Andreas Schleicher
We used to learn to do our work – now learning is the work Globalisation, digitalisation, and education have connected people, cities, countries, and continents in ways that vastly increase our individual and collective potential. But the same forces have also made the world more volatile, more complex, more uncertain, and more ambiguous. The world has seen a growing disconnect between the infinite growth imperative and the finite resources of our planet; between the financial economy and the real economy; between the wealthy and the poor; between the concept of our gross domestic product and the well-being of people; between what is technologically possible and the social needs of people; and between governance and the perceived voicelessness of many.
No one should hold education responsible for all of this, but neither should we underestimate the role that the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values of people play in social and economic development and in shaping our cultural context. Education is not just responding to societal change; it can help steer society toward a different future.
The Convention on Education lays out important dimensions for what success in education means in current times, looking both at educational outcomes and how these are distributed across social groups. Those dimensions mirror the expectations of many countries that schools need to enable the next generation to design new societal, economic, and organisational models for a century of unprecedented challenge; to foster human growth through the right mix of cognitive, caring, and creative abilities; and to help young people find purpose, meaning, and hope in situations of uncertainty. In the past, we could assume that what we learned in school would last for a lifetime. Therefore, teaching subject-matter content knowledge and routine cognitive skills were rightly at the center of education. Today, when we can access content via artificial intelligence-based engines, and when routine cognitive tasks are being digitised and outsourced, our focus must shift. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s startups. They will not learn for jobs but need to learn to create jobs; they need to learn to fail constructively Reimagining Education for the Age of Accelerations and to see failure as an opportunity for growth.
The most obvious implication of a world that requires constant adaptation and growth from learners is the need to build the capacity and motivation for lifelong learning. We should not teach students things that they can learn by themselves. Student agency, the mastery of effective learning strategies, and an identity as lifelong learners must therefore form the core of 21st-century education. Agency relates to the capacity to find one’s purpose, identify one’s intent, and translate them into meaningful action. This is not simply about getting things done; it is about doing so with direction and intent. Students can develop important enablers to act effectively, such as adaptive problem solving, which allows them to navigate uncertainty and complexity, and ethical competence, which ensures their choices are guided by values and a sense of responsibility.
Agency and effective learning rely on students being engaged and intrinsically motivated, which in turn relies on understanding the purpose of learning objectives, on being part of the design of learning environments; on mastery, the desire to get better and better at what we do; on relatedness, our desire to feel valued and supported; and on autonomy, our ability to deploy a range of learning strategies in self-directed ways.
These days, it is easy to see AI as a rising tide that steadily erodes human agency. If machines can draft our memos, diagnose our illnesses, compose our music, even tutor our children, what exactly is left for us? Are we destined for a slow surrender – ceding one task after another to ever-smarter algorithms? But at our best, we are not a bundle of discrete tasks waiting to be automated. We are meaning-makers, pattern-seekers, moral agents. We don’t just execute; we interpret. We don’t just calculate; we imagine. We don’t just respond to the world; we reshape it.
The rise of AI should not shrink that space – it should illuminate it. If machines increasingly master the routine, then education must double down on the irreducibly human: on our ability to think about our own thinking, to zoom out and see the system behind the symptom, to build and navigate complex relationships, to make ethical judgments when the data runs out, to create what has never existed before. Those are not soft skills. They are survival skills for the 21st century, and they are the load-bearing pillars of open societies. They are what allow democracies to deliberate, economies to innovate, and communities to hold together when the ground shifts beneath them.
If education fails to defend and cultivate those capacities with clarity and courage, AI won’t just automate our tasks. It could quietly erode the foundations of our civic life.
Educating students for their future – not our past
The dilemma for both policy-makers and educators is that the kind of things that are easy to teach have also become easy to digitise and automate. Of course, state-of-the-art knowledge will always remain important. Innovative or creative people generally have specialised knowledge in a field. As important as it is to learn how to learn, we always learn by learning something. But success in education is no longer mainly about reproducing content knowledge; it is about extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge creatively in novel situations. The more rapidly content knowledge in a subject evolves, the more important it is for students to understand the structural and conceptual foundations of a discipline (‘know how’), rather than just master content with a limited shelf life (‘know that’). For example, content knowledge in science will always remain important, but what matters even more is students’ capacity to think like a scientist. Can they design an experiment rather than just remember the results of that experiment? Can they distinguish questions that are scientifically investigable from those that are not? Can they make well-founded judgements that are grounded in sound science? Or take history: knowledge of dates, names and places will provide broad orientation, but the key will be students’ capacity to think like an historian. Do they understand how the narrative of a society has emerged, how it advanced, and sometimes how it unraveled when the context changed? The past was about teaching students answers, the future requires motivating them to ask the right questions, to advance from problem-solvers to become problem-finders, to attend to purpose rather than just complete tasks, and to embrace the new and uncertain rather than sticking to known plans. Education in the future will be iterating to better questions, putting into question what we took for granted. If students feel that questions lead to trouble rather than to answers, then something fundamentally is wrong with education.
