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A photograph of Andreas Schleicher.

Andreas Schleicher

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Ulf-Daniel Ehlers: We would like to dive into the conversation with a personal question: can you remember what could be called a Future Skills moment or an anecdote from your life where you thought ‘I went to school, I went to university, but in this moment, what really helped me, that was my Future Skill’?

Andreas Schleicher: Yes, absolutely. I was in Thailand and lost my way. It was after school and I had to navigate in an environment that was completely unknown to me. It took me four hours to find my way back to the hotel, but I learnt suddenly that what I remembered from the past was at that moment not what would help me to find my future.

Ehlers: I have a similar story from when I lost my way one evening in Brussels. The saying I kept from that is: you have to lose yourself to find yourself—and this has been a guiding orientation.

Laura Eigbrecht: You’re a very well-known expert for education. What made you this expert? How come that you’re burning for education and that you really wanted to work in the field of education?

Schleicher: I actually originally focused on science. I studied Physics; my first job was in the field of medical industry. Then I had to do my military service and I set it to civil service—and they sent me to a school with disadvantaged learners. It was a fascinating environment for me. At first a difficult experience—I encountered people who I had not really met in my daily life before, but it was absolutely intriguing. The first thing that came to me really was that many of these students would have been perfectly normal if they had lived in an environment that had been more conducive to learning and to their social and emotional development—many of them came from really difficult families. I thought: we can really make a difference as educators. These almost two years changed my outlook on life and also what I wanted to do and achieve in life.

About my expertise in education: I’ve learnt everything I know from the world. I had the fortune of working in and with over 80 countries on design and development; I followed public policy, ministers of education, educators over the years and that’s really where I learnt everything I know.

Eigbrecht: I see the idea to have a global outlook in order to analyze where we are in right now, to see different ways to approach it. Was there a moment of irritation where you thought: maybe this system is not working so well, the educational system of Germany, for example?

Schleicher: Yes, in fact! I think you learn about yourself best when you look at other systems, other people, other approaches. You understand the idea of language the moment you learn a foreign language. Before, you don’t think about it, you take it for granted; you think that every object has one way to express it. Suddenly you learn a foreign language and you can see the world through different lenses, perspectives, appreciate different ways of thinking, different kinds of approaches—that’s really what enriched my thinking. I started to think about the German education system first when I learnt about other education systems. I could see the strengths of the system in integrating the world of work and the world of learning in the system of vocational education. But I also learnt about the weaknesses—the fact that the system very early on in the lives of people makes not well-founded judgements about what people are good at and not so good at. It doesn’t leave people enough room to develop their own identity, their own kind of aspirations.

I learnt through comparisons, through contrasts and with an open mind. I do believe that learning will become increasingly important, because we’ve seen through the pandemic that the future will always surprise us. Future Skills are not about a specific skill set that we can define today and that will be valid forever—they are about our capacity to be open to alternative futures, to be receptive to how the evolution of labor demand, of skill demand really evolves and then to find creative responses to this. This really is the challenge of our times. We cannot learn that much from the past, because in a pandemic, the past was not a very good guide to what we should be doing. But we can learn by looking outwards to how other people, other institutions are responding to those kinds of challenges. If you are in higher education, you suddenly ask yourself: what is your value proposition? Some people say: we just do remote learning, we just do online courses. But people don’t go to university to consume online content; they go to university to meet a great professor, to work with researchers in a laboratory, they want to experience campus life—and suddenly that’s out of the picture. So what are we there for? Who are we? What are the kinds of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values we want to develop? How do we do that? These questions really are the ones that help us find our future.

Ehlers: You were telling us about your own biographical learning pathway which brought you where you are today—I love this kind of story. I think that many people have stories like that to share while it is so hard to form them into a concept. And it shows that what really matters is individual—taking the initiative and going forward, making experiences and distilling out of these experiences what matters. But it is so difficult to put this idea into a curriculum.

“For me, the idea that there should be a study curriculum, and then we transmit it, is an idea of the past.”

Schleicher: For me, the idea that there should be a study curriculum, and then we transmit it, is an idea of the past. The idea of the future is that we have educators who become creative designers of innovative learning environments and that the curriculum is the product of co-creation where you have learners and educators work together on what content is relevant in this moment for that purpose. The kind of things that are easy to teach and maybe easy to test are precisely the things that are now easy to digitize, to automate. We have to ask ourselves: what makes us human? How do we complement, not substitute the artificial intelligence we created in our computers? Learning is no longer about teaching you something, but about giving you the compass, the navigation tools to find your own way in a world that is increasingly complex, volatile, ambiguous. Our capacity to navigate ambiguity, in this moment of crisis, was perhaps the most important thing to have. The reaction of education systems to shut down everything the moment things were difficult shows how helpless we were, rather than to think: we need to do things differently. We were only able to switch things off—and I think that’s often a reaction when you lack that capacity to navigate an ambiguous situation.

