What Should Schools be Teaching?

2/3/2025

Students and teachers need the skills to be successful in a fluid, rapidly changing, and ambiguous future.

For students and teachers to be prepared for that future, they need to become self-evolving learners with a growing individual and collective comfort and capacity for change.¹

To be an educator is in some ways to be a fortune-teller. If the role of education is to prepare our students for the future, then we must surely begin with an idea of what that future looks like.

Yet predicting the future is a dangerous business. Technological change is rapid and seemingly exponential, while at the same time economic and social progress is erratic and spotty. K-12 schools were historically designed to prepare our students for jobs that are being replaced or made redundant by technology, while changing economic and social conditions have created a situation where even those with professional education and training are finding it harder and harder to find employment in their chosen fields. Employment overall is more tenuous and labour more mobile. While it once was commonplace for individuals to spend their entire working lives with a single employer, it is now the norm for employees to change not just companies, but careers, several times during their lifetimes. At the same time, political, environmental, and demographic change are placing ever greater demands on governments and citizens to take meaningful action to resolve increasingly complex social problems, and on corporations to take greater responsibility for their roles in creating them.

But that is not a picture of the future, that is the world of the present. Even our oldest students at Roeper will still not be entering the workforce for at least another four or five years, and our youngest for 20 or more. If we focus our efforts on teaching them to “plug-in” to some extrapolated version of today’s world, we are certain to fail them. First, we will fail because we are sure to be wrong in our predictions about what that world will look like. Second, we will fail because, even supposing we are right in those predictions, if we teach our graduates simply to survive that future, we will be denying them the opportunity to shape it for themselves.

Even at Roeper, we need to think differently about the role of schools and teachers. The ease of accessing information–or even creating it with AI–at the push of a button or by simply asking a device means that schools can no longer be focused on the transmission of information as their primary goal. Likewise, the rate of economic and technological change means that teaching technical skills is likewise no longer sufficient.

Whatever the future may hold, what we do know is that successful schools will be those that model that same resilience, adaptability, and socially conscious entrepreneurialism we know our students need today and our graduates will need tomorrow.

^{1 Grant Lichtman, #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2014), xxi-xxii.}

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What Should Schools be Teaching?
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