Episode 224: What skills do we need to teach young people to help prepare them for the future?

Andy Psarianos

Welcome back to an exciting episode of the school school podcast. We're here with Robin and Adam as per normal. They can both say hi if they would like to.

Adam Gifford

I'd very much like to. Hi Andy.

Robin Potter

And I would love to, hello.

Andy Psarianos

I've been accused of being bossy sometimes so I gave you the option. I didn't tell you you had to say hi.

So, you know, I think we should talk about, what are young people going to need to be able to cope and deal with?

What are the skills that we should try to be building in them for the future? So I don't know if you guys have any opinions on this or thoughts, but you know, know everybody talks about all the time and you hear all these buzzwords floating around, but let's try to be a little bit more practical.

Like what, what are the things that we should help children with, to prepare them for the future? Cause none of us really know what the future is going to look like, but we know it's going to be different.

Robin Potter

I have a crystal ball, so hang on. Let me look.

Andy Psarianos

Alright, get your crystal ball out.

Adam Gifford

Go for it. That means you start Robin. So over to you.

Andy Psarianos

You going to put a pointy hat on? OK.

Robin Potter

Well, I think we have to go back to... Let's go back to the basics. I mean, are we talking very young people?

Andy Psarianos

Ooh, that's an education buzzword going back to basics that that could be interpreted in so many ways.

Robin Potter

But I guess for me, the reason I keep hearing about it is, and you mentioned young people, because it seems right now with, at least at my kids' age and stage, where they're a little bit older and people are wanting to know, what are they thinking of doing down the road?

Not that neither of mine know what they want to do, but at the same time, sounds like it's questionable whether should they be doing something specific because is that just going to dramatically change and then by tomorrow, there's not gonna be an opportunity for them to do that. So.

I guess it goes back to skill set, if that's back to the basics, but kind of what are the important skills that in the next, what, 10 years, people are going to need or will still need?

I don't have the answer. Maybe I'll throw it out to you two.

Andy Psarianos

Well, I could take it from there, but Adam, don't know if you want to jump in.

Adam Gifford

Mine's pretty basic. There's two parts to it, okay? Because we can guess, and it would just have to be a guess as to what the skills and competencies people need in the future. And we can have pretty, I think, educated guess about that.

But think to start with, this might sound really twee, but they've got to be good humans. Like they've got to be decent people, right? So that to me is fundamental, is that we want a society that's made up of decent people and we know how to behave like decent people.

And I think that if you go back for a long time, there's been fundamentally decent people the whole way through. So making sure that we never lose sight of that, that we're a social species, that we know how to be social decently. So I think that that's really important.

So we give the children opportunities to ensure that that's which is what schools are. They're sort of mini societies, mini communities, sorry. And I think we can't lose sight of just being good, caring people that are kind to one another.

I think as twee as that sounds, I think that that's really, really important. Competency wise, well, that's a really interesting one. mean, the world changes faster than we can keep up with. You know, there'll be advances this week which we wouldn't have understood the advances a year ago, and this week alone would have made them look simply stoneage as to what's happening.

And so I guess I keep coming back to the same thing, that you want people that can solve problems, you want people that don't panic if they're in unfamiliar situations, and that there's a series of thoughts that you can go through to say, what do I need to do to help myself out here? What can I do to get this done in an environment that's forever changing, because I think that if that becomes too overwhelming, and we can't cope with that, we're seeing that now, right?

There's plenty of people in our society that are just simply not coping with today's world. And it seems to be ever increasing. So I think that, you know, that acceptance of our society changing rapidly, as it's always done, but I think it does go through changes that perhaps are faster and, you know, slower at different times.

I think it's those people that can adapt to that and be comfy in that space of, I don't know what's going on here, but I'll just stop for a bit. They're all very broad, so I'll hand over.

Andy Psarianos

No, I think it's great. You know, so I was just, and I love the fact that I get to go third because while you guys are talking, I get to take your ideas and I'm writing little things down and trying to, cause I know it's always, it's hard when you're put on the spot with a big question like this, because it's, hard to imagine like, how do you even begin to answer this Right?

But you know, what was resonating in my mind while I was listening to you guys talk was, why do we even, we like, we're talking about this from a school perspective.

Why, why does school even exist? You have to ask that question. Like, and that has changed so much over time and the school systems have not changed in tandem with it enough probably. And now as it's accelerating even more, we're ill equipped at changing schools or curriculums or education at the rate at which the world is changing. And that's part of the problem.

Because I think if you look back to when this like, you know, mass schooling was kind of accepted globally as a good thing, right? It was really about creating a workforce, right? And, and a lot of, a lot of, a lot of school was about knowledge and skills. Here's what you need to know. Here are the skills that you need in order to be a valuable, you know, contributor to society.

And it was easier back then because, you know, the jobs were like factories and they were, you know, office jobs and there were responsibilities at home and all those types of things. And those, those were more similar, like regardless of what industry you worked in, you know, if you worked in an office, the office responsibilities, accounting and whatever it was, like they were similar, right?

