Will schools of the future be different?

How different might schools be by 2040? Will children born in 2025 experience school differently from students currently completing their schooling? This article suggests 3 ways in which schooling could be different.

Anticipating the future is always tricky, especially in times of rapid change. Children born this year will enter a world of conflicts and threats of war, political polarisation, increased nationalism, ongoing global warming, echo chambers exacerbated by social media, and remarkable advances in artificial intelligence and digital technologies. It is difficult to imagine the world these children could inhabit.

With the current pace of change, it is not uncommon to hear people question whether schools will exist at all by 2040. Will there be a need for physical buildings and classrooms, or will students be able to learn anywhere at any time with the assistance of technology? Will there be a role for teachers, or will students be able to source any assistance they require using artificial intelligence? If there is a role for teachers, will it be radically different from the role they play today? 

In many ways, schools historically have been a bulwark against change. Despite calls for reform and instances of schools that have transformed radically, school education is generally slow to change and often resistant to change. Most parents expect schools to be like the institutions they attended; conservative forces argue for the maintenance of traditional priorities; and the external frameworks within which schools operate – including the curriculum, assessment/examination requirements, and university admissions processes – play powerful roles in preserving the status quo.

Beyond this, it seems likely that there will be an ongoing need for teachers who can monitor and oversee student learning, intervening as necessary to teach and explain. By 2040, teachers are likely to be making greater use of technologies to establish where individuals are in their learning, diagnose difficulties and misconceptions, assign well-targeted learning activities, and monitor long-term student progress. They will also continue to play an essential role in supporting student wellbeing and promoting their social and emotional health. 

So, will schooling be different for children born this year, and if so, how? Here are 3 suggestions for how learning at school might evolve.

More flexible learning

A safe prediction is that technology will play a growing role in learning at school, leading to more flexibility in what, when, and where individuals learn.

Today, most school curricula are designed with the intention that students in the same year level will be taught the same content at the same time for the same amount of time. All students are assessed and graded on how much of that content they can demonstrate before moving together to the next body of content where they make a fresh start, and the process is repeated. This is sometimes referred to as an ‘assembly line’ model of schooling and considered an efficient and fair way to teach entire age cohorts.

However, in most if not all countries, this model and its assumption that students are more or less equally ready for the same year-level curriculum are not consistent with data on student learning. For example, in reading and mathematics, the most advanced students in any year level are commonly 5 to 6 years ahead of the least advanced students. And because students move from one curriculum to the next based on elapsed time rather than demonstrated mastery, some lack prerequisites for new learning and fall further behind as each year’s curriculum becomes increasingly beyond their reach. As a result, many students lack basic reading skills that should have been mastered years earlier, and many 15-year-olds lack mathematics knowledge expected of 11- and 12-year-olds.

By 2040, the deeper integration of digital technologies into schools should enable more flexible forms of learning. Teachers will use new technologies to better diagnose where individuals are in their long-term progress and to target teaching on individual needs. Rather than expecting some students to learn what they are not yet ready to learn, and some others to learn what they already know, the aim will be to optimise every student's learning through well-targeted, personal stretch challenges. If teachers set tasks that are too easy for students (or, at the other end of the scale, beyond what they are currently ready for) learning is unlikely to occur. Lev Vygotsky argued that we can maximise the probability of successful learning by providing challenges just beyond an individual’s comfort zone – in their ‘zone of proximal development’. Such challenges stretch and extend students to the point of making mistakes, from which they can learn.

More fundamentally, in 2040 there is likely to be a changed attitude to time. Rather than expecting all students to learn in lockstep, students who require more time will have it; students ready to advance to more challenging material will be able to. The current practice of holding time constant and allowing student success to vary is likely to become less common than holding standards constant and allowing individuals the time they require to reach them.