Ehlers: I was once talking to an old, long-term, very high-esteemed professor of competence research. He had developed a very differentiated view on competencies—action competencies, social competencies, personal competencies, subject-matter competencies, etc. In the end of that conversation, he said: In all my research, what we also found out is what really matters and makes people active and makes them engaged, that’s what I like to call activity competence or initiative, people just taking things into their hands, going forward and starting to learn, making experiences. With all these competencies which we can map out—what is also becoming apparent is that self-organization and being creative and initiating are increasingly more important. Would that also be your understanding of important Future Skills?

Schleicher: Absolutely—that is what I would call agency—and a competency is an enabler for that agency. The key is: are you capable to mobilize your cognitive, social and emotional resources to do something? It matters what you know—it matters what you can do with what you know. But ultimately, success is about putting that into action—that agency is really important. But agency is not just an individual kind of attribute—what’s equally important is co-agency or collective agency. We learn and do things in dialogue; the sum of people is bigger than the sum of its parts. I think that agency, co-agency, collective agency are really the ultimate tests of competency. If you just accumulate competencies but you cannot put that into action, you will not be very impactful in this world.

“But agency is not just an individual kind of attribute—what’s equally important is co-agency or collective agency.”

Eigbrecht: We’ve seen in our research that there are many people discussing Future Skills. We see very different ideas about Future Skills in these debates—ideas about: why do we need these Future Skills and what’s the world that we are working towards? So what is your idea and conceptualization of Future Skills?

Schleicher: I look at a triangle where knowledge is the foundation. I look at the capacity of people to use that knowledge; the skills dimension. But then the third part is really the values and attitudes that help us navigate. You want a great engineer—but you actually want an ethical engineer, an engineer who knows how to use his or her knowledge for the better, someone who can use and apply their knowledge creatively, with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes as enablers for agency, co-agency, collective agency. That’s really how I look at the future. You could say that everything that is static will lose its relevance for humans—because that’s what you can digitize. So our human capacity will be that navigator: can you live with yourself? Can you live with people who are different from you? Can you live with the planet? Can you see the future as much as you see the present, make the right choices? Climate change is a good example—can we think beyond our immediate horizon, see the longer term and translate that future into our present? I don’t see artificial intelligence as a magic power—it’s just a great amplifier and an amazing accelerator. But it will amplify good human skills and good human knowledge in the same way it amplifies poor human judgement and skills. I think that’s really where we should focus our energy when we think about the future—think really carefully about what will differentiate us from technologies that we created.

Ehlers: One thing we found when we did research on Future Skills all over the world is that there are actually at least two different discussion strands to it: One has to do with employability, to turn employability into a ‘digital employability’. How can we equip citizens of a country with suitable digital skills along their lifelong learning journey so they can perform in their jobs? Some countries like Japan, Singapore, Canada have national Future Skills initiatives which are looking into this kind of upskilling of citizens. But then there is another kind of understanding, often found in higher education, which is a more emancipatory understanding of Future Skills. It is relating Future Skills to questions like: how can we live together, co-create together, shape the future of our societies in a way that it is just, sustainable and peaceful? So we are wondering: where is it leading, this discussion on Future Skills? Is it necessary to bring these debates together or how will they evolve? What is your outlook on this debate?

Schleicher: I agree to your observation that there are more narrow and wider views. My own outlook on this has evolved over the last decades. I would have given a lot of importance to these employability aspects when I started my career, because in those days, we had a fairly clear picture of the future. We could educate people for jobs, we knew what employment looked like—we learned for a job. Today, learning is the job—learning has become the work. What really matters now is not what specialist you are, but if you have that capacity to become a specialist in a new field that nobody else has discovered in a short period of time. Employability becomes harder and harder to grasp and if we focus too much on it, we educate people for our past, not for their future. In the past, you could genuinely rely on what older people could tell you. They knew the world—and they could help you find your way through it. Today, when you meet older people, you never know if what they tell you is timeless wisdom or just outdated. When I went to school, literacy was about decoding text—very carefully curated books, I could trust that information to be true because many people had validated it. Today, young people look things up on Google and find 100,000 answers to their question—they have to construct knowledge, not just extract knowledge. What is going to become increasingly important is your capacity to learn, but also to be willing and able to unlearn and relearn when the context changes.