But at some point, you know, knowledge becomes less important because knowledge is like at your fingertips all the time. Hey, how much, you know, he's just thinking about what have I done in the last 24 hours?

So I get this recipe. I'm baking a cake. It says use one and a half sticks of butter. Well, you know what? I don't, this is a North American thing that you can buy butter in sticks. How much is a stick? I don't know. I don't have sticks of butter. I have a big piece of butter. How much of it do I need?

So, you know, go to my phone and say, how many grams is one and a half sticks of butter and it's like it's 170 grams boom okay done right once upon a time you would need to know what the conversion was from sticks of butter to ounces to none of that stuff matters anymore because always at your fingertips right so that's not a valuable thing to waste our time like i mean we need to make sure that children can convert and know how to convert but remembering what all the you know one inch is 25.4 millimeters is not a valuable bit of information for most people, right?

So that's all changed. So, and we have no idea, we have no idea what the future looks like. Nobody ever really does, but now it's changing at such a rate and such fundamental changes, we have no idea. So I think...

I like what you said, Adam, which is, you know, if I was to summarize it, it's like, need to teach people how to have, be a good, good human being, right? How to have a meaningful life, especially in a very uncertain world. Because if I just think about some of the questions that my kids have asked me recently, um, you know, like, you know, Hey, uh, I'm getting, I don't know if I should do a doctorate in this, because I don't know if there's going be any jobs in that because AI can answer most of the questions that I would have been an expert in.

So should I spend the next five years doing this research knowing that no one's going to ever ask me the question. They're just going to ask some AI the question, right? And that's a pretty damn compelling thing to ask before you think about going in to do, you know, several years of research and writing a dissertation, right?

Because the knowledge that you're going to come up with Is it going to be useful to anybody? Are you just doing it for yourself? Cause is there a job at the end of it? Cause in the end, before you finished school and then there was a job. I am a dadada dadada. I'm going to work in such and such. Right now it's like, I'm a dadada, but nobody needs a dadada dadada. Right. So, so that's kind of a compelling thing.

So anyway, I know I'm talking a lot, but but the things that I wrote down, like what are the things that I want my own children to have? because I think there things that schools can help with. And I'll just tell you what I wrote down. And I don't know if they're right or not, but this was resonating in my head.

No right answer, no wrong answer. I think I'd like my kids to be joyful, right? Not miserable. I'd like their lives to be full of joy. And I think that that's something you need to learn. I don't think it's something that is inherent, right? Especially when you're living in an unpredictable situation, somehow you need to be joyful, right? Because you don't know what you're to have. You need to be resilient.

We need to teach them resilience and we need to teach them tenacity. Like you got to keep doing this for a long time before anything comes out of it. Or, you know, that you're going to get a lot of knocks. Like you're going to have to change direction. Things are going to happen. You need to be resilient. You can't just expect that everything's going to be the way you want it to be. And from that, you need to be joyful. You need to be self-motivated. You need to get up every morning and say, today, I'm going to do this.

And that might be, I'm going to solve this critical world problem, but it might also be, I'm going to get up and I'm going to go for a hike. Right? Like you need to have that self. You can't be a couch potato, right? Because it's too easy to be a couch potato now before people had to get, get up and do things they had to, because they had to put bread on the table. Maybe that's not true anymore. Right? So what's your self motivation? You need to be resourceful.

How do I get what I need out of this current situation? Whatever that is, whether it's sustenance, whether it's joy, whether it's, you know, partner, like finding a partner, whatever it is, how are going to do that? Right? Be resourceful.

And then the other thing is, can you be critical? Like, can you this? I don't believe that. I don't think that's true. Do you have those critical skills? Right? Can you tell the difference between BS and you know, because you're being bombarded by all kinds of agendas all the time, right? So I know it's a really long-winded answer, but it's kind of like, this is, we don't do enough of that in school.

Robin Potter

That's an excellent list of things to have. I don't even know how you would classify it because it's not necessarily, maybe it is a skill in some way, but it's learned, it's their life skills.

Andy Psarianos

They're life skills. They're all life skills.

Robin Potter

I would add adaptability to that list because it does really go with tenacity and because especially now, you know, and there's always been this discussion about change being difficult for people and now more than ever, you need to be adaptable because change is imminent and it's happening all of the time. And if you can't go with the flow on these things, you're going to be left behind. you know, it's...

Adam Gifford

I think it's always been this, it's always been like the world is never, it's not gonna stop changing for anyone, right? And I was thinking, I was considering, know, like going to do a PhD or something like that. I guess the big difference will be the circumstance and the context of doing that PhD, well, the PhD will be radically different to someone who's done a PhD historically. I went back, I was just considering what happened when I was training to be a teacher.

I had go to the library. I had to physically get books out. And if they weren't there, I had to wait for the person to return it. And you'd ask the librarian, what's the wait? And they say, it's coming back on the seventh. And you say, but I've got an essay to write from the fifth and I'm not started and today's the fourth. What's going on?

Can you get another copy? So I think the thing is, that whatever I learned there though you've got to it into, at the moment it's 2025, you've got to take it into there. And I just wonder if the learnings of doing a PhD today will be radically different to someone doing a PhD 20 years ago. And I think that they'll be at the forefront of what research looks like.

