Thinking 25 years into the future

There is one scenario from the Facer & Sandford (2010) reading that I think is viable: the world of trusting yourself where people would be highly responsible for their personal behaviors and actions. And in that kind of environment, I especially favor the education system called ‘informed choice’. Nowadays, we can already see that lots of fields besides education are more personalized and diversified than before, such as our dressing styles and the user settings of social media applications. It is very natural and almost unstoppable for the general public to want to think and act in a more self-reflective manner instead of merely following the lead of an old-fashioned educational mechanism. And I believe, in order to bring out the best in people, there should be more space as well as more well-designed sources of information created for personal choice. It is not enough just to learn something based on the guidelines given by the education department of a government or the conventional notions delivered by a certain society. We are the individuals who actually perform the process of thinking and acting and we are the ones who live our own lives. Social norms and experience from the past do matter. But they should not be the dominant factor dictating our life of learning and growing.

In addition to the scenario that has been discussed in the last paragraph, I also have my own predictions to share. First, I would imagine in the year 2042, the morality education would be penetrated in a way that is closely related to virtual reality. In today’s society, the education regarding moral values seems to be too intangible to implement to a large extent and may be even underestimated to some degree. The only way right now to deliver such education is to lecture, whether through verbal emphasis on the theoretical significance or relevant stories printed on textbooks or embedded in videos. But that is not enough. Personally, I think the best those present specific methods could do is to focus on sympathy while the true pathway to morality should also include empathy so that compassion could be achieved and the harmony of a society could be enhanced. Virtual reality could really help in this process because it would give people a chance to experience struggles, both physically and emotionally, others have been going through in a first-person position by using physical devices and advanced technology to construct a certain environment or experience. Virtues could be better cultivated in this way. For example, those who are arrogant and aggressive in a group discussion will learn to step down at some point after experiencing the introverted group members’ situations. Moreover, ideally, bullies will learn to respect and care about others after they see the world through the lens of a victim.   

Secondly, I also want to predict that personality types would be taken into consideration during both formal and informal educational scenarios with the help of technology. A certain piece of knowledge itself may mean different things to different people with different personality types, which would exert great impact on their motivation and even ability for learning such knowledge. For example, a person would take more initiative to learn about chemistry if he or she is introduced to that discipline in a way that is highly related to the humanities such as solving pollution problems. In this regard, technology in general could help scientists better observe, analyze and determine personality types by letting them productively evaluate subtle biological reactions through all kinds of digital devices and algorithms. In school settings, learners would be assessed in terms of their personality types via technology every semester for the sake of accuracy. Then the electronic textbooks and software applications used in schools and universities would cater to the needs of different personality types. In other words, the main content of a certain week’s readings and discussions of a course remain the same for everybody, but the way learners begin to engage in such content is different due to the different structures of that content. The principle applies to the informal learning as well when there is a portable digital device for assessing one’s personality type at home. People would learn the same topic informally online also in a different manner. And it is different not only in an internal way, but external as well. It will relate to all kinds of senses, especially the sense of sight, smell and hearing, in order to help create a learning environment one finds the most encouraging and inspiring.