The video talks about how technology has severely changed the way we function and how it affects the future of work. Firstly, work productivity used to be hard to measure, but now there are many tools widely available to keep track of workers’ productivity. This reveals what workers do during their jobs, open to public scrutiny by the company, thus labelled as “transparent. The more productive one is, the more merit they earn, which is directly proportional to their monetary benefits. Secondly, work becomes flat. With technology, communication no longer becomes something hard to do as people can make use of their devices anytime, anywhere, getting rid of the large physical gap between regions. Thirdly, it gets competitive. With the many free online courses available to the whole world, people no longer have the excuse of not being educated. It becomes common to attain high education status in our modern world, and is no longer deemed as something difficult. This increases competition within the workforce of the future as many others now have the same qualifications as each other. One no longer stands out from the crowd, and would only be hired by companies if one is deemed to be innovative, creative, or unique. Lastly, it’s on demand. One would not be guaranteed a lifetime career, with such stiff competition, one would have to stand out and be set apart from the rest to ensure he does not fall behind on the bar, which has been set so high due to technology.
Qn: Which education system (European or Asian) best prepares students for the work of the future (knowledge economy)?
What exactly is a knowledge economy? Peter Drucker, a management consultant and author, coined the term “knowledge work” as work that involved the use and manipulation of knowledge and information. Being able to do this easily requires creativity in the brain, and this is why we feel that the European education system best prepares students for the work of the future. For example, Finnish schools receive full autonomy, and head teachers and teachers are allowed considerable independence when developing their own curricula, which means that the curriculum is suited to their setting. The teachers will use alternative teaching methods, and the pedagogical freedom experienced facilitates greater creativity and innovation. This is put into contrast to Asian education systems, where it is highly performance-oriented, and competitive. Asian students typically only avoid failure, and will refuse to take a risk-oriented approach in the learning process. They are encouraged to memorise information before writing everything they memorised down in the examinations, just to achieve a goal of distinction and above. The Asian education system does not allow the students to be able to be flexible in their thinking and discourages the students from thinking out of the box to solve the problems they have at hand. The Asian education system still highlights that intelligence is equated with academic excellence, and children who choose to pursue interests in the non-academic areas are still being stigmatised and viewed as less successful. This also discourages the students to be creative in any way, and will only steer them in the direction of academics, and teach them that academics is the only thing that will bring them success in the future. However, what the future holds is the knowledge economy, and the skills of rote memorising will not help the students much in that kind of work of the future, in contrast to the European education system, where they encourage more thinking and doing rather than memorise and regurgitating. Therefore, we feel that the European education system prepares the students for the work of the future the best.
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