MARLON LINDSAY, CEO of 21st Cent Ed
Education was organized for work, work has changed, education has not.
Over time, the purpose of education has shifted according to the needs of the country. The primary purpose of education has ranged from instructing our children in religious doctrine to preparing them to live in a democratic society to assimilating immigrants into the mainstream of society to preparing workers for the industrialized 20th-century workplace.
A poll conducted by PDK/Gallup on education summarized the following:
Parents and adults (each 53%) agree that academics should be the focus of a public school education while teachers say the main goal should be preparing students to be good citizens (45%) or preparing them academically (37%). Another question, though, makes clear that learning job skills is a broadly shared goal nonetheless. 75% of parents, 77% of adults, and 82% of teachers say schools should prepare students both for jobs and academically. Only 15% of parents and all adults and 8% of teachers say core academics alone should be the priority.
Education Means Survival
Since the dawn of mankind, education has been about the survival of the species. From the time of the hunter-gatherer to farming to the Industrial Revolution, our fundamental purpose for education was to survive and thrive. The fundamental skills we used were critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication. We went from practice to theory in making our world more predictable. Whether confronting the threat of the saber-tooth tiger or determining where to hunt and gather, we used critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication—skills that educators today call the 4Cs.
Today, our saber-tooth tiger is digitization, and deciding where to hunt needs STEM education. As we did in our early days, we need to go from practice to theory so that our young people can survive and thrive in the rest of the 21st century.
Beginning with the homo sapiens, we have been inventing the tools needed for our survival. Technology has always been, and will always be, at the heart of our inventions. Every generation used the technology of their time to advance their society. We use technology for fire, tools, weapons, the wheel, the printing press, the internet, and now mass digitization.
Today’s Technology
We continue to manipulate our technology in such a way as to eliminate our physical and mental labor for many jobs, and soon most jobs. Universities, businesses, and other thought leaders across the globe continue to study the impact of technology on the modern-day workforce. The Oxford University Study on Employment indicates that 47 percent of all jobs will be eliminated or impacted by technology. The McKinsey study suggests that 50 percent of all jobs are automatable and 30 percent will be automated by 2030. The World Economic Forum reports that 6.1 million jobs will be created because of automation. Early in the pandemic, my prediction was that COVID-19 would impact these numbers as employers look to guard against another year like 2020 by automating as many functions as possible using current and emerging technologies.
For the rest of the 21st century, we will accelerate our investments in STEM fields. Robotics in manufacturing, self-driving trucks in transportation, AI-reading X-rays in medicine, robots making pizzas in fast food, and drones making deliveries in retail are just the tip of the iceberg of what we will see. The results of this acceleration will force us to move beyond students with the natural disposition for STEM to attract all students to STEM. We must ensure a comprehensive STEM foundation for ALL students, just as we do with numeracy and literacy. The confluence of technology, such as artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, and other emerging technologies, is transforming our world in a way that will leave us well-educated but useless without a foundation in STEM education.
A 21st-Century Education
Today’s education was organized by the Prussians around the late 1700s for the Industrial Age. It was brought to the United States by Horace Mann in the mid-1800s and has stayed the same since. Education was then standardized to offer credentials so people could qualify for work. Features like grouping by age, with a specific amount of time to gain knowledge, and then pacing through the system whether they are ready or not are dubbed “the factory model of education.”
Alvin Toffler, who ardently denounced the “Industrial Era School” in his book Future Shock, wrote:
Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world —a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.
A New System
The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world. This system did not emerge instantly. Even today it retains throw-back elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius. The whole administrative hierarchy of education, as it grew up, followed the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines was grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes in time.
Arguably, education was organized for work, work has changed, but education has not. We have been talking about the transformation of education for many years with little noticeable change. The COVID-19 pandemic created urgency to change a system that has been too big to change. Schools failed, people stopped working, and industry came to a standstill. The aftermath is that industry has leveraged technology to evolve itself to accommodate its own transformation and thus will require a STEM-ready workforce.
Here again, industry will dictate how to educate the workforce of the future. The pandemic resulted in remote work, cloud-based collaboration, video conferencing, and worker-centric accommodations. These allowed kids to run around in the background shattering “the work-life balance.” As such, the acceleration of technological breakthroughs occurred, and life will never be the same.
Modern Advancements
Advancements in AI, automation, and robotics have caused and will continue to cause, the replacement of physical labor. This will eliminate jobs in every industry. As education did before, it will evolve to accommodate the needs of industry. Industry moved away from its own factory-based model. Now education must do the same. But how? The answer is a comprehensive STEM education.
STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—when taken together as an integrated discipline, provides opportunities for students to develop the enduring skills of critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration. A STEM project, by its nature, is an experience in the skills dubbed 21st-century skills or the 4Cs. So, back to survival.
For the 21st century and beyond, education must be about skill and talent development, which is also workforce development, and the economic vitality of communities. Unless we learned a specific skill or studied a profession, most of us can’t remember what we learned in school. This isn’t a bad thing because assimilated knowledge makes for a well-rounded person; however, project-based learning with a focus on mastery is a time-tested method of education that is needed again in today’s schools.
