The Future Of Education In The Extreme Future

According to John Dewey, an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” This is so true, since the aim of education is to prepare every learner for the future, to prepare for the “unknown” which is “life” itself. According to Canton (2013) in his book entitled The Extreme Future, “We are teaching the kids about the past. We need to teach kids about the future. How to survive in the Extreme Future.” This means that there is an urgency in the air that every educational institution in the world should be aware of and be prepared for this “extreme future” that every learner will be facing for the next 5, 10, and 20 years. In fact, Alvin Toffler highlighted in

That's different from changing everything. However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.”

There is also a call to make action to every educational institution in the world to prepare its learners to become 21st century learners. This will certainly make every learner to become regionally and globally competitive. Being in the 21st century education needs a lot of preparation on the part of the teacher, students and even the school administrators that these 21st century skills should be embedded in the curriculum. Tony Wagner of Harvard University worked with CEOs in businesses, non-profits and educational institution through interviews and was able to identify seven skills that students always need and they are as follow: critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration across networks and leading by influence, agility and adaptability, effective oral and written communication, initiative and entrepreneurship, accessing and analyzing information, and curiosity and

Is it to delineate the weak from the strong, inciting nation to compete against nation, Americans against Asians, and school against school. After we have pinpointed schools that are failing, does this just make it easier for invading opportunists to set up charter schools in their place, or to market online alternatives, tutoring services and the like?

As in surveying, benchmarking in education should be about discovering where we stand and learning about who we are and what we do by observing those around us. It should be about improving public education, just as the sewer maps for my hometown contributed to public sanitation. Benchmarking should not be about fomenting panics about performance in relation to overseas competitors. And it should not be about dividing schools, families and communities from each other to create easy pickings for the educational market.” Therefore, benchmarking in education is seeing the “spectacular” things that others have been doing to uplift the life of every learner to become globally