Education for the knowledge economy

Education has both content and form. Content has to do with the learning of information, the absorbtion and memorising of facts. However, it is the aspect of form that distinguishes education from the mere gathering of facts. It has to do with the learning of a practice over a period of time, a process that demands of a learner that they submit themselves to discipline.

The integration of these two aspects is what we mean by knowledge. In schools and colleges, form is embedded in the traditional approach.

With the advent of the information superhighway, and the dramatic opening of access to an ever burgeoning deposit of human knowledge, education is faced with critical questions.To what extent are the practices being learned in schools appropriate to a 21st century knowledge economy? And how can the aspect of form be maintained without becoming submerged by the vast content of contemporary human knowledge?

There is a danger of irrelevance, in that education could fail to equip students with the disciplines and skills that are unique to an information age. It is just not possible to carry on as if nothing had changed. The nature of the global economy and its symbiotic union with computers and the networks that transform them into the largest artifact ever seen in human history has changed for ever the context in which we live and work. It is also in the process of changing the nature of the students being educated in schools and colleges.

It is all too easy however to see the solution as the introduction of computers into schools. There are the twin dangers of distracting attention from the learning of practices that are fundamental to what education is about, and of trivialising technology education to the learning of information about certain proprietary packages.

More important is that the focus is on the introduction of new practices appropriate to the knowledge economy. I would suggest that these skills include the following:

• critical thinking
• awareness of the nature of forms of knowledge
• organisation of personal knowledge, with and without technology aids
• presentation and deployment of knowledge
• decision making, discrimination, and value judgements in the pursuit of knowledge
• search and research
• awareness and accountability in the use of sources
• ethics of shared knowledge

Education is empowering, and the challenge is that education continue to empower individuals to own and to understand the knowledge economy rather than to become strangers in their own land, no more than technicians that maintain a system with its own inexorable logic and momentum.

Knowledge that we have learned meaningfully, that we have constructed from a union of our actions, feelings, and conscious thought, is knowledge we control [Novak, J.D. (1998) Learning, creating and using knowledge, cited by Sebastian Fiedler, BlogTalk 2003]

The achievement of meaningful knowledge in an information age, knowledge that we own and control, demands more than ever the learning of disciplines. It is by submitting ourselves to the process of learning a practice that we gain the ability and the methodologies to structure our personal instance of knowledge. Without basic frameworks we lack the wherewithal to organise our knowledge, or to integrate the new knowledge that will continue to beat its path to our door.

There will always be a need for formalised educational institutions that are able to provide an environment for disciplined learning. The question that remains is the nature of the education to be offered by these institutions.