ABSTRACT
Teachers all over the world have had to accept the compromise of focusing more on delivering the prescribed curriculum than developing understanding; test-taking rather than learning. There is not an achievement gap, there is a relevance gap. Most of what is taught quickly gets forgotten and a huge information base may not be the right priority for our times. Our conceptions of what is possible are inhibited by our beliefs about what is practical in an antiquated institution that pays disproportionate attention to practices entrenched in an industrial, colonialist society. School systems are good at ranking, not at developing human capital. The knowledge that is easiest to teach and assess is also the easiest to digitise, automate and outsource. Schools were not constructed to be fast and agile, and they were not designed for an environment where change has become the norm. As global interconnections and complexities increase, hierarchies are being supplanted by more lateral interactions. Education is moving from a narrow pipeline metaphor to an incredibly diverse web of outside networks and knowledge is becoming literally inseparable from the network that enables it. Healthy systems have to have the innovation capacity for new models of practice to emerge.
