Fernando Alcoforado*
- Introduction
Education has always been seen as one of the major economic and social development factors of a nation. Education operated as one of the main levers of Japan’s development in the 1970s, South Korea in the 1980s and China from the 1990s, just as it contributed to the economic and social progress of the Scandinavian countries ( Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland) after World War II. Education has also always been seen as the guarantee of obtaining a well-paid job, of social ascension to the lower classes of the population and reduction of social inequalities. Better wages have always been related to the skill of the worker that would be obtained with the qualified education.
Conventional education currently offered to workers and students who are preparing to enter the labor market is ineffective. In other words, Brazil’s education system is preparing workers for a world of work that will cease to exist. There is every reason to believe that robots should be widely used in general productive activity, that is, in agriculture, industry, commerce, and services, which makes it imperative to prepare human beings to deal with these intelligent machines in the market of work.
In 2013, researchers at Oxford University published a detailed study of the impact of computing on employment in the United States, considering recent advances in machine learning and mobile robots. They analyzed each of the professional categories cataloged by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics based on a database of skills required to perform those jobs. The researchers concluded that 47% of current jobs are under high risk of automation in the coming years and decades and another 19% under average risk. They consider that only a third of current workers are saved from replacement in the next one or two decades by smart robots. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that education to be provided to workers in general should contribute to enabling them to deal with intelligent machines.
We live in an age defined by the fundamental change between workers and machines and that this change is causing the machines to contribute to increase the productivity of the workers, besides being also transforming into workers in replacing the human beings. According to Martin Ford, all this change results from the relentless acceleration of computer technology. Moore’s Law that the capacity of computers doubles every 18 or 24 months has been maintained to the present moment. Moore’s Law emerged in 1965 through a concept established by Gordon Earl Moore. Such a law said that the computing power of computers would double every 18 or 24 months. There is no way to say that this law will perpetuate itself for much longer, but so far it has been valid (Ford, Martin, Rise of the Robots, New York: Basic Books, 2015).
The education system aims to prepare people, not only for the job market, but also for life. Contemporary education needs to provide the conditions for students to acquire the knowledge they need to think and build a better world. Students need to be made aware of what is happening in the fields of economics, science and technology, the environment and international relations, among others. There is enormous disinformation that reaches the overwhelming majority of students in Brazil, causing them to be unable to correctly interpret the reality in which they live, much less transform it. The present educational system contributes enormously to the alienation of human beings because education is not thought of as cultivation of the spirit as a condition for the advancement of humanity. This is what should be true sense education.
For the education system to prepare people for life, the guidelines proposed by Edgar Morin in his book The seven knowledge needed to education of the future should be adopted, which indicates the need for a transdisciplinary effort that is capable of rejoining the sciences and the humanities and to break with the opposition between nature and culture which, he argues, is a challenge for all those who are committed to rethinking the course of educational institutions and do not want to succumb to the inertia of fragmentation and excessive separation in disciplines characteristics of the contemporary era. Morin defends the thesis that we need to re – learn to rejoin the part and the whole, the text and the context, the global and the planetary, and face the paradoxes that the technical and economic development brought with it [MORIN. Edgar. Os sete saberes necessários a educação do futuro (The seven knowledge needed to education of the future). São Paulo: Editora Cortez, 2011]. Considering that the world will very soon be quite different from what it is today, it is necessary to carry out a revolution in the education system to meet the needs not only of the present but above all of the future.
Brazilian education is going through an unprecedented crisis. This crisis results, on the one hand, from the lack of an efficient and effective education system and, on the other, from the lack of government policies that contribute to overcoming the current problems of education and their adaptation to the ongoing technological changes that impact on the world of work and society in general. The fact that Brazil’s education system is inefficient and ineffective prevents it from functioning as a factor of economic and social development and contributes to the social ascent of the lower classes of the population. The lack of a new education policy adjusted to the current technological changes prevents Brazil from increasing the productivity of its workers and jeopardizing their future economic and social development. These are the reasons why it is imperative to implement a new education system in Brazil.
