When considering the lives of secondary students in the year 2025, I have a natural starting point with my kids Claire and Tim. At this time in my life it seems almost impossible to imagine my 21-month-old daughter and my 12-day-old son as teens, but that is just what they will be in 2025. As they turn 16 and 14 that year, I hope I’ll look back on writing this piece and smile that my wishes for their education have come true. As a father and an educator I’ve often pondered about the details of their forthcoming education. Above all, I want the role of content knowledge for Claire, Tim, and their peers to be significant. Some of the articles I’ve read in the course of being an education student seem to devalue content knowledge, preferring instead that the greatest emphasis be placed on the “learning experience.” Some authors, it would seem, believe that the increasing ease with which we access information renders a personal knowledge of factual data relatively moot. I think this is a terrible mistake.
Even with the amazing improvements in data accessibility, there is not now, nor will there be in the future, any substitute for personal understanding and knowledge. I hope we never get to the point where Claire, Tim, or any of my future students would be considered the best in their fields simply because they could access information the fastest. History has taught us that wisdom and judgment, undergirded by a fact-based knowledge of the world, are the most valuable traits for individuals to possess.
As a future social studies teacher, I hope to imbue this belief through the use of technology. How much more powerful and tangible will students’ understanding of the past be if reading passages of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or seeing photographs of slaves is just a button-click away? Being able to immerse oneself in the constructs of the past is an ability that advanced technology will enhance, and I can think of no better way for students to better understand the complexities of their world and fully appreciate how local, national, and global society arrived at its present state. Possessing and maintaining this understanding will be critical; although not everyone will aspire to a career relating to history, our increasingly globalized world will require that we understand the perspectives and experiences of others.
Thus, to fully take advantage of this great cache of information, Claire, Tim, and their peers will need to be proficient in the use of technology in order to be productive in 2025 and beyond. Much in the way that “woodshop” classes were added to the twentieth century’s secondary school curriculum to meet the demands of the manufacturing economy, information technology classes should be included in schools’ curricula now—to say nothing of 2025—to ensure that our students are graduating with the skills they need to remain competitive and useful in the working world. Fluency in the use of technology will be absolutely crucial to students’ careers now and in the future, because as Draves and Coates write on page 51 of Nine Shift, “Sometime between 2010 and 2020 the percentage of people in knowledge jobs becomes greater than those employed in the manufacturing sector.” By 2025, it will simply no longer be possible for Claire, Tim, or anyone else playing a meaningful role in society to shrug off an unfamiliarity with the latest technology.
Simply put, students and the schools that educate them need to have a knowledge of the past in order to be prepared for the future. Time and again throughout world history societies have risen as they have developed certain technologies, and fallen as they have failed to adapt their skills and societies. It seems that with China, India, and other nations challenging the United States’ position as the lone global superpower, the world is casting down the gauntlet: Will we harness the new world of digital technology and remain among the most productive and intelligent people on the planet, or are we doomed to follow the path of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome?