Mastery-based education is using practice to validate principles and theories, and it is the way education sticks. Social emotional learning deals with the whole child, which should focus on not just how they learn but also what they learn. So, interest-based learning is crucial. Self-paced learning is a must for full-potential learning. Hybrid learning, blended learning, and remote learning provide crucial options where location-based learning is a challenge for students and their families. The number of families home-schooling their children has never been higher. With a flexible learning environment, this number would drop significantly.
Workforce Development
We need all students to be prepared for the workforce. We simply will not have enough people to fill the demand for workers without them. There are just over 625,000 computer science jobs available, with only 71,000 computer science students graduating into the workforce last year. We will need 2.4 million advanced manufacturing workers, 2.7 million data scientists, and 465,000 cybersecurity professionals in the United States over the next few years. To complicate matters, the gaps we have mentioned are not in the United States alone; the STEM workforce shortage is a global problem.
Major global economies, such as China, India, and countries in Europe, are faced with the same STEM workforce challenges as in the United States. The projected cybersecurity shortage in the United States is just under 500,000 jobs. However, in India, for example, some are estimating that there will be a cybersecurity job gap of 1.5 million. Developing countries are preparing their young people to go after these jobs with a fierce urgency.
The United States pays some of the most competitive wages and can keep its workers. However, some of these developing nations are better preparing their young people to take jobs from the United States without leaving their native land. Still, the threat to a community is not just from a better-prepared international community. Within the United States, there is a brain drain happening in local communities as they face competition from other regions across the nation. It’s imperative, now more than ever, that schools take, again, their rightful place in workforce development and economic development.
It Takes a Village
Given all of this, It Takes a Village to Raise a 21st-Century Graduate. The school district must be the center of transformation. They have the future workforce and the resources to make a systemic change. It is not easy. It will not be easy until the outdated education policies are changed to support the work that needs to be done. We cannot wait for policies to change or we will lose generations! Instead, let’s heed the old African proverb and reach out to the village to raise the child.
If we are going to leverage the village to raise the child, which we must do, then the role of the school superintendent must be different. The school superintendent is the most important role in a community—they have our children! They have the awesome responsibility of shaping young minds, developing responsible citizens, and training a workforce for the continued economic vitality of this great nation. Yet, when conversations about workforce development and economic development are being had, they are often not at the table.
Superintendents of schools must assume their rightful place among the village elders. They must expand the four walls of the district. Additionally, they must meaningfully include the stakeholders of the community. Community intelligence must inform instruction and create opportunities not otherwise available in the insular world of education. They must create partnerships that provide access to resources bilaterally. Curriculum resources should be shared with the community, and the community should provide real-world learning opportunities for students.
I am excited to have the opportunity to share the stories, perspectives, and vision for STEM education from superintendents across the country. The rest of the 21st century is the most crucial period in our lifetime and a pivotal century for mankind.
My Mission
My mission through 21stCentEd is to make STEM education available and accessible to all students, in school, after school, and out of school. Working with schools, nonprofits, and communities, we are making sure that students engage and grow in STEM and are provided the tools to reach their full potential. We are equally, if not more, determined to ensure underserved black and brown students, girls, and rural communities get the support they need to participate confidently in what is coined by the World Economic Forum as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The United States is being challenged from all sides for our innovative dominance. India, China, and others are investing heavily to ensure that they become globally competitive and catch us while we sleep. As such, the STEM Century is about education, workforce development, and economic prosperity. Why? So that America can continue to lead in innovations, technology, and economic vibrancy. The people at the heart of these innovations will determine the direction of our society. They do this while making a great living and changing their life trajectory for their families for generations to come.
About the Author
MARLON LINDSAY, CEO of 21stCentEd
Marlon is a business leader and writer who is committed to helping people reach their full potential. He believes that the stewardship of our young is a biological imperative and thus our ultimate priority. He pursues this priority daily with his own six children and the work that he does at 21stCentEd.
Additionally, he creates STEM opportunities for students early to prepare and capitalize on the disruptions brought on by artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, and other emerging technologies. He works towards the imperative of getting students ready for a STEM-centric economy through public/private partnerships in education, workforce readiness, and the economic development of 21st-century communities.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, he has doubled down on ensuring that all students, especially the underserved and underrepresented, have a foundation in STEM. How? By bringing affordable and scalable comprehensive STEM education to school districts and their communities.
He is motivated to influence a world where his children can play, create, collaborate, and reach their full potential. Marlon is noted for saying, “The best way I know to make sure my kids reach their full potential is to ensure that all kids reach their full potential—adults are just big kids.”
Born in Jamaica, Marlon immigrated to the United States at the formative age of thirteen. He grew up in Connecticut, where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Connecticut—Go Huskies! Additionally, he furthered his learning, and training in leadership, financial management, and business development, at Wharton and Columbia, Dartmouth respectively. He is the author of Reminder to Self, The Eight Life Principles for Living from Your Truest Self.
He lives in Utah with his wife, Amanda. They are proud parents of Skye, Makenna, Bliss, Shiner, River, and Wilder.
