations), and not even confronting the need for new adaptations and updates (e-Learning, ICT). No, this is a whole new OS operating system, a new paradigm of education.
This past August, I became a grandfather for the first time. It’s an enjoyable life experience. In a few years, my granddaughter is going to go to school and, if she chooses to, she will probably graduate university after 2040 (if the university continues to exist as we know it today), and she will turn 30 around 2050. What will her world be like by then?
“We need future students to be balanced, creative, full of initiative, committed, competent, accustomed to solving complex and interdisciplinary problems collaboratively.”
It is evident that no one knows for sure, but we already intuitively know that the mere transmission of knowledge or even the experiential teaching of skills in fundamentally group tutoring will not be enough to help my granddaughter. We will need her and her classmates to know each other profoundly, that they discover how to learn and, therefore, they become accustomed to learning in a permanent way, that they know and internalize the intelligence they have and express it strongly, and understand what they can contribute to this world.
We need them to be balanced individuals, creative, full of initiative, committed, competent, accustomed to focusing and solving complex and interdisciplinary problems collaboratively. They should incorporate change as the only permanent thing in their lives and internalize that continuous reinvention is going to be their habitat.
This is why we must change now and move to a new phase. Moving away from activist innovation (caution, doing it this way surely has been good for us until now and has taught us a lot) to a profound transformation of education (paradigm shift). This process will last a few years, and so we must have a medium to long term view. This is a change of phase that we must start as soon as possible. We must stop ourselves, visualize, and establish a point of arrival. Where do we want our school or faculty to be in five years? With what internal culture, with what organization, with what roles and spaces? What disruptive teaching methodologies and mechanisms are we going to implement? How do we establish a story of change and prepare a strong coalition to face this much more profound difference than we have done so far? And the most critical question: What kinds of students do we want to develop in this ever-so-changing world?
In recent months, many have told the Reimagine Education Lab team that they have experienced the feeling described at the beginning of this post. They are disoriented, tired, lost in the immediate moment, and have asked us for help in focusing on this new phase of profound transformation that we are talking about. We are doing it; we are building it together, based on our own methodology called RIEDUSIS.
We are working to build a more in-depth phase, more in line with the learning ecosystems that we want to develop so that students can grow, mature, and follow their life projects following the times in which they are going to live. We are forging ahead with joy and effort.
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This post was originally published on Xavier Aragay’s blog.
Xavier Aragay is an expert on educational transformation and an international consultant on institutional and leadership change. He specializes in the shift of education through the accompaniment of disruptive innovation processes through its own, original, and proven methodology. Currently, he leads Reimagine Education Lab, a team that aims to accompany, promote, and put into practice processes and experiences of disruptive innovation in educational institutions.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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