 Hello, and so welcome to this session from the World Economic Forum on Reimagining Education. I'm Andrew Jack from the Financial Times, and it's a pleasure to host this impact session. So as a reminder, over the next 30 minutes, we're going to have a discussion with our three panelists, and then the next half an hour for forum members and partners, there'll be a follow up series of group sessions to reflect on some of the issues that we've touched on today. So with us, we have John Goodwin, the Chief Executive Officer of the Lego Foundation in Denmark, Angela Duckworth, the Rosalie and Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Igor Tolchinsky, the Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WorldQuant USA. So we're going to talk today about global citizenship, digital skills we've heard about, sustainability and technology. The key thing though, we're talking about education and what policies, practices and partnerships are needed to prepare to move future ready employability skills higher up the agenda in schools and other educational providers, talking across the world and at different age ranges and different challenges. But let's begin maybe with Angela. So tell us a little bit from your perspective on the role of interpersonal skills and some of the soft skills and the wider skill sets that you've been focusing on that you see as important within education and how they're being fostered and developed. Andrew, I think not just this year, but maybe dating back to about the turn of the millennium, there's been increasing dissatisfaction with the narrowness of measures like standardized achievement tests to fully capture the capabilities that we hope our young people, wherever they live and whatever they go up to be, that they're developing. So your test scores may illuminate your current level of reading skill or mathematics skill, but they say very little, for example, about your ability to get on in a team or to lead that team. Those would be interpersonal skills that are clearly not metriced at all by standardized tests. And then I'll just add another category that most scientists who study human development would say is also different from what's typically measured on a standardized test, but is very important for success in life. And that is what's sometimes called self-regulation skills or sometimes it's intrapersonal because it's really you and your own goals and being able to delay gratification and persist and be resilient and have a growth mindset. This collection of call them self-regulatory skills that again are not easily measured using conventional standardized tests. And how then does the system go about it? Of course, it's the education system has been so infused with that whole idea of imparting knowledge, practical or harder and technical skills that you can sometimes memorize, practice, demonstrate. How do we start to develop in a more systematic way these sorts of approaches that are wider, albeit terribly important? I know that you are and John are going to speak to other capabilities that I knew in advance that they would be speaking to. So I'll just say that this more comprehensive and holistic view of the development of capability in young people, there are two major challenges and I think we're just the beginning of both of them. One is measurement, right? If you're going to say that we care about interpersonal skills, for example, then you at some point want to be able to measure a child's developing interpersonal skills. How do we measure whether they are a good team player yet? The things that they are able to do in terms of leadership or communication, the extent to which they show gratitude, honesty, kindness. We don't yet have very good metrics that we can repeatedly administer that aren't easily fakeable, that are cross-culturally valid and so on and so forth. So I think on measurement we have a long way to go. And the other long, long journey that we're at the very beginning of is actually how we would ever help educators intentionally cultivate these capabilities in the classroom. Beyond folk wisdom or like, well, I guess do what your second grade teacher said to you when you were eight years old. We're just the beginning, I think, of being able to support educators in that work. So any bright spots, any examples up till now that you could point to different countries around the world? There's probably one concept that I'm guessing most people in this conversation have heard before, it's growth mindset. This is the idea that Carol Dweck has had. She's at Stanford University. She's spent her whole career, really, from graduate school till today, trying to understand why some children persist and others give up in the face of challenge. And what Carol and her collaborators have discovered is that children have these sort of theories in their head, beliefs about, for example, whether your intelligence is malleable and can grow. So if you do terribly in math a certain year, you might not say that, oh, well, I'll definitely do poorly in math forever because I know my math ability and my math intelligence can grow. And I can learn from last year and do better next year. The opposite is a fixed mindset. Oh, well, I'm not a math person, so I guess I better just give up right now and hide in a corner. And I think the power of that idea has been global, has been universal, and most encouraging in terms of a bright spot. In very recent research, Carol and her collaborators, this is led by David Yeager at University of Texas Austin, did a random assignment placebo controlled experiment where teaching young people about brain plasticity actually increased their growth mindset and improved their objective academic performance at the end of the school year. So, John, that also adds very compelling what we heard from Roger. Does that resonate with your findings and reflections about what we need to be fostering in this next generation? Yeah, very much so. As Angela mentioned, the skills base, I think is somewhat universal in terms of the needs. And they're very interconnected as well in terms of interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, a lot of those skills can be nurtured through a consistent