Why are we educating generations to come with outdated processes?

In a data-led, artificial intelligence, five-month innovation cycle world, today's education system, still based mostly on 19th-century models, is fast becoming redundant. Nitin Viijay, CEO and Founder of Motion Education, unearths why education now needs to change not only in terms of content, but also in terms of structure, delivery, and intent.

The origins of today's education can be found in the industrial era, an era in which blackboards and mass delivery model represented advance. Nitin points out, "These techniques valued sameness over individuality. Modeled on 19th-century Prussian models, the system we are doing today values rote memorisation, discipline, and standardisation, better suited to churning out factory hands, rather than fostering innovation and creativity."

This dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach continues unabated for decades of social and technological advancement. And this is the issue, we are applying antiquated tools to the construction of tomorrow.

The knowledge economy is racing at speeds never seen before. According to the World Economic Forum, the average lifespan of a skill is currently only five years, in certain sectors even shorter. Digital platforms change overnight: from Orkut and Facebook to TikTok and now AI content. What one learns today will be obsolete by the time they join the workforce.

McKinsey forecasts that more than 375 million workers will have to switch careers by 2030 because of automation. This change places flexibility over degrees. The future professionals have to learn, unlearn, and relearn on an ongoing basis.

True education, then, should not only give answers but also instruct on how to ask the correct questions. It needs to breed curiosity, flexibility, and resilience, which can't be standardized or examined but need to be developed on a daily basis.

The age of static learning is behind us. In a world that remakes itself every couple of months, the victors will not be the best-versed, but the most flexible. As Nitin Viijay so elegantly states, education needs to free itself from its industrial heritage and adopt a new ethos: one of progress over performance, curiosity over compliance, and learning as an ongoing adventure and not a phase.

Because in the future, you won't survive based on what you know, but how quickly you can learn whatever is coming next.