This will have significant implications for the design of the curriculum. Instead of consisting of discrete bodies of content that all students are taught at the same time for the same amount of time, future curricula are likely to define learning pathways –maps of increasingly sophisticated knowledge, deeper conceptual understanding, and growing skills in an area of learning. 

These will give teachers and students frames of reference for collaboratively establishing where individuals are in their long-term progress, identifying best next steps for teaching and learning, setting challenging but realistic learning goals, and monitoring individual growth over time – all with the assistance of digital technologies. By 2040, rather than expecting all students to be at the same point in their learning at the same time, curricula are likely to be designed to maximise every student's ongoing growth.

Broader learning priorities

Another relatively safe prediction is that, by 2040, schools will be fostering deeper and more holistic learning. With the store of human knowledge increasingly accessible to everybody on the planet; machines handling most routines; and digital technologies performing sophisticated analyses, learning continuously, and creating novel solutions, schools will give growing priority to what it takes to be distinctively human.

Today, many school curricula are designed primarily to pass on bodies of factual and procedural knowledge. In some countries, teachers complain that required curricula are overcrowded with such content, resulting in time pressure and limiting opportunities to teach in depth. Tests and examinations often reinforce this emphasis on content coverage, rote learning, and reproduction.

Although factual and procedural knowledge are vital to every area of learning, there is growing recognition that, as important as what students know, is what they can do with what they know. The ability to transfer and apply knowledge to complex problems and unfamiliar contexts usually depends on a sound grasp of underlying disciplinary concepts and principles. These deeper understandings enable students to organise and use their factual knowledge.

The application of knowledge also depends on skills in knowledge application, including skills in critical and creative thinking, using technologies, problem solving, and collaborating with others. The development of these skills calls for a more holistic approach to teaching and learning – one that sees competence emerging from the integration of subject knowledge, conceptual understanding, skills, and personal attributes such as persistence and resilience.

By 2040, school curricula are likely to be less dominated by facts and routines to be memorised, and more focused on promoting students' abilities to think about and apply what they learn. Earlier dichotomies between knowledge and skills, theory and practice, and academic and vocational learning will give way to more integrated understandings of what it means to be proficient in an area of learning. In schools of the future, higher levels of attainment will be defined not only as more knowledge, but as deeper conceptual understanding and more expert use of knowledge.

A greater focus on continuity

It is also likely that, by 2040, curriculum and assessment processes will better reflect the ongoing, cumulative nature of learning and so better support the continuity of individuals' learning.

Today, educational structures often undermine continuity. For example, formal learning is divided into stages (early childhood, primary, secondary, tertiary) with learning environments, pedagogies, and educational philosophies often differing from one stage to the next. Transitions between stages create disjunctions in learning and setbacks for some learners – the result of artificial divisions of an ideally continuous process.

Fixed, time-based transitions are also inconsistent with observed variability in students' progress and readiness. For example, children in age groups on both sides of the preschool-school transition have widely varying (and overlapping) levels of social, cognitive, emotional, and language development. 

Despite this, it is common to assume all children are ready to begin the same school curriculum at the same time. Similarly, the requirement that students move from one year's curriculum to the next at the same time, regardless of their readiness, can leave unaddressed gaps and missing prerequisite knowledge that work against continuous, cumulative learning.

And common approaches to assessing and reporting learning do not reflect or promote an understanding of learning as progressive and ongoing. For example, students who receive the same letter grade year after year are given little sense of the continuity of learning, where they are in their long-term growth, or what absolute progress they are making.

By 2040, we might expect some progress in addressing these issues. This progress will include reduced differences and smoother transitions between educational stages, and curriculum, assessment, and reporting processes more reflective of the lifelong nature of learning. 

School structures and processes will increasingly be designed from an understanding that every student is on a long-term path of learning; that students of the same age and year level can be at very different points in their progress; and that every student is capable of excellent further progress with well-targeted teaching and learning opportunities.

This Teacher column is based on an article originally published on World-Class Learning Systems.