Even in foundation skills like literacy, things have changed. In the twentieth century, literacy was about extracting and processing pre-coded information; in the twenty-first century, it is about constructing and validating knowledge. In the past, teachers could tell students to look up information in an encyclopedia and to rely on that information as accurate and true. Nowadays, search engines present them with millions of answers, and nobody tells them what is right or wrong and true or not true. The more knowledge technology allows us to search and access, the more important becomes deep understanding and the capacity to navigate ambiguity, to triangulate viewpoints, to make sense out of content, and to make well-founded ethical judgements. AI chatbots take this one step further; they present us with a single answer cooked up from what other people have written about our question. Without the deliberate development of advanced thinking skills and ethical judgement, our capacity to think creatively and critically and to triangulate knowledge will atrophy, like our sense of orientation did with the introduction of Google Maps. Too often, we surrender autonomy for the comfort of convenience. When convenience becomes the default, agency becomes optional. Education is our strongest safeguard against that drift.
The fact that advancements in literacy skills have fallen sharply behind the evolution of the nature of information has profound consequences in a world where virality seems sometimes privileged over quality in the distribution of information. In the ‘post-truth’ climate in which we now find ourselves, assertions that ‘feel right’ but have no basis in fact become accepted as fact. Algorithms that sort us into groups of like-minded individuals create social media echo chambers that amplify our views and leave us insulated from opposing arguments that may alter our beliefs. These virtual bubbles homogenise opinions and polarise our societies; and they can have a significant – and adverse – impact on democratic processes. Those algorithms do not reveal a design flaw; they are how social media work. There is scarcity of attention, but an abundance of information. We are living in this digital bazaar where anything that is not build for the network age is cracking apart under its pressure.
Learning to live and work together
Socio-cognitive, meta-cognitive, and socio-emotional skills, in turn, intersect with pluralistic societies in important ways. They can help students live and work in a world in which most people need to appreciate a range of ideas and perspectives, and collaborate with people of different cultural origins, often bridging space and time through technology; and a world in which their lives will be affected by issues that transcend national boundaries. Effective communication and appropriate behavior within diverse teams are also keys to success in many jobs and will remain so as technology continues to make it easier for people to connect across the globe.
In an economy increasingly driven by ideas, collaboration across difference is not a soft skill. It is a core competency. Employers seek graduates who can navigate diverse teams, listen actively, and co-create solutions; learners who easily adapt and are able to apply and transfer their skills and knowledge to new contexts. Work-readiness in an interconnected world requires young people to understand the complex dynamics of globalisation and be open to people from different cultural backgrounds. In democracy, these capabilities are essential to building the social contract. When citizens lose trust in those who have different viewpoints, polarisation festers, and the democratic fabric begins to fray.
Engaging with different perspectives and world views requires individuals to examine the origins and implications of others’ and their own assumptions. This, in turn, implies a profound respect for and interest in who the other is, their concept of reality and their perspectives. The ability to see through multiple lenses provides opportunities to deepen and question one’s own perspectives and to make more mature decisions. So, schools need to become better at helping students learn to develop an awareness of the pluralism of modern life, to help them learn to be autonomous in their thinking while developing an identity that is aware of the pluralism of modern living. At work, at home, and in the community, people will need a broad understanding of how others live, in diverse cultures and traditions, and how others think, whether as scientists or as artists.