approach. Sadly, though, that's not typically the default approach which most education systems employ. Because there's a race to knowledge retention and regurgitation through standardized testing formats. And whilst completely agree with Angela and that we're still in the nascent stages of understanding how it is that we can effectively measure the development of these holistic skills of children as they progress. The issue is the old adage of, you know, you get what you measure and it's easy to measure whether or not someone can regurgitate facts because we've got test processes that have been refined over the years to do that perfectly. The problem is that we're perfectly measuring something that's almost irrelevant in today's world. And we keep forcing children through this system. And then we're surprised when they emerge at the other end and don't possess the skills that we really need them to have in order to be active contributors. So what does a better system look like when you look at the work you've been doing around creativity and innovation, for example. Well, we definitely need to look at the pedagogical approaches that are being utilized and give as much agency as possible to the learner, to the child in order for them to be able to truly explore their own capabilities. Obviously underguided facilitation by the teachers, but less of a restrictive curriculum that forces certain hurdles to be assessed, and much less of a focus on knowledge retention, particularly at the early years. The early years is really when there's a lot of neurological form forming that takes place. And there's very robust research to show the power of agency for children at that stage. Angela referenced some of it in the context of the preconditioning that the existing systems tend to give in children or your science-based or your more arts-based, but instead allowing them to develop their creativity, develop their collaboration at a pace that works for them in a way that works for them. And as I mentioned, very robust research in order to support that. So any, again, any particular bright spots you've seen countries or systems around the world where some of these skills and approaches are being adopted more effectively? Yeah, I mean, specifically on the context of creativity, it's great that the OECD with their PISA assessments that are going to be rolled out in 2022 are starting to explore creative thinking as a key output of education systems. And that's going to start governments really challenging themselves to understand whether or not their existing systems are actually delivering on that objective. But we also seen some quite progressive thinking from countries like Scotland and Wales and Thailand, Victoria and Australia. The LEGO Foundation pulled together a report recently called Creating Systems where we were really showcasing some of the more progressive education system governments around the world. And also the Finnish think tank 100 has also done an amazing report talking about spotlighting creativity around the world and some wonderful innovations that are being put in place in order to truly nurture creativity amongst children. So Igor, let's just think about this for a second from the point of view of the employer, the recruiter and what skills, personality traits and so on they're looking for what they need and how far that is being met by existing education systems. What's your experience? Well, my experience is that, you know, you have to group the skills into different areas. There's the basic skills where you learn how to think, how to come to conclusions, how to communicate, how to lead. And then there's more specific things, which is when you learn, you have specific problems, what to think about. And in a second body, the amount of information and knowledge that has to be learned is growing exponentially. So we have to rethink our education systems from beginning to end to really make them more suitable for doing this. And in the end, you know, you should be able to almost do like a Google search, you type in give me a PhD in applied mathematics with such and such a specialty, and you should be able to produce the exact coursework that you need to do this. So that's, that's idea number one. Idea number two is that, you know, talent is distributed uniformly around the world, but the opportunity is not. So we have to make our education systems free, universally accessible, and that they're critical to the future of work. There's really no reason whether always online capability to stay within any particular order. We need like a global education system. And that's interesting. You've launched your own universities that online and free. Is that a reflection of frustrations with the status quo with the, you know, the alternatives that are out there at the moment. It's, it's not so much a reflection of frustration as as an opportunity to create and give an example of what can be built on a pretty modest budget. We have a completely free online master's degree program in financial engineering. We have the biggest enrollment in the world in such a program we have 1300 students in world in this particular program. It has all standard features it has features it has a grading where we have applied for for accreditation, and it was not very difficult to make it so so we just need to get some very smart people who are, you know, who are aware of the latest technologies of the way things are changing. Combine them with with educators and build just a brand new system that can deliver knowledge at scale. Focusing of course there with with highly technical skills. On the other hand, do you do you see in even the students coming into that system, as well as your wider experience of employees you're recruiting and so on, of the missing skill sets that we were talking about earlier like creativity and inter and intrapersonal skills. Is that a big gap in the younger years that needs to be fostered more. I think so. That's a critical skill set that is not growing exponentially. When you read the works of Plato and Aristotle, they make just as much sense today as they did a very long time ago, maybe with a couple of exceptions, but generally, yes. And so we