- Evaluation of Brazil’s current education system
The inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current education system are demonstrated by the mediocre performance of Brazilian students in the PISA (International Student Assessment Program) examinations that measure the knowledge and ability in reading, mathematics and science of students aged 15 years of age in countries industrialized members of the OECD as well as partner countries and by the unsatisfactory performance of Brazilian universities in the ranking of universities in the world as measured by THE (Times Higher Education), which evaluates the performance of university students and academic production in the areas of engineering and technology, arts and humanities, life sciences, health, physics and social sciences and also considers research, transfer of knowledge and international perspective, as well as the teaching environment.
The Pisa of 2015 evaluated 15- and 16-year-olds in 70 countries and territories in mathematics, reading and science. The general average leaves Brazil in the last position: it is in 63rd position in mathematics, 58th in reading and 65th in science. The Brazilian universities are also poorly evaluated in the international university ranking of THE, the main one of the present time. The main University of Brazil, USP is between 251 and 300, and the second largest Brazilian university, Unicamp, is located between 401 and 500 in 2018. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( Unesco) presented the Education Development Index of 128 countries. Brazil appears in the uncomfortable 88th position, near Honduras (87th), Ecuador (81st) and Bolivia (79th) and away from our neighbors Argentina (38th), Uruguay (39th) and Chile (51st).
Brazil is in the last position when the subject is the amount invested annually per student. In 2012, US$ 3,441 per student of the Brazilian public network, from basic to higher education, was invested, an amount that corresponds to 37% of the average of the 34 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is US$ 9,317. At the top of the list are Luxembourg (US$ 21,998) and Switzerland (US$ 15,859). Behind Brazil, only Mexico (US$ 3,233), Turkey (US$ 3,072), Colombia (US$ 2,898) and Indonesia (US$ 1,809). According to international research, the amount spent per student in Brazil is the 2nd lowest among all countries mapped.
The fact that the Brazilian government allocates more public money in universities than in primary and secondary education is a distortion that tends to reinforce the weaknesses of basic education. Still in the allocation of resources, the funds allocated to secondary education exceed those of elementary education and the effects of this appear in IBGE figures. While the school population aged 10 years or older is 94.6%, or almost universal, the number of people out of school between 4 and 7 years is large (- 31%), or 4.1 million people.
Brazilian higher education receives 3.4 times more resources than the initial years of elementary education in Brazil. On the OECD average, this investment is 1.8 times higher. The Federal Government is a federated entity that participates little in the investment in education in Brazil. According to INEP, in 2012, each R$ 1 invested in education, municipalities put R$ 0.42, the States spent R$ 0.40 and the Union invested only R$ 0.18. The federal government invests little in education because 45% of the Union’s budget is committed to paying interest and amortization of public debt.
The weaknesses of higher education in Brazil happen, among other factors, due to weaknesses in elementary and middle school that does not prepare students with sufficient qualification to attend university courses. This is the main reason why there is great student evasion in several courses offered by the Brazilian University. In engineering education in Brazil, for example, of the 150 thousand students admitted to the entrance exams, only 32 thousand are graduates. In addition to dealing with unprepared students from high school, the public university deals with the lack of resources that limits its performance and, above all, due to the lack of a consistent national education plan.
Making analogy of higher education with the construction of a building and basic education with the foundation of the building, it can be said that the building will only be able to reach higher heights if it has a strong foundation to support it, while higher education will only be greatly developed if basic education is well structured and supports it. To construct a building, we must first lay the foundation. For the student to succeed in higher education, he must have a basic education of quality.
The catastrophic situation of the education system in Brazil demonstrated by PISA, THE, UNESCO and OECD data and the ongoing technological changes that impact on the world of work and society in general are demanding that it be carried out a true revolution in education in Brazil. The great challenge of education in Brazil is represented not only by the deficiency of the current system, but above all by the rapid changes that are occurring in the world of work thanks to the technological advance, mainly due to the impact of artificial intelligence, which is intelligence similar to the human displayed by mechanisms or software. Experts believe that the intelligence of machines will match that of humans by 2050, thanks to a new era in their ability to learn. This means that we are creating machines that can teach themselves and also communicate by simulating human speech.
