What Should We Teach Our Kids?
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2016
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What will the world economy look like 30 years from now? And, how should we be preparing British schoolchildren today to find employment in it? Robert Peston travels to three cutting edge schools that claim to provide the way forwards for secondary education. Should the focus be on languages and cultural knowledge for an increasingly globalised world? Should we be striving to create more of the engineers and programmers that so many employers are crying out for? Or, with the unstoppable march of the robots gobbling up ever more human jobs, should we be preparing kids with the social skills to be future entrepreneurs, employing their own personal fleets of automatons?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:04.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. of us frame the future in a very simple and traditional way. What will it hold for our children? |
| 0:26.8 | But with technological change, perhaps faster and more unpredictable than ever, seeing the future does seem harder than it ever has. |
| 0:36.6 | My name's Robert Peston, and in this program I'll be attempting to find out what we should teach |
| 0:42.0 | our kids in this world of unusual uncertainty. |
| 0:47.0 | Hi, I'm Kira, I'm 16 years old and in the future I'd like to either be a mathematician or a playwright. |
| 0:52.0 | Hi, I'm Jayre and I'm 16 years old. |
| 0:55.0 | I don't really know what I want to be, |
| 0:57.0 | but I'm quite interested in psychology |
| 0:59.0 | because it fascinates me how the brain works. |
| 1:10.0 | So here I am in an inner city school in London, in Maryland, and I've come to see arguably the world's expert on which schools are best all over the globe. |
| 1:21.0 | So Andrew Schleicha, in British slang you'd be called the stato of international education, |
| 1:27.8 | you're the great mind of statistics about what works and what doesn't work. |
| 1:31.7 | Can I just ask which countries in your view do it best |
| 1:36.0 | and what do they have in common? |
| 1:38.0 | Well, if you look at the most rapid progress, |
| 1:40.0 | it's clearly in East Asia. |
| 1:42.0 | If you compare, for example, Finland, a high-performing system in Europe, |
| 1:45.2 | versus Shanghai, a very high-performing systems in East Asia. What they have in common is a very |
| 1:50.1 | strong focus on conceptual understanding. |
| 1:52.5 | For example, if you take mathematics, |
| 1:54.2 | students know what probability it means |
... |
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