Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives. Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils “to think for themselves”. In truth, this has been the ideal of western liberal education for centuries, but up till now even many western schools have been rather slack in fulfilling it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world. In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. Besides, countless other things are just a click away, making it difficult to focus, and when politics or science look too complicated it is tempting to switch to funny cat videos, celebrity gossip or porn. People all over the world are but a click away from the latest accounts of the bombardment of Aleppo or of melting ice caps in the Arctic, but there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe. On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to inundate the public with conflicting reports and red herrings. No government can hope to conceal all the information it doesn’t like.
If you live in some provincial Mexican town and you have a smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED talks, and taking free online courses. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies. In contrast, in the 21st century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal. Of course, humans have never been able to predict the future with accuracy. Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the 22nd century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them and navigate the maze of life? If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the 22nd century. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. In this exclusive extract from his new book, the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind. Forget programming - the best skill to teach children is reinvention.
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