need to build a basic skills that don't change with time. First, and we have to do that well and at a young age because, you know, I have, I have six kids and I can tell you firsthand that they then the amount of what studying they do has been increasing and increasing and increasing. They're staying up to one o'clock habitually just learning. So we need to think all this through. Yeah, you think would you agree, Angela, with that that we've gone too far. There is this huge sort of attempt to absorb vast amounts and to upskill but maybe using the wrong sorts of approaches and techniques to the point of mental exhaustion. Well, absolutely. I mean, both Igor and John brought up the, you know, not just limitations but the wrongheadedness of like thinking about education as like the primary goal is to just stuff more facts into the long term memory of children. By the way, most of us did not grow up with Google, right, or like the internet but like that now exists. Like, why would you want to memorize almost anything. Of course, there are some things that you need to memorize so that you can access them very quickly. You know, you don't want to have to like Google what's six plus six in order to like solve a calculus problem. But I do think there is a kind of Byzantine structure and education that we've inherited from, you know, the way civilization just was for a long time where of course you would have to memorize all these things like that was 99% of what you did in education and now because knowledge has expanded exponentially and access to it has become frictionless and immediate like why do we still school in the same way. I will also just suggest that when we talk about interpersonal skills like gratitude, empathy, kindness, etc. And we talk about intrapersonal or self regulatory skills like delay gratification, growth mindset, productivity. It may be that these are not necessarily learned in the same way as we learn calculus. So it may be that they require more of an experiential approach. Nevertheless, I think technology is the answer. I'll just leave with, you know, this remark with this comment. I teach a class for undergraduates called grit lab. And it is the science and practice of passion and perseverance for long term goals, something I study as a scientist. My first instantiation was live we could only fit 60 students in the room. Then the next semester we got to, you know, 80 and now when it's online, honestly, I could teach it to 8 million kids, you know, at zero marginal cost. So there must be a way as we rethink everything as Igor and John are encouraging us to do and I completely agree. There must be a way at the same time that we can think of technology as unlocking and democratizing access to the right kinds of knowledge and capabilities that we should be encouraging. So technology is the enabling platform, let's say, but actually focusing within that, perhaps more on the soft skills than the harder ones in many ways. We're not necessarily to the exclusion. I don't want to say that we shouldn't be teaching like any content in schools, but you know, I think I like when Igor said we have to be rethinking things. I don't know that in any of us would say like, oh, I got it. Let me just send over a PowerPoint slide. But absolutely we should be questioning what should be taught, how it should be taught. And through what modalities. John, what would you say? Yeah, I completely agree. I would also say that if we focus on really learning how to learn and nurturing that zest for learning, then that can be transformative in the context of the types of 18 year olds that we have emerging from education systems. It was somewhat tragic. I was listening to the radio the other day about changes that have occurred in in Northern Ireland to the 11 plus system. Sort of standardized test system that allows children to enter into a certain streaming of schools and they were interviewing one mother whose child have been told that they were doing away with the testing for the those types of schools this year due to the pandemic. And the charge response was well, what a waste of my time learning all of that stuff beforehand. And I think that is somewhat sort of central to the issue that we have in a lot of our education systems that the learner feels that unless there's a test at the end that they're going to apply that thing then it's a waste of their time. So if we think about things like creativity, collaboration, critical thinking problem solving, those are universal skills where as humans we can relate to their worth, because they're meaningful in the context in which we will apply them. And so much of what we're forcing children to do doesn't have meaning in the context of their lives at this point in time. So Angela's point around the access that we have now to data and knowledge gives us a different opportunity as humans to be able to pursue those areas that have a real interest to us as long as we have the critical thinking critical thinking problem solving creative collaboration skills that enables them to apply that knowledge so much more productive than simply assimilating a bunch of facts that you're going to regurgitate in the three hour exam hall. And then to just amplify that a bit. So psychologists often speak about intrinsic motivation as opposed to extrinsic motivation. And they're both things I get you know the word motivation comes from to move right so you can get a student to move like to work and to study either extrinsic motivation. This is interesting. It's meaningful to me. I see how this is useful, not only to myself but maybe to other people who I care about, as opposed to extrinsic motivation if you don't study for this you're going to fail the test. If you don't study for this I'm going to give you a lower mark. So threats and incentives that are external to the student. And the, you know, short story of the research on this is that intrinsic motivation. Absolutely. Extrinsic motivation in every possible way over the medium and long term. And I think once students have been so conditioned in an education system that is almost exclusively built on extrinsic motivation, it even becomes difficult like in my class that I mentioned