“Employability becomes harder and harder to grasp and if we focus too much on it, we educate people for our past, not for their future.”

Ehlers: Connected to that, if you think about initiatives like PISA for example, which are very important for national policy-making not just in the OECD countries, but all around the world—how do you think you could weave this kind of idea more into the assessments so that they become a stimulus for shaping the education systems for the future we just discussed on the national level?

Schleicher: This is a really interesting question. On the one hand, I think what is technologically possible in the field of assessment has enormously evolved. When I started with PISA, we couldn’t dream of assessing something like empathy or curiosity—today we can. Where the difficulty often lies is connecting that with the reality of educators—I learned my lesson with that in 2015. When we started PISA, we focused on things like individual problem-solving—we know how to assess these things. In 2015, we told ourselves: the most important problems you don’t solve on your own, but by collaborating with other people—so we assessed collaborative problem-solving skills in PISA. But when we tried to bring that message back to teachers, educators and governments, teachers said: It’s so interesting, but it’s not in our curriculum and it’s not really my job. And policy-makers said: Very nice, but you better learn that in the workplace—in school, you have to build the foundations. One of the biggest mistakes I think we made in the field of education over the last few hundred years is to divorce learning and assessment. We ask people to pile up years and years of knowledge and then one day we call them back and say: now tell me everything!—in a very constraint, contrived environment. That frames how we learn, and that’s why collaboration doesn’t really play out in the world of learning. What we need to do better is to integrate learning and assessment so they become two sides of the same coin; and the cognitive, social and emotional aspects of learning need to play an equally important role.

“One of the biggest mistakes I think we made in the field of education over the last few hundred years is to divorce learning and assessment.”

Ehlers: I agree! But also something teachers and schools still have difficult times with.

Schleicher: In a way, maybe a thousand years ago, we did better than we do today. A thousand years ago, learning was all about apprenticeship—you learned from and with other people, you learned by experience, you learned by doing. When you made a mistake, it had probably real consequences for you, because you didn’t learn somewhere in a classroom. Today, even when we do project-based learning in schools, at the end of the lesson the teacher throws all products into the bin because they serve no purpose.

I think we have to really find that kind of learning where assessment and learning are entirely integrated. But the difficulty really is to have results that we can translate back into having learners learn better, teachers teach better and education institutions becoming more effective. This year, we are going into the field with a really interesting PISA assessment of creative thinking skills. But I’m afraid of the same story, that everyone will say: oh, how nice and how interesting! But what does it mean for me in my classroom? Building these bridges, reintegrating assessment, learning and teaching—that is the challenge that we have in front of us. Educators see themselves too often in a knowledge transmission function rather than as designers of innovative learning environments, the ones who really frame the ideas—and I think we need to work on that. On the other hand, I believe it’s crucially important that we advance the field of assessment itself—you can only change and improve what you can somehow make visible. If you teach in very advanced ways but you only measure in very reductionist ways, the latter will always win.

“Building these bridges, reintegrating assessment, learning and teaching—that is the challenge that we have in front of us.”

Eigbrecht: When working with our students we try to use all kinds of Future Skill pedagogies like problem solving and project-based teaching or working on basis of real practice. But still we feel everyday that it is difficult to land this idea in the institution. In our teaching in higher education, we think we know why it is important to work with Future Skills, but we wonder: how can we show and showcase it—how can we not convince students, but how can we have them have that experience that Future Skills matter? And how can we inspire other teachers for Future Skills? Because in the field of higher education, we need to have everybody on board. Do you have recommendations for strategies on changing higher education that work?

Schleicher: We have probably seen a lot more change and progress in early childhood education and schools than in the university sector when it comes to new ways of teaching and learning, cross-disciplinary learning, project-based learning, to the integration of the world of learning and the world of work.

In a way, the university sector has remained the most conservative part of that ecosystem and I believe that in a way what makes the higher education sector so resistant to change is the success to bundle three things: owning the content, managing the delivery and basically being the accreditor—having the monopoly over deciding what a success in education is. It will take some time until higher education loses that monopoly, but you’ll see micro-credentials and other forms of recognizing learning, and I think at that point, higher education will become more open to focus on a broader skill set. We already see today that young people graduating from universities are having difficulties to find a good job. At the same time, employers say: we cannot find people with the skills we need. That gap is not narrowing but widening and higher education needs to be more aware of the evolution of the world and what it means for the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values of people, with the social and emotional side playing an increasingly important role.

Ehlers: I would like to reflect on my own institution: we work in a university which combines practice experience and study phases in a very structured model. On the one hand, we know that this kind of combining real experience with reflection is the only true way to really develop competencies and agency. On the other hand, since we have formