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We are witnessing the end of education and we still don’t know how to react

If we really open our minds, hearts and will and just see reality instead of only seeing and perpetuating our ideology, if we let the future emerge instead of insisting on living inside an echo chamber, then we would see that we are witnessing the end of education. And, whether we accept it or not, we don't know how to react.

A recent article by Rodrigo Assael published on the Educación Futura site highlights something that should be obvious: education is no longer preparing us for the future. In fact (we say), maybe it never did it. Perhaps education was and is only the necessary level of domestication to perpetuate the present.

According to Assael, the Fourth Revolution (artificial intelligence, biotechnology, 3D printing, 5G network, Internet of Things, and quantum computing) has made the current educational system (which still prepares workers and employees for repetitive, mechanical work, specialized or a lifetime) obsolete and outdated. 

In other words, current education prepares good workers for the First Industrial revolution two centuries ago. But we are now in the Fourth Revolution (or in the fourth stage of the same revolution, if you prefer.) 

And in this new revolution, education (understood as the transfer of information in a formal context controlled by teachers or professors) is coming to an end. It remains to be determined how long the agony will be or if the end will be anticipated or sudden. Perhaps, in the post-truth and deep fakes era, no one will cry for the death of education.

Paraphrasing Nietzsche, education is dead, and we have killed her. Or almost, because there are still certain elements of post-education hope because of the actions of those who know, understand, feel, and live that the future is not continuity of the past.

Consider, for example, the case of BR, a young woman from Argentina who at 13 completed her secondary studies online at a school in the United States and then enrolled in a nationally accredited university to study mathematics.

None of that was to the liking of the local school district that refused to accept BR studies and wanted to force her to return to traditional school and to begin therapy sessions for having studied alone. But it all ended in a good way when a local court ruled against the measures of the school district.

The judges forced the local district to accept BR's studies and argued that the girl, although she sought a “heterodox educational solution” to her desire to study, had to do so because that was the only way in which “she could exercise her right to educate herself ”, something that “the inefficiency of the educational system” didn’t offer her.

There are already hundreds of thousands of and perhaps millions of young people like BR who, tired of their dying education, create their own solutions without waiting for adults to act. To those adults who still confuse education with straitjackets, young people respond as Greta recently did: How do you dare!

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