it's pass fail only. So there's no carrots and sticks really right it's really interesting, but they kind of are like, What do I do, like if there's not a final exam and there's a, you know, so, so I really do believe that kind of rethinking as both Igor and John are saying like really almost from principles like what are we doing, and how are we doing it is I think the order of the day in 2021. Igor as some of those approaches ones that you've explored in the university. We haven't explored them yet. But some of the, some of the things that were mentioned some particularly good Angela mentioned great, which I believe is the same as willpower, I think we should teach people just share willpower to just ability to go from point A point B just because you want to, no matter what the motivation. And this is a key skill, somebody can have in life, but I don't see thought anywhere with or even really talk of as a subject. So there's an interesting question a couple of questions here come in and maybe I'll try Angela initially. There's a lecturer here who says it from Indonesia who says what's your suggestion for us lecturers who still have to work within the old systems, even though we want to help our students to grow beyond. Here's one specific suggestion I believe is something that like happened almost accidentally to many instructors during the pandemic which is that now that you're teaching in a video format right because of circumstance. So many of us discovered the breakout room right which is actually by the way harder to do in some cases in an in person context because you'd have to rearrange the chairs to have everyone like in groups of three or four and then everyone can hear each other so it's acoustically impossible. Well, that is just one step towards I think making a learning something which is much more team based than completely an individual sport. So this is, you know, both john and Igor were saying at the beginning like, you know, what we're preparing young people to do in life for their work lives is so very different from what they are incentivize and experiencing in the student life. Right. You learn as a student who gets your GPA your test scores but most work this, this, you know, era in civilization is team based. So you can just begin to think about how you could encourage students to think of themselves as going, going through an academic course in teams, pair them in the same teams over and over again pretty soon you'll help them be developing their interpersonal skills as well. And as I said it doesn't require to rethink the entire structure of your course in order to make that one step forward. Yeah, I'll come to you on another question here which is perhaps particularly relevant obviously in the younger years and creativity so as we evolve and rethink what education offers. Do parents remain relevant and what partnerships should we have with them. Absolutely. And parents, I believe are essential to this dialogue, because a lot of the fears, pressures are in the total system, and often parents first receipt of what's happening in the classroom comes through their children and if they get surprised. Then they can often create quite a, quite a challenge for, for teachers. So I think that parent dialogue is so important. It's really critical that they come along on the journey and are comfortable with the change that takes place. So that needs to come both from the governments and from the, from the education system in totality it needs to be all of the stakeholders that are involved in in the child's development are really clear on why it is that the changes is taking place and what the objective is through that process. Anika maybe one for you you touched on this already as a parent as well as educator but how do we avoid burnout in youth, both in learning but also in the extracurriculars including opportunities they sometimes have to take to earn money, what might be a new strategy around that. I mean, yes. I think you, you almost have to teach the kids not to work too hard. You have to teach them to work hard, but then you have to teach them not to work too hard. The life has to remain balanced. The best way to show that is by your own example because no matter what people say no matter what people do in the end, the kids are going to copy the parent. So we as parents have to show balance balance and yet perseverance in what we do. So maybe a final one for you because we're almost at the end unfortunately but because it relates to your point, if assessments shifted to pass fail, would extremely motivated students be disadvantaged. Well, you know, the thing about policy prescriptions is that you have to think about unintended consequences. So that's why I so resonated when Igor said we have to rethink things doesn't mean that there's an easy policy recommendation like let's go from graded exams to pass failed exams or like let's go with test scores altogether. I think it's not that simple. I do think that we should ask like what are we solving for like what does success look like in our education system, what is our TELOS, if you will, and then let that guide kind of like what assessment should be. Now whether that means that all assessments are going to be passed fail or not, I'm guessing is no, but I'm sure that we can do better than we've done since we've had almost zero innovation in assessment or curriculum in over a century. I think there's also a degree of continuum thinking as well. So we what we're seeing is a cascade downwards from the endpoint of the education system in terms of the methodology of assessment is being applied earlier and earlier, as if that is the only outcome that's important. And I think part of the rethink is really determining what is the role of assessment in very early years, and is it the same as what we're seeking to achieve in the later years. And sadly, what we're seeing too often is that it's viewed as the same. Well, I think it needs to be fundamentally different in terms of the nurturing of the foundational skills at the earlier stage relative to the testing of knowledge and application at the latest age when you're coming more close to the point of implementation for the for the learner.