- Bases of the new education system to be implemented in Brazil
Considering that one of the objectives of a country’s education system is to plan the preparation and recycling of people for the labor market, it is up to the planners of Brazil’s education system to identify the role of human beings in the world of work in a future with intelligent machines to bring about a broad revolution in teaching at all levels, including the qualification of teachers and the structuring of teaching units to prepare their students for a world of work where people will have to deal with intelligent machines. The educational programs of educational units at all levels should be deeply restructured to achieve these goals.
In order to implement a new education system aimed at preparing human beings for the future labor market, it is imperative that we begin to identify the human skills necessary for 21st century work and to restructure Brazil’s educational system that is obsolete for to train citizens better equipped for a reality that is different from the industrial era that is coming to an end and still prevails at the moment.
As in the best education systems in the world, the Brazilian government should prioritize basic education, and only when it becomes universal should it allocate resources to higher education. It should be noted that the pillar that supports education concerns the selection and training of highly qualified teachers, with professional recognition and good working conditions, as in the best education systems in the world. In Finland, for example, where the best education in the world is practiced, the teaching career attracts the student elite. The best students saw teachers in Finland. Meanwhile, in Brazil, there is a “blackout of teachers”, with fewer and fewer students seeking undergraduate courses. As a result, Brazil has been less and less educated. Achieving quality in education is not an easy task. It requires time and integrated actions, from teacher training to infrastructure, from salary to school management.
Murilo Gun, a lecturer who graduated from Singularity University and a professor of creativity, listed four skills that will be essential in an exponential growth future with disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence: 1) Interpersonal Intelligence- the ability to relate to other people, the ability to create empathy, which is related to leadership capacity; 2) Intrapersonal intelligence – the ability to relate to oneself, emphasizing self-knowledge, self-control and mastery of emotions; 3) Artificial Intelligence – ability to understand the impact of technology, such as Artificial Intelligence and robotics, and use these resources as tools to expand human potential; and, 4) Creative intelligence – the main differential between human and artificial intelligence, that is, developing the capacity to create something new, using the other intelligences and applying them in an innovative way [SAP. As habilidades do futuro em um mundo com Inteligência Artificial (Skills of the future in a world with Artificial Intelligence). Available on the website <http://news.sap.com/brazil/2017/01/25/as-habilidades-do-futuro-em-um-mundo-com-inteligencia-artificial/>, 2017].
Countries such as Switzerland and Finland have already begun to actively consider this new reality and have started a process of adapting their societies – which began by reformulating their educational systems, favoring the development of the ability to metacognition (human capacity to monitor and self-regulate cognitive processes, ie the human being’s ability to be aware of his actions and thoughts), language proficiency (especially in English, because most human knowledge is registered in this language) and a curriculum based on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) associated with the Greek “method” of “liberal art” because it is understood to be an efficient way of adapting the way of thinking to a mentality more directed to the creation of intellectual property, in which the connection of knowledge – more comprehensively – and the imagination – to act creatively in society and generate innovation [TIBAU, Marcelo. A Inteligência Artificial e o mercado de trabalho (Artificial Intelligence and the labor Market). Available on the website <http://www.updateordie.com/2016/10/08/inteligencia-artificial-e-o-mercado-de-trabalho/>, 2016].
Article published on the Blog CONQUER – a nova escola (CONQUER Blog – the new school) under the title 6 tendências para o futuro da educação (6 trends for the future of education), available on the website <http://escolaconquer.com.br/6-tendencias-para-o-futuro-da-educacao/>, informs that the education system must follow the changes in the world. The 6 trends of the education system of the future are as follows:
- Classrooms– Instead of being intended for theory, the rooms will have the purpose of practice. The student learns theory at home and practices in classrooms with the help of a teacher / mentor.
- Personalized learning – Students will learn with tools that adapt to their own abilities, being able to learn in different time and places. This means that above-average students will be challenged with more difficult exercises and those with more difficulty will have the opportunity to practice more until they reach the desired level. This process will make teachers more able to see clearly what kind of help each student needs.
- Free choice – Students will have the freedom to modify their learning process, choosing the subjects they wish to learn based on their own preferences and may use different devices, programs and techniques that they deem necessary for their own learning.