The foundations for this do not all come naturally. As human beings, we are born with what sociologists call ‘bonding social capital’ – a deep, instinctive sense of connection with those closest to us: our families, our cultural or ethnic group, our community of origin. This form of social capital is powerful. It offers security, identity, and belonging. But it also has limits. It connects us inward, not outward. It builds loyalty but can also build walls. In these times, our economies and societies need more ‘bridging social capital’: the capacity to build trust and collaboration across lines of difference, whether cultural, socioeconomic, linguistic, or ideological. This is not something that happens automatically. It must be cultivated. It requires deliberate, continuous investment in the conditions that allow people from different backgrounds to come together, engage meaningfully, and expand their ‘radius of trust’ beyond the familiar. And schools are one of the most powerful platforms we have to make this happen. When designed with intention, schools are more than places of academic instruction. They are civic spaces – social microcosms where students encounter people unlike themselves and engage with ideas they may never encounter at home. Schools that create opportunities for students to work together across differences – on projects, debates, artistic performances, service learning, or collaborative problem-solving – not only foster academic growth but also help build the habits of empathy, perspective-taking, and mutual respect. This is not just about harmony – it is about building a generation fluent in co-operation, not just co-existence.
That brings us to the toughest challenge in modern education: how to incorporate values into education that provide orientation and foster identity in this fast-changing world. Values have always been central to education, but it is time that they move from implicit aspirations to explicit education goals and practices in ways that help communities shift from situational values – meaning ‘I do whatever a situation allows me to do’ – to sustainable values that generate trust, social bonds, and hope and that help students learn to reconcile present with future needs. If society doesn’t build a solid floor under people, many will try to build walls, no matter how self-defeating that would be.
Finally, the school’s transformative power upholds hope. Hope does not mean passively waiting for something good to happen; it means understanding one’s capacity to act for a better future together with others. Schools can teach students to imagine better futures and strengthen trust in humanity’s ability to solve even the most difficult challenges.
Reimagining how and where learning happens
The challenge is that developing such capabilities requires deep transformations in how and where learning happens.
Declining student engagement and participation in school may be as much a function of the declining relevance of schooling for youths than a matter of access and opportunity. When students disengage, it may be less about getting them through the school doors and more about making what happens inside those doors matter. The fact that over a third of fifteen-year-olds in OECD countries considered school a waste of time illustrates this problem.
If we were running a supermarket instead of a school, and more than a third of our customers walked out every single day without buying a thing, we wouldn’t hold a committee meeting about customer resilience. We wouldn’t blame the shoppers for lacking grit. We would change the inventory. We would redesign the layout and customer experience. And we would adapt, fast. That needs to happen in education too. There often remains a yawning gap between how schools are organised and how young people learn.
Instruction in the past was subject-based; instruction in the future needs to be more project-based, building experiences that help students think across the boundaries of subject-matter disciplines without sacrificing deep understanding of the ideas and ways of thinking of the disciplines. The knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that students need in the twenty-first century cannot be learned from books alone but must be developed through practice, coaching, and real-world experience.
The goals of the past were standardisation and compliance, with students following the same standard curriculum, all assessed at the same time. The future is about building instruction from students’ passions and capacities, helping students personalise their learning in ways that foster engagement and talent. In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. Now school systems need to embrace differences in student learning, and AI can enable the differentiated approaches that students need at scale.
The conventional approach in school was often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to train students how to solve these bits and pieces. But modern societies create value by integrating different experiences, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, connecting the dots where the next innovation will come from.
The past was divided – with teachers and content divided by subjects and students separated by expectations of their future career prospects; with schools designed to keep students inside, and the rest of the world outside; with a lack of engagement with families and a reluctance to partner with other learning environments. The future needs to be more integrated – with an emphasis on the interrelation of subjects and the integration of students.
The future also needs to be more connected, so that learning is closely related to real-world contexts and contemporary issues and open to the rich resources in the community. Learning is not a place but an activity, and school should not be the world of children, but the world should be their school. Schools need to open themselves to the surrounding society and neighbourhoods. Co-operation with other actors – public services, communities, businesses, and citizens supporting the school – needs to deepen. That will provide schools with stronger support from outside while providing students with more meaningful experiences of learning, belonging, and success.
Modern learning environments are constantly creating synergies and finding new ways to enhance professional, social, and cultural capital with others. They do that with families and communities, with higher education, with businesses, and especially with other schools and learning environments. This is about creating innovative partnerships. Isolation in a world of complex learning systems will seriously limit potential. Applied learning and vocational education should no longer be last resorts for students but become first choices for them.
Tomorrow’s students will need to connect the dots where the next big idea and innovation will come from. The past was hierarchical; the future is collaborative, recognising both teachers and students as resources and co-creators. In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and, at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements. Students spend most of the time in school sitting behind individual desks with limited time for collaborative learning. The more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators. Innovation is now rarely the product of individuals working in isolation but rather an outcome of how we mobilise, share, and integrate knowledge.
