Basic Educational Skills towards 2030

Photo by Geronimo Giqueaux on Unsplash

This summer I had a number of discussions with teenagers and their parents about the choice of university education. Obviously, they wanted me to comment primarily on the opportunities for engineering education (something I am qualified for), rather than going to the specifics of other educations (where my comments may turn out to be less useful than a random choice). Nevertheless, we were almost always ending up wandering at the corridor of indecisiveness, placed at the intersection of ambition and fear-of-missing-out. This corridor is normally used to ponder various cliché-questions, such as “Where do you see yourself in X years?”, “Can you imagine being a <some profession> and become like <that-winner or those-losers, depending on the targeted parental effect>?”.

This same corridor can be inspiring to think a bit broader about the following question: Which basic educational skills will be needed in the coming 10 or more years, regardless of the actual profession? Here by "basic educational skills" I mean the set of skills that are going to augment the current set of basic skills, consisting of reading, writing, and math. Besides my personal experience (I had them as basic skills in my education in the 1980s and my kids had it in 2010s), the fact that these three are basic skills is widely recognized, see for example CBEST or similar tests. There are two aspects of augmenting the current set of basic skills (reading, writing, math): (1) how are these basic skills changed (2) what are the other skills added to the basic set? I will make an attempt to provide a brief answer to these questions, without the ambition to be scholarly complete but rather thought-provoking.

1. Reading. Reading books and well-written articles is undeniably healthy for your brain, while being able to clearly understand various documents is essential in many jobs. However, in the internet era we are bombarded with texts, articles (especially article titles) or similar, and, dealing with this information overload requires an upgrade to the reading skills. For example, this is the ability to quickly scan for desired information or promptly judge whether an article is worth spending a quality-reading time. In my case, one of the most depressing pictures used to be that of a library with a huge number of books, reminding me that life is too short to read all of them, but also unjust to those authors that spent time writing the books without catching the due attention of the reader. Yet, digitalization of content and diagonal reading skills enable us to go thorugh many more books.
2. Writing. Not all of us will become writers or write articles for living, but writing is an excellent tool to structure your ideas as well as give you an impression of how is your opinion presented to others. Back in the 1980s we all wrote essays at schools, while writing letters or postcards occasionally. In the online world we are writing much more than before, such as emails (a large percentage of my work is floating around reading and responding to emails) or opinions (as I am doing at the moment). The quality of the public discourse in social media, spiced with outrageous comments and grammatical errors, tells us that writing is still a much-needed basic educational skill.
3. Math. I have frequently encountered memes on the social media stating something along the lines of "One more day has passed and I have still not used sin, cos, or exp". This sentence succinctly presents the erroneous view that math is of no use in everyday life, except for, perhaps, payments. Without going into a deep argumentation why this is fundamentally wrong, it is sufficient to say that math is one of the main tools that helps us to simplify the world around us and represent it with a model we can understand. Take the simplest math — counting and numbering. There are no two identical people in the world (or for that matter, not two identical subjects or objects whatsoever); yet, when we need to count how many chairs we should put around the table, we simplify the world by modeling all people as identical, count them, and find out how many chairs are needed. This simplification in order to find relations among the entities in the world will only grow in importance, considering the information overload and the increased complexity of objects we encounter every day, such as robots or sophisticated cars.
4. Foreign languages. This has also been considered a basic skill for a long time, although not at the level of reading, writing and math. For example, in the countries where English is not an official language, the knowledge of English is assumed almost by default and the start of English courses has been pushed to the very early years in the elementary school. Besides English, riding the wave of globalisation and knowing a set of foreign languages opens a broader opportunity for being integrated in various study or work environments.
5. Softwarization and automation. In the recent years, programming started to be seen as a basic, necessary skill and many initiatives have attempted to bring it in the curriculum of the elementary schools. While knowing how to solve problems in a structured ways, using algorithms, is an important skill, it belongs to a broader set of skills related to softwarization and automation. Softwarization means that a lot of the tools used in practically all jobs will have a software component, that is, something that can be reconfigured or reprogrammed to obtain some feature in that tool. It is thus necessary to understand what is possible to achieve by this reconfiguration, what are the principles behind it, as well as the opportunities and threats. Here the term automation is used to denote the fact that many tasks and jobs will get components that will get automated or outsourced to a computer/software, while still keeping the human in the loop. For example, radiologists that are able to work together with sophisticated algorithms for analyzing images. The importance of this softwarization/automation skill will only increase in the coming years and it is a definitive candidate for a basic educational skill. How to make a curriculum/courses about it is entirely different question.
6. Statistics, data, and uncertainty. Wait, math was already mentioned in point 3 above, why is statistics treated separately? Statistics and data is not orthogonal to skills #3 and #5 above, but it does deserve a separate spot. This is because, as the data is becoming more abundant and increasing number of phenomena is subject to statistical analysis, dealing with uncertainty becomes a basic skill. Correct interpretation of the statistical indicators and uncertainty will be part of many educations and jobs, but also, having a lot of data at the fingertips, indispensable in making personal decisions. For example, how to interpret the cost-benefit of the vaccines, how to understand what an increase of the average temperature of X degrees means, or similar.

This set of skills is likely not complete, as it does not include soft skills, creativity, self-discipline and work ethics, and many others. I am far from being qualified to comment on those, but recall that we started from the three skills that have been for a long time universally accepted as basic. In that sense, the augmented set of basic skills will likely be universally useful across different professions. It is a mistake to see skills #5 and #6 as being relevant only for engineering, as the aspects addressed by those two skills are transforming all areas of work and play.