- Practical applicability– Knowledge will not only be in theory, it will be put into practice through projects so that students acquire the mastery of technique and also practice organization, teamwork and leadership.
- QE> IQ (emotional quotient> intelligence quotient) – Since technology brings more efficiency and is increasingly replacing human work in several areas, training should include the presence of essentially human skills and value social interactions. Schools should provide more opportunities for students to acquire real world skills that will make a difference in their work. That means more space for work programs, more collaborative projects, more practice.
- The evaluation system will change – Many argue that how the quiz system is not effective because many students just decorate the contents and forget them the day after the evaluation. Moreover, this system does not adequately assess what the student is actually able to do with that content in practice. Therefore, the tendency is that the evaluations happen to occur in the realization of real projects, with the students putting their hand in the mass.
In the text Education of the Future, available on the website <https://www.goconqr.com/pt-BR/examtime/blog/educacao-futuro/>, an interview was presented by José Moran, researcher and adviser of Innovative Educational Projects with active methodologies in face-to-face and online courses and author of the book “A educação que desejamos: novos desafios e como chegar lá” (The education we want: new challenges and how to get there). The main aspects considered by him are as follows:
- A single model, proposed, path to education should not be adopted. Working with challenges, with real projects, with games seems the most important path today, but it can be done in many ways and in different contexts. We can teach for problems and projects in a model with isolated disciplines and models with a transdisciplinary approach; with more open models – of more participatory and procedural construction – and with more scripted models, previously prepared, planned in the smallest details.
- Some components are fundamental to learning success: the creation of challenges, activities, games that actually bring the necessary skills to each stage, which solicit pertinent information that offer stimulating rewards that combine personal pathways with meaningful participation in groups, which are embedded in adaptive platforms that recognize each student and at the same time learn through interaction, all using the right technologies. The articulator of the individual and group stages is the teacher, with his ability to monitor, mediate, analyze the processes, results, gaps and needs, based on the individual and group courses. This new role of the teacher is more complex than the previous one of transmitting information. It needs a preparation in broader skills, beyond the knowledge of the content, how to adapt to the group and each student; plan, monitor and evaluate meaningful and different activities.
- Teaching and learning can be done in a much more flexible, active and focused way in each student’s rhythm. The most interesting and promising model of use of technologies is to concentrate on the virtual environment what is basic information and in the classroom the most creative and supervised activities. The combination of learning by challenges, real problems, games is very important for students to learn by doing, to learn together and to learn at their own pace as well. And it is decisive also to value more the role of the teacher as manager of processes rich in meaningful learning and not that of a simple information transfer. If we change the mindset of teachers to be mediators, they can use the near resources, simple technologies such as those on the cell phone, a camera to illustrate, a free program to gather images and have interesting stories, and students to be authors, the protagonists of their learning process.
- The challenges of changing education are structural. There is a need to increase the number of quality schools, schools with good managers, teachers and infrastructure that can motivate students and really promote meaningful, complex and comprehensive learning. There needs to be a career plan, training and valuation of educational managers and teachers. Consistent training policies are needed to attract the best teachers, reward them well and qualify them better, innovative management policies that lead to successful management models for basic and higher education.
- Educators need to learn to be people and professionals in difficult and precarious contexts, to learn to evolve in all fields, to be more affective, and at the same time to know how to manage groups. They must become inspiring and motivational educators.
To make a revolution in Brazil’s education system, it is necessary to prepare the teacher to fulfill a new role. The role of the teacher is decisive so that through education a new type of man qualified for the world of work is created and conscious and well prepared to transform the world in which we live for his benefit. The role of the teacher should be that of a manager of processes rich in meaningful learning and not that of simply sending information in the classroom. We should be inspired by the educational policies practiced in Japan, Finland, South Korea and Switzerland, which are the most advanced countries in education in the world in order to restructure Brazil’s education system from pre-school to higher education.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 79, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is the author of 14 books addressing issues such as Globalization and Development, Brazilian Economy, Global Warming and Climate Change, The Factors that Condition Economic and Social Development, Energy in the world and The Great Scientific, Economic, and Social Revolutions that Changed the World.
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