By Dita De Boni
It's no wonder parents go into future shock when they hear Australian Michael Demkiw say that in the next five to 10 years, 85 per cent of students will be going into jobs that have not yet been created.
Mr Demkiw - financial adviser, diagnostician, analyst, risk manager, IT consultant and self-proclaimed futurist - says educators should be dealing less in "bureaucratic" instruction and more in the business of business.
In his 20 years of motivating corporates and almost 30 seeing his six offspring through the education system, Mr Demkiw has become convinced that education must both teach entrepreneurial skills and be entrepreneurial itself.
The former financial planner was brought to Auckland from Brisbane last week by Toshiba to convince a collection of New Zealand teachers that implementing IT in schools was not just about hard and software, but also about understanding how best to tailor students' psyches for the digital-age workplace.
"The problem, in terms of what skills are being taught, is that students are currently being held to ransom by the educational bureaucracy," he says.
"The role of the educator should be to demonstrate what is possible, to teach students to think outside the square, and to not promise jobs that we don't know will exist by the time they graduate."
Mr Demkiw's enthusiasm for a paradigm shift is timely for New Zealand education, under siege from IT lobbyists and industry malcontents accusing the system of turning out the wrong proportion of students in the wrong subjects.
Mr Demkiw says the key to encouraging enterprise in young minds, regardless of subject, is to phase back the "three Rs" of traditional education and place more emphasis on the "three As" - access to, acquisition and application of information.
"Teachers will have to put more emphasis on imagination and creativity over rote learning," he says.
"The microchip disintegrates all human work except creativity and relationships, which means an instruction-based approach will have to be replaced by an imagination-based approach."
Mr Demkiw says his research shows the four biggest growth areas for employment in the future will be genetic engineering and biotechnology, artificial intelligence, the business of space, and new applications for materials like plastics and fibres.
He says that as innovation is cheaper than competition, business and schools must work together to develop critical thought capacities from a very young age in pupils.
"Not only do schools have to have the tools to attract students into the business of learning, business itself has to be responsible for the infrastructure and capital requirements of their future workers in schools."
If technology is the medium for releasing the entrepreneurial potential of students, what subject matter will replace arithmetic on chalky boards and history from weighty tomes?
Mr Demkiw says along with the use of technology and the space to be creative, young people these days need to learn more life skills. He points to modern American schools as teaching a more workplace-geared set of subjects.
As the millennium approaches, Mr Demkiw says talk and rhetoric about knowledge-based economies will have to be acted on as education - a service industry - becomes more susceptible to global trends. It will have to devolve a centrally defined curriculum into "unique curriculums unable to be replicated by other schools - competition between providers."
"Basically, what I'm always telling my clients is that you don't even know what you don't know - and for our society to make room for graduates, we must prepare them for a world where they can take on the unknown."
Business must educate students for the unknown
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