This also implies a different role for schools, seeing them as a community oriented towards the common good, taking a deliberate stand against societal trends that weaken community, and fostering participation. Community does not require sameness; it makes room for diverse ways of thinking and differing opinions. A sense of belonging strengthens societal trust and the ability to face uncertain futures collectively.
In the past, schools were technological islands, with technology often limited to supporting and conserving existing practices, and students outpacing schools in their adoption of technology. Now schools need to use the potential of technologies to liberate learning from past conventions and connect learners in new and powerful ways, with sources of knowledge, with innovative applications, and with one another.
Unlocking the conditions for systemic change
Where teaching is about imparting prefabricated knowledge, countries can afford low teacher quality. And when teacher quality is low, governments tend to tell their teachers exactly what to do and exactly how they want it done, using an industrial organisation of work to get the results they want. Today the challenge is to make teaching a profession of advanced knowledge workers who work with a high level of professional autonomy and within a collaborative evidence-centered culture, collectively owning their professional standards and ethic.
But such people will not work as exchangeable widgets in schools organised as Taylorist workplaces that rely mainly on administrative forms of accountability and bureaucratic command-and-control systems to direct their work. To attract the people they need, modern school systems need to transform the type of work organisation in their schools to one in which professional norms of control replace bureaucratic and administrative forms of control. The past was about received wisdom; the future is about user-generated wisdom.
Public education was invented in the industrial age, when the prevailing norms were standardisation and compliance, and when it was both effective and efficient to educate students in batches and to train teachers once for their working lives. The curricula that spelled out what students should learn were designed at the top of the pyramid, then translated into instructional material, teacher education, and learning environments, often through multiple layers of government, until they reached and were implemented by individual teachers in the classroom.
This structure, inherited from the industrial model of work, makes change a very slow process and will not allow closing the widening gap between how schools are organised and how young people learn. Even the most agile countries revise their curriculum only every six to seven years. But the rapid pace of change in most other domains makes that response far too slow. In short, the changes in societies have vastly outpaced the structural capacity of current education systems to respond. And when fast gets really fast, being slower to adapt makes education systems seem glacial and disconnected. Top-down governance through layers of administrative structures is no longer sufficient. There are too many brilliant, dedicated people who commit their lives to the ideal of serving the nation who are trapped in systems that prioritise safety over courage and process over public value.
This shift requires a coordinated approach to transforming purpose, power, relationships, and resource flows in our education systems. It requires shifting from looking upwards in the bureaucracy towards looking outwards to the next teacher, the next school, and the next education system.
Measuring what we treasure
None of these changes will happen without changes in the culture of assessment, what we cannot see is hard to change. What we measure is where we place our attention, where we place our attention is where we will form our intention, and where our intention is is where we will act.
Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we have made in the history of education was to divorce learning from assessment. For most of human history, learning and assessment were inseparable. In ancient times, education was not a process of sitting in classrooms and later being tested. It was woven into the fabric of daily life. Skills were acquired through apprenticeship, by working alongside a master and observing, imitating, and gradually perfecting the craft. Assessment was not an event; it was a constant dialogue. When the apprentice made a mistake, the master would be there – sometimes literally with a hand on the shoulder – to point out the error, explain why it mattered, and guide the correction. This feedback was immediate, personal, and specific to the task at hand. The learning loop was short: mistakes were addressed in the moment and improvement happened in real time.
Contrast this with much of modern schooling, where assessment often comes weeks or months after the learning moment, in the form of an abstract grade on a test. By then, the context is gone, the opportunity to correct misconceptions has passed, and the feedback is reduced to a number or letter with little guidance for improvement.
The apprenticeship model reminds us that assessment at its best is not a separate stage of education but an integral part of the learning process. Technology can make that happen. AI now allows us to reintegrate learning and assessment in ways that measure what we treasure rather than treasure what is easily measurable. It can make assessment feedback-rich, continuous, and deeply embedded in learning. It can yield powerful real-time learning analytics that will help students to learn better, teachers teach better, and education systems become more effective.
In the world of ancient apprenticeships, the tap on the shoulder was a moment of human connection and guidance. In today’s classrooms, we need to recreate that spirit – ensuring that assessment is not a gatekeeper at the end of the journey but a trusted guide along the way.
Andreas Schleicher is Director for Education and Skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He initiated and
Andreas Schleicher oversees the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and created a global platform to innovate and transform education and skills policies. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, and he holds honorary professorships in Germany and Ukraine.
