The pandemic has accelerated systemic changes that were apparent before its inception. The fault lines that emerged in 2020 now appear as critical crossroads in 2021…
— from the announcement for the 2021 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.
In Part Six of this editorial series, on Friday, we looked at a couple of the puzzle pieces that might explain why Colorado schools have struggled to teach young students (K-3) how to decode various literary styles and information sources, so the students can produce passing scores on annual standardized tests administered by the Colorado Department of Education.
We glanced at the overall system model, which is still based largely upon the system developed in Prussia in the late 1700s, adopted in American schools beginning in the mid-1800s. We discussed the idea that children generally strive to emulate the adults in their lives — and that those adults are spending less and less time reading books and magazines and newspapers, and spending more and more time with ‘non-literary’ information and entertainment sources.
We’ve also touched on the idea that society is changing in unexpected ways, and the ways we earn our daily bread now bear little resemblance to the jobs available in the mid-1800s. The pace of change doesn’t appear to be letting up.
For example. We quoted author Louis Hyman, professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, talking in 2018 about the modern ‘gig economy’…
I think a lot about how, in the 19th century, the dream was to have a farm, to be independent, to be on the frontier. But that gets substituted with a house in the 20th century. But the house is not a site of production — you still have to go to work, you still have to go to an office or a factory. And in a lot of ways, we traded, in that post-war period, we traded autonomy for security.
So even if you got a steady paycheck, it was a paycheck where you had to push paper in an office or turn a wrench on a factory line, and that is soul-breaking work, to have that kind of drudgery. … The opportunity we’re looking for now is how do we restore that kind of autonomy in [an age of] digital capitalism…?
Professor Hyman here presents an interesting view of adult life in the 21st century — as compared to the 19th century, when more than half of all US jobs were in farming, and “the dream was to have a farm, to be independent, to be on the frontier.” That’s not a dream that gets promoted in a modern school classroom, now that — thanks to farm mechanization and automation, a highly profitable petroleum-based fertilizer industry, and thousands of delivery trucks plying 8 million lane-miles of highway — fewer than 2 percent of American jobs are in agriculture.
But… are we now in an age of “digital capitalism”? Looking at the world’s 20 largest corporations, 6 are involved in oil and gas, 3 are involved in healthcare, 2 produce electronics, 2 produce automobiles, 2 are retailers that sell over the internet.
That’s just a list, however. ‘Big corporations’, as listed in 2020, don’t necessarily provide insights into ‘the jobs our children will have in the future’. If most jobs in the future will be ‘gig economy’ jobs — as some people are predicting — then most jobs might not be related to ‘big corporations’ at all.
Perhaps ‘big corporations’ will play a smaller role on defining where and when and how people work, in the near future?
And who, exactly, is defining that future? Schools? Advertising agencies? Banks? Politicians? News reporters?
I had to chuckle when I visited the World Economic Forum website, and saw the selection of keynote speakers who presented at the January 2020 Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The graphic designer who placed photos of Greta Thunberg and Donald Trump directly adjacent to one another, obviously had a sense of humor.
From the WEF website:
Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters is the foremost creative force for engaging the world’s top leaders in collaborative activities to shape the global, regional and industry agendas at the beginning of each year. It will bring together 3,000 participants from around the world, and aim to give concrete meaning to “stakeholder capitalism”, assist governments and international institutions in tracking progress towards the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, and facilitate discussions on technology and trade governance…
Doing a quick check of the expert presentations scheduled for last year’s five-day event in Davos — 219 expert presentations looking into current global conditions and how they might play out in the future — I could not find a single presentation that appeared to be focused on “reading” or even on “education.” One might get the impression that education is irrelevant to the global future.
Those of us who are not “the world’s top leaders” understand that the job of raising children is of primary importance to our future (and to theirs, of course.). We understand that preparing our kids to play a meaningful role in society is crucial. But what roles will be meaningful?
One of the 219 expert forums presented in Davos last January (all of the 2020 presentations are available in the WEF website) was entitled “How to Survive the 21st Century”, and featured author and historian Yuval Noah Harari. This was a serious discussion about whether “civilization” will still exist 80 years in the future.
Mr. Harari proposes that we face three key threats to continued human existence, and that we are fairly familiar with two of them: the threat of nuclear war, and the threat of environmental collapse. These existential perils have been addressed occasionally (or often) in global media outlets, Hollywood movies, books, magazines. (Most of us probably don’t want to spend time thinking about them, especially in the midst of a pandemic-driven economic lock down. Mr. Harari is willing to do the thinking for us.)
The third threat, he believes, is not a household idea. Yet.
“Technological disruption.” Automation. Artificial Intelligence.
Mr. Harari:
“In Davos, we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology, and these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life, in numerous ways, ranging from the creation of a global ‘useless class’ to the rise of data colonialism and of digital dictatorships…
“Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs. And while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether people will be able to learn the necessary new skills, fast enough…”
Some heavy ideas. Should we be paying attention?