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by Dirk Van Damme  Head of the Skills Beyond School Division,  Directorate for Education and Skills Since Harvard economists Goldin & Katz published their ground-breaking book The Race between Technology and Education (2008), education has come face-to-face with the challenges of a world continuously altered by technological innovation. Education is generally perceived to be a laggard social system, better equipped to transmit the heritage of the past than to prepare for the future. This perception is not entirely accurate; OECD/CERI work on Measuring innovati on in education (2014) demonstrates that education is a system that is not change-averse. From a historical perspective, education has adjusted to the needs and opportunities of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, for example by introducing natural sciences into the curriculum – although it took many years for that to happen. Will education have the luxury of time to confront the current wave of technological change...

by Dirk Van Damme Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills In a not so distant past, it was seen as one of the defining features of schools that they isolated learners – and the learning process itself – from the surrounding environment. As so brilliantly described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his account of the modern machinery of discipline and power, schools must be secluded time/space settings, far away from the impurities of the contemporary world which would poison the minds and character of children. But also in a more enlightened and emancipatory sense, separating young learners from an often depressing environment was perceived to be the best way to guide them to higher levels of knowledge, skill and wisdom. Schools and schooling have changed a lot in recent years, but they are still well-defined in terms of the time and space boundaries that separate them from their environment. Some modern progressive pedago...

by Andreas Schleicher Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills People have quite different views on the role that digital technology can and should play in schools. But we just can’t ignore how digital tools have so fundamentally transformed the world around schools. Students unable to navigate through our complex digital landscape are simply no longer able to participate in our social, economic and cultural life. In the past, education was about teaching people something. Now, it’s about helping students develop a reliable compass and the navigation skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile and ambiguous world. These days, we no longer know exactly how things will unfold, often we are surprised and need to learn from the extraordinary, and sometimes we make mistakes along the way. And it will often be the mistakes and failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. A generation ago, teachers could expect th...