Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) schools are sometimes characterised as being at the pinnacle of global education. Governments the world over are keen to invite them and their kind to set up franchise schools in their countries. This month their members met in Scotland to share thoughts on the future of education. The suggestions were at once exciting and terrifying.
HMC is an association of more than 300 independent schools that includes Eton and Harrow. The UAE hosts three such schools: Dubai College, Jumeirah English Speaking School and the British School Al Khubairat. But why is the opinion of a group of traditional British establishments relevant to the ultra-modern city of Dubai and the future of education?
Well, schools that offer an adapted version of the English National Curriculum are the fastest growing brand of school in the world. Already accounting for 7,958 schools worldwide as well as 390,000 teachers, the number of British curriculum schools is anticipated to double by 2020. Dubai boasts more than 59 British schools out of the 169 in the emirate. Just three weeks ago, the KHDA invited Sir Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington College in the UK, to headline an event in Dubai, underlining the innovation and relevance these schools offer.
It has been estimated that within two decades most modern jobs will cease to exist – they will be done by robots. The majority of high-paid jobs will exist in the “new economy” – computer programming, app design, web creation, trend analysis and robotics.
Reassuringly there will still be a need for teachers and hairdressers – professions that require a degree of social interaction and the soft skills that independent schools cultivate – but even professions such as finance, medicine and law are under threat from computer programs that can trade, diagnose and seek precedent at a rate and accuracy a human can never emulate.
As parents, pupils and educators we all need to be asking whether our schools are even aware of the road ahead.
Futurologist Rohit Talwar, a guest speaker at the HMC conference, painted a picture of a world where, within a matter of decades, the human experience would become augmented by embedded technology.
We are already aware of cochlear implants and pacemakers, which enhance the life experience of their wearers.
Mr Talwar predicts that within years we will wear embedded memory chips that will allow us to upload entire languages to our brain.
Our jobs are under threat and the careers our offspring will pursue do not even exist, so we need to ask ourselves what exactly is the purpose of education in the 21st century?
There will always be a place for reading, mathematics, science and poetry in the lives of human beings, but are we teaching our students to negotiate the new world that awaits?
Simply rote learning and memorising facts for formulaic testing is an old world model.
Drawing upon knowledge in new ways, building fluid and flexible relationships with information and yet holding on to what it is to be human is our new challenge.
We already live in a world where automated drones are replacing soldiers, where wars are being fought on behalf of humans rather than by humans, where the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening.
In this atomised and increasingly unequal society everyone associated with education has a very important balance to strike.
We need to be ready to run schools that resurrect and explicitly teach old philosophies – such as ethics and morality – while also teaching new skills such as coding and entrepreneurship.
There is already an understandable reaction against these developments by some countries, cultures and individuals who find it hard to champion humanity in an increasingly digitised environment which lacks traditional human connectedness.
This is heartening to a great extent and we absolutely must remember to be kind and true to what Aristotle labelled our political animal.
Nonetheless to ignore the rise of the new economy, however disconnected it may seem, has the potential to limit the lives of our children if, as seems likely, the advance of technology continues at its current pace.
For this reason you each need to be asking yourselves: is your school ready for the future and if not, what are you going to do about it?
Michael Lambert is headmaster of Dubai College
