Anders Norberg The WHAT of education needs to be explored together with the students. The minimum is that the students understand that the WHAT is something they can participate in developing. You need some basic skills to understand where you are in history and how to function in society, but I think we largely forget to listen to needs, interests, dreams and wishes. We forget to address the life the students are living. Life here and now is very important for every individual. This might sound simple and naive, but if our students do not experience recognition they close their minds. If they do not experience that the WHAT is relevant and usable we will not keep their interest and attentention. If what we «offer» can not be shown to give long term benefit - a good and meaningful life - we are wasting our students time. I am not sure teachers themselves feel empowered to even question the WHAT. That is very worrying. That is about teacher education.

Discipline of learning should be introduced. Learning how to learn is what I believe should be part of curriculum e.g

Self reflexive skills

Dear Anders Norberg ,

I completely agree with you. We need to think about "what of" and "what for" of education. We are in a "maze" which hinders our unorthodox thinking. We are in our comfort zones rather than adapting and adopting new changes that occur nowadays. Sources of knowledge are changing, and so do applications. We should select and design, especially the academicians, curriculum and update the teaching and learning process to go with the change.

Thank You.

This is a really excellent question from the doctor Anders Norberg. With all due respect to the problems of educational technology, the main thing in education is content. Substantial replacement of content is required, this is a very complex and time-consuming problem. Apparently, an inverse movement from the end to the beginning is required: from practical needs to applied content, and further to saturation with the necessary methodology and fundamental foundations. In this way, content can be optimized and modernized.

Anders Norberg The WHAT of education needs to be explored together with the students. The minimum is that the students understand that the WHAT is something they can participate in developing. You need some basic skills to understand where you are in history and how to function in society, but I think we largely forget to listen to needs, interests, dreams and wishes. We forget to address the life the students are living. Life here and now is very important for every individual. This might sound simple and naive, but if our students do not experience recognition they close their minds. If they do not experience that the WHAT is relevant and usable we will not keep their interest and attentention. If what we «offer» can not be shown to give long term benefit - a good and meaningful life - we are wasting our students time. I am not sure teachers themselves feel empowered to even question the WHAT. That is very worrying. That is about teacher education.

Dear Gurudutta Japee! Yes, I think like you that learning to learn is kind of central here, and we may not do that so well today in the school system. Learning in a sense is what people more and more will be doing for their living. But how do we teach people to really learn, and how do we assure that this is happening?

...and a suitable quote from the futurist Peter Drucker: “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” See this interesting collection of quotes on education where I retrieved this quote : https://www.growthengineering.co.uk/55-quotes-about-learning/

Dear Kjartan Skogly Kversøy ! Yes, the students should be a part of deciding what to learn. When a student is truly interested in something, it is hard to stop him or her from learning, and a teacher has often a quite nice task to support the student just by good questions, content recommendations, positive feedback, etc. However, this is not so easy as a class activity.

But students as a collective have knowledge as well, together. In society, education is a kind of messaging between generations that "check what we know already, here is a compressed version, learn that, and come into active working life when you get it." In this way, education is always conservative, asserting a linear progression in history like climbing a stair. It may not be that easy, far from, and young people's choices on what seems interesting show often to be wise ones. One conclusion is, I think that we could give more room to critical discussions, about everything. And: Could we develop some kind of good process for students looking into the future and discussing with teachers on scenarios of what is the wisest way to go?

Dear Vladimir Rotkin ! I see that you agree with what is a concern within a question, and you argue for more attention to the need for, and the attention to how to modernise curriculum. I agree here as well, but do you think this modernising of what to learn can be designed to happen as an orderly ambitious process in society, or will it have a more disruptive character?

Dear Md Habibur Rahman ! I like your metaphor of educators (?) being in a "maze" in this question, and I agree that it deserves better attention. We can so easily just be convenient to continue as earlier, convinced that that has some lasting value, while not understanding what happens in fast development in our subjects. But, on the other hand, teachers and researchers do not have the time or energy to do that...with some exceptions, and these teachers can become quite problematic in their contexts...

The philosopher of information I mention in the question, Luciano Floridi, does not claim to have any final answer to the question of WHAT to learn either. But at least concerning general and basic education, he has an idea, he points us in a direction, gives us a thought to chew on:

What we should learn in school may be expressed as "The languages of information", meaning all from human languages, to concept languages in disciplines or areas of work, to the art of connecting different information sets to one another, like in doing a mashup (connect two sets of information to develop new clarity or knowledge). What do you like this idea?

