“The work place is demanding more innovation and creativity…That’s a fundamental shift from just five years ago when the focus was on simply re-engineering and efficiency.” Terry Ryan

In the 21st century economy, preparing youth to work and succeed is far different than it used to be. Society has undergone a massive and rapid shift from being a factory-based economy dependent on physical labour to being a computer and knowledge-based economy to what some now call ‘the concept age’. "The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers1". This new economy requires radically different approaches to work, productivity and prosperity and consequently requires radically different approaches to learning, schools and education.

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​Heather MacTaggart on the Factory Model of Education


Rote instruction, student passivity and structured classrooms made sense when training people for the standardized production of a factory or repetitive office tasks. However, today’s workplace, world and economy require more: more creativity, more people skills, more initiative and the ability to synthesize across fields. “If we want children to function well in an open and dynamic economy then it is imperative to expose them to open and dynamic learning environments. . . . In other words, for young people to thrive in highly flexible, changing environments, they need to have grown up in open and challenging environments that stimulate their ability to be creative and thoughtful2”.

Instead of memorization, repetition and following formulaic solutions, education today needs to encourage innovation, flexibility, synthesis, creativity and problem solving. A recent study on the accumulation of human capital points out that “as children spend more time in structured learning environments they, not surprisingly, become successful in navigating and excelling in such closed environments. They quickly learn the rules to success, and as long as the rules don’t change they do well. They feel comfortable in settings where things are structured and controlled. In contrast, a more open and risky environment intimidates them; they have learned to play life safe. If this is indeed the case, then we are creating a potentially dangerous disconnect between the learning environments we are providing for children and the economy we are creating for them to enter into as adults3”.

Youth today must become active entrepreneurs and innovators to succeed4. Outcome-based education, rigid school days, subject specialization, standardized testing and onerous homework loads do not support the genuinely creative, collaborative or the entrepreneurial in our youth.
The statistical evidence is that the best predictor of the performance of a community's schools, the best predictor of math scores and science scores, for example, is the social capital in that community... And by that I simply mean the number of people who know one another's first name, the number of people who take part in community organizations, the level of trust and reciprocity in the community.
Robert Putnam, author of the book "Bowling Alone"

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 Endnotes
1 Daniel Pink A Whole New Mind.The Berkley Publishing Group, 2006.
2 Terry Ryan, The New Economy’s Impact on Learning (The 21st Century Learning Initiative, September 2000).
3 Iyigu and Ann L. Owen. “Risk, Entrepreneurship and Human Capital Accumulation.” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.” (July 1997), p. 2.
4 Terry Ryan, The New Economy’s Impact on Learning (The 21st Century Learning Initiative, September 2000).