The Future of Learning

As I try to make sense of the dizzying pace of change in today’s education trends, I can’t help thinking back to the debates I used to have with my father at the family dinner table. In high school, I excelled in math and computer science. However, I was determined to break out of that niche and explore my passion for the arts in college. My father, a physician, argued I had a responsibility to pursue my strengths in a field like engineering as opposed to following a creative passion.

Who was right? And what does this have to do with the future of education? I ended up majoring in design at a private liberal arts college. Yet I ultimately built a career in education, something I certainly never planned, in a role that requires a blend of both technical and creative skills. I’d never claim that my own story has made me an authority on precisely what is next for students and the jobs of the future. But I do think that as we face the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence in education, reflecting on career development experiences like mine offers some valuable clues on the need to mix left- and right-brain thinking -- to cultivate human skills -- to develop the habits of mind that will help us learn to harness technology wisely.

Attention & Learning

In practical terms, we’re in an age when the astonishing popularity of short-term video content appears to have a significant impact on learning and, more specifically, individuals’ attention span. Research suggests that short-form videos, from TikTok to YouTube, are capable of rewiring cognition. They’re impacting how long individuals – particularly children and teens – can focus. Furthermore, because these provide the brain with a stream of short-lived dopamine rewards, they are addictive.

The implications of these changes are significant not only for how we learn, but for how we prepare individuals for careers and leadership roles in the future workforce. First, the importance of practice and repetition for learning is well established. It was memorably popularized by Malcolm Gladwell with his discussion of the “10,000 hour rule” needed to develop true expertise. However, anybody trying to develop effective education tools, whether for young learners or for mid-career students seeking to refresh their skills, has to deal with the growing reality of managing attention and motivation. If learning experiences are too challenging, students become overly frustrated and demotivated. If learning experiences are not challenging enough, students struggle to remain engaged. What should educators do?

For one thing, it is important that we guide learners to the self-realization that learning can and will be at times frustrating, and develop meaningful ways to support and encourage learners during those frustrating inflection points. This can be done through program design by creating engaging, progressively more challenging learning experiences utilizing a method commonly referred to as scaffolding. When each exercise builds on the previous one, provides the satisfaction of achievement, and sets the groundwork for the next experience to be more challenging, students are more likely to stay engaged. Needless to say, designing highly effective learning experiences that lead to meaningful (and measurable) results is a significant undertaking.

While scaffolding is a well-established education pedagogy, it becomes more critical in an era where easy-access solutions are just a few keystrokes away. And the truth is that I’d like our educational aspirations to reach higher. We can accept and understand the pull of electronic devices and the quick psychological gratification they provide, yet also try to buck this trend by cultivating deep, lifelong qualities in our students that will help them learn and succeed. I have in mind fundamental skills like goal-setting (thinking intentionally about what you’re trying to achieve); long-range planning (making a deliberate plan to accomplish something that is measured not in days, but months or years); and self-reflection (sitting down, perhaps keeping a learning diary, and reflecting on what you have learned, and why).

Focus On The Future

Throughout the process of developing these qualities in students, what if we help them nurture brain-stimulating behaviors like sitting with a book for an hour, without phones or other distractions? This might feel like foreign and anomalous behavior in today’s world, particularly among young people. But it’s a valuable exercise in developing one's attention and promotes long-term student engagement. Alternatively, exercises related to improving metacognition can lay the groundwork for the kind of creative inspiration and orthogonal thinking that can’t be usurped by AI.

In a future newsletter, I plan to share in more detail some concrete strategies for developing the vital, lifelong attributes I’ve just described. For now, I want to underscore something they have in common: they’re about learning how to learn. Thinking back to my dinner-table debates with my dad, I’m convinced that all the changes we’re seeing today underscore the need to navigate the future of education trends by embracing innovation while maintaining a solid footing in some core fundamentals. That includes the wide-ranging liberal arts education, including writing and quantitative analysis (and, in my case, design) that equipped me so well for a range of career challenges and opportunities.

In a recent New York Times guest essay, “When Your Technical Skills Are Eclipsed, Your Humanity Will Matter More Than Ever,” LinkedIn executive Aneesh Raman and Jobs for the Future president Maria Flynn reminded readers how much deep learning, beyond technical skills, matters. “We believe there will be engineers in the future,” they wrote, “but they will most likely spend less time coding and more time on tasks like collaboration and communication.” Raman and Flynn point to a recent Jobs for the Future survey that showed how 8 in 10 top-employing occupations place high value on “uniquely human skills.” Those skills include things like guiding teams, building interpersonal relationships, and negotiating.

This observation may explain why Harvard economist David Deming has found that by age 40 liberal arts graduates catch up with the early earnings advantage of their peers who major in STEM subjects. It also serves as a cautionary tale. Yes, short videos are surging in popularity. And yes, there are good reasons to develop technical skills. But let’s not overlook the life-changing value, in education and beyond, of cultivating our uniquely human abilities.