Here is a short paper of his, attached. Note also the term "E-ducation" - the "e" is already a part of education, we can leave the discussion of having digital technologies in education or not..

Article E-ducation and the Languages of Information

Dear Anders Norberg. I think that there will be no order or destruction. Like many cultural and social processes, this one will occur as a set of local breakthroughs and will be extremely long-term.

This is a really good question. I believe that what to learn should depend upon what is the need of society today and in the future and of course focus on learning how to learn.

Evolving culture

Despite the expectations about digital technologies that existed before this pandemic situation, I believe that we will return to the classrooms but we have a new vision about safety and close human contact; I think we already obtain new meanings and evidence on the limits and advantages of remote work, digital devices and resources. But above all, we will have witnessed (again) how this situation accelerated and made visible the processes of inequality and the inadequacy of "equity" policies.

We need to consider where we have been, how the present looks like and what trends there are, so we can visualize possible scenarios. At this time it seems to me that soft skills need to be enhanced. Our global socioeconomic context requires strong leadership, adaptability to technology integration in basically every dimension of our professional and personal lifes, receptiveness and willingness to establish collaborations in order to accomplish determined significant outcomes, particularly in work-related environments, monitoring and evaluation knowledge and skills, and ways to procure and demonstrate transparency in everything we do and accountability for our decision-making and actions.

What to learn in education depends on what board decided to teach us.

But how to learn in education, it depends on us and our guides.

It depends on the developments

This is all true, dear doctor

This paper sheds light on related issues:

Article Teacher leadership in the context of distance learning

Good topic .. Good luck

The curriculum should be play-based, activity based and developmentally appropriate for children.

I would go for any study about the environment and its policy making. Since there are so many issues that involved sustaining our planet resources and all ,while inevitably habitat for a growing population needs an expansion of space we definitely put environment and qualification of policy makers to make the right decisions for a good future.

Interesting question and replies. Might I adress a quote from an ancient Greek Tragedy 'Prometheus Bound' By Aeschylus:

"Learn yourself and learn to adapt to new realities" (Uranus to Prometheus)

I guess the only thing sure about education in future, is that it will CHANGE, like everything. So, we must prepare ourselves for changes or we must try to keep up with them.

Interesting answers, thanks!

Many answers seem to call for a more frequent update of curriculum. I am not sure this is enough, I think it may be necessary to be more radical in thinking. We can of course teach children/students to read, write, count and be critical as a basis, but I am not sure the path from these basic knowledges/skills should be to teach more of the same by continuing a disciplinary-based curriculum agenda. Can we instead help students work with increasingly more advanced project- and problem based learning to create better and better learning skills?

Hej, Anders!

Om du följer mina forskning, kan förstá estetikens betydelse i várt kommande ,liv. Jag har boken "Musikens gáva", och artiklar om temat. Forskningsrapporten "Estetiken som pedagogiskt redskap" finns pá MDH hemsida frón 2006 och vára forskning i Ungern med Szeged Universitet om Synliga ljud utvecklande matrerial.

SZTE.hu Józsa, Gevayne Janurik, - Antal- Lundström) Mvh: Ilona Antal- Lundström e-mail: [email protected]

Thanks Antal-Lundström Ilona , I will have a look at your publications about Importance of esthetical subjects In what to learn in school. Music, images and other arts can also be seen as important human languages of information.

This is a fascinating and important question, Anders Norberg! My research focuses more on the 'how', but I agree that the 'what' needs a lot of attention.

We can talk about content and about skills, and here in Scotland we currently have what is ostensibly a skills-based curriculum, but it is (especially at high school level) structured around school subjects that are little different than when I started school many decades ago.

One important development in my view is how understanding oneself and others can play a role in successful learning, i.e. the learning of how to be psychologically well, how to live a good life, and how to interact socially in a moral and tolerant way, how to handle problems, how to learn, how to be creative, how to work with others, how to think critically etc. A lot of this draws on the subject we know as psychology, and as such I have an ongoing project looking at its role in the school curriculum:

https://www.researchgate.net/project/The-role-of-psychology-in-the-school-curriculum

very insightful information Jonathan William Firth and Anders Norberg

A curriculum that is linked to real life and can expand , change and flex. The future unravels quickly and we should be a step ahead. Maybe considering the core necessities can help design a learning path that supports and expands learning. Possibly different subjects to the ones taught now keeping the core ones as tools of communication.

If we are designing the future we need to be in it not miles away as we are. From the early years onwards life is change and learning, in a nut shell, never stops. New visions ahead.