And I think the other thing that's hugely exciting is I suppose with every technological advance, the learning will be so much like more accessible and those things I suspect, but I think that I completely agree with that list. I think it's brilliant.

And I think that the one that jumps out to me the most, I think, is that resilience one, actually. It is that being able to accept that whilst I talked about kind, nice humans and all that sort of stuff, life's tough, right? We don't control the good and the bad things that happen.

You know, sometimes bad things happen that affect us deeply. That's just life. That's being a human. And so I think that that that sometimes I think there's too much of an idea that always frustrates me.

Someone says you deserve to be happy. So I don't know if I deserve it, but I will take those moments of joy. I will take those moments of happiness and really embrace them, because that is really important and trying to put yourselves in those situations, because there's going to be other times where you are going to be sad and you might be offended and you might be these things.

But I think that that resilience part is the part that I think is a really interesting one because I think sometimes we've got to call out, that's actually wrong. We don't want you to be, rather than saying, no, that's okay, Andy, you can do that. You can hit that child or do whatever. Now, I'm not saying that happens, but do you know what I mean?

That sometimes we might be worried about upsetting people, but at what point do we build resilience and what does that look like? And I think that is something that's crucial for everyone.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, because life happens, right? Sooner or later, somebody or some like a pet or something that you love dearly will die. And you're going to be sad. It's going to happen. You can't just like always be happy. Like you said, this is not going to happen. Right. So, so how do you, how do you take that event and deal with it? You know,

But it might also be like you get like, I'm sorry, we don't need people like you in the company anymore. We now bought this machine, which is not a new concept, but it's happened over in the past, but now it's going to happen at a rate where it's never happened before.

Right. You know, so like you think of any, any job, like just imagine like being like, you know, I don't know the best gardener around, right? And everybody comes to you for advice. Oh, I got this planted. Oh yeah. Just a couple of eggshells and some coffee beans and it'll be fine.

Right. Now you just go online, right? And say, you can even take a picture of your plant and say, I don't know what's happening to this plant and boom, you know, this is what you need to do. You're watering it too much. Put it in the sun, take it out of the sun, whatever it is right. You know, and so all that stuff is like, so if you're that guy who's like spent a whole lifetime building this knowledge about when to use coffee beans and when to use eggshells and when to stop watering and now you no longer need it right?

Nobody's coming to you anymore and that's just reality and and and and that's just the way it's gonna go right so yeah

Adam Gifford

But I think that comes back to Robin's point about adaptability and it feeds back into all of those things. So you've got to be resilient to go, do you know what? What I'm doing today is irrelevant tomorrow because you can just ask, what do I do for the sick plant and all the rest of it?

And it's that initial, oh man, that sucks because I like paying the mortgage and that sort of stuff. So you've got to have that resilience and then think, yeah, but my skills won't be wasted, but how can I make them work?

Andy Psarianos

Right. So maybe you're going to take joy out of having your own garden and you're not going to, and that's okay. But you know, it's like your identity may need to shift as being the one who has all the answers. Cause now there's a machine that has all the answers, but now can you be okay with the fact that nobody needs to come to you for answers anymore, but you can still find joy in your life, knowing what you know and doing what you do and not. You know, so a lot of the yeah, go on.

Robin Potter

Maybe you end up creating the perfect eggshell recipe and that's your new thing and that's what you sell. There you go. Whatever it is.

Andy Psarianos

Exactly. Whatever, whatever it is, but it's, kind of, it's, it's resilience. It's the ability to be adaptable. It's the, you know, like not putting too much value on the, on the things that are going to be, that can be taken away from you very easily.

But for schools, we also need to teach how to read, how to do mathematics, how to do. So what we need to do is we need to gear those things. And this is kind of, you we know it's possible. How do you build these competencies in a person while teaching the things that they need to learn? Right. And that's what schools need to get better at, I think.

Adam Gifford

I think just quickly, think it's being mindful that you're also building those in all of the subjects that we teach or that time at school. It can be a vehicle for all of that. So I think that's the thing. think that if we're conscious of it, if we think that this child will benefit by being put in a position where they really struggle, and we'll just keep watching, we don't want to break them, but equally, we want them to get comfy in that position.

And the only way you do things like, or get better at things in general is by practicing. So, I think that's the thing I think that it is if we're conscious about it, but I think the other thing that has to happen is schools need to make conscious decisions that these are the types of skills, attributes, competencies, however you want to phrase them, that as a school, it's our mission to ensure that these develop. Because I think if you're not conscious of them, then it's left to chance, right?

Then you're just going to teach them maths and you're just going to teach them how to read and you're just going to do these things. But actually, I think being mindful that these things have always been incredibly important. Otherwise, humanity would have failed. We've always needed people who are resilient. We've always needed adaptable people. We've always needed these things. And it helps us deal with a world that can be quite tough at times.

I agree. just think it's that it's giving the importance to those areas that you've highlighted and being really mindful that, you know, do you want to make sure that these are the types of attributes that our children have? Because I think we do have to be really conscious of it.