By Prof. Dr. Turki Bani-Khaled
While we need to acknowledge the significant achievements and leaps in our educational system, I believe it is wise to spend some quality time on reflecting about the future. After all, education is always positively viewed as the key to development and change.
The world is rapidly changing and a nation that has no vision of the future will certainly be doomed to misery. We must respond to the global challenges and make the best of the opportunities that come in our way. In this regard, we need to reconsider the whole concept of education and prepare our generations to a better sustainable future.
I suppose we need to rethink our current vision of education and reshape it to accommodate the inevitable realities that will prevail in the coming few decades. I am certain that the world will gradually look different from what it is now and it would be a great mistake if the same educational system stays.
Society, economy, and technology are swaying the course of action already. The climate has already shown its new ugly behaviors with very serious challenges or even dangerous threats around the globe. Everything is going in an unprecedented transition, and therefore, our current perception of education must be re-evaluated and properly adjusted.
With the advent of more technological tools every day, and with more and new platforms and venues of virtual possibilities, we cannot stay silent as a society. I strongly feel that public discourse must engage everybody in active debates about what we need from our educational system. The elite and scholars from all sectors need to be involved in discussions and brainstorm activities in an attempt to engineer the future of our kids.
I also guess that school and university governance must be reshaped so that we do not recycle the same old solutions based on useless rhetoric. Simply, we cannot afford the status of entering the future with old traditional undemocratic and improvised styles of running our schools and universities.
Schools and universities will be smart and the internet of things will dictate how we run things. The human capital of teachers and students will stay as valuable as ever; but new ways will have to be adopted. The physical and face to face or campus-based learning may be disappearing soon and budgets will need to be re-allocated to cater for more prior needs. In short, the future is in our hands now and it will elapse away if we do not face the serious question now: where do we go from here?! The ostrich approach is no good!
