Welcome To The Future!

"When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact."

The above is a quote from a book we are reading titled A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future and for me it perfectly explains what will eventually happen to education in the coming years. As we observe today, people are 'mastering' concepts and phenomena at an increasingly younger age because 'rote memorization and 'recall' are not as important as they used to be and thus 'mastery' takes less time!

Instead, with the abundant tools technology has made available, it is more valuable a skill to situate issues either looking at how constituent parts make up a whole, or what the larger picture is than it is to know a bunch of facts. Unfortunately, our educational system in Nigeria and Africa generally is setup as a garbage-in-garbage-out one.

So in order for our children to compete in an ever changing world, we need to arm them with skills that will enable them 'synthesize' and 'recycle' information (data) to produce 'solutions' and 'novelty', unleashing latent creativity that lies deep within.

That is why we see in the developed world many disciplines are currently being invaded by a crop of 'fresh recruits' who need neither the background nor the long rigors which usually define left-brain-directed thinking. Today people pick up 'Coding' and become 'developers' with the snap of a finger because basic level programming has already provided a 'user-friendly' interactive environment for new-age developers! What is needed as Daniel Pink talks about in this highly engrossing book is the novelty and creativity that things such as design, story, empathy, symphony, play and meaning will provide to enrich life in the 'Conceptual age'!

Again to butress my point, yesterday I was just watching a 'technology' YouTube video in which it was revealed that the US Airforce is training more drone navigators than pilots and it actually prefers those with no prior real 'flying' experience ironically because they don't come with the baggage of 'experience' which would interfere with their new training on how to 'pilot' drones and other unmanned vehicles. Rather it is 'Gamers' and those adept with their fingers who will come in handy in this area of expertise.

These examples I cite are some of the ways in which technology (automation) is changing the reality of jobs and careers and it is already approaching the speed of light! So if you intend to 'catch-up'! I will recommend 'Reading' which is the only known method of time travel that can teleport you from the fringes of pages to the reality of the future which has already arrived! Hurry and grab a book!

Haidarwali