ABSTRACT
The first chapter of this book is about changes in society and their impacts on education and schooling. In this respect Chapter 1 examines the transition of society from an industrial era to the transformative knowledge era, which had its genesis circa 1996. This chapter pays particular attention to the convergence of new technologies, including AI and robotics, and increasing processing power, as disruptive influences that have brought rapid social change and disruption in the employment market, with corresponding disruption to the field of education. From this perspective Chapter 1 reveals a series of new socio-economic fundamentals that have re-focused societies from the local to the global and created a greater reliance on the use of technological innovation as the basis for redefining the concepts of work and home life. Chapter 1 ends by discussing how these new fundamentals call into question what it means to be educated and how education should be undertaken in the modern era, setting the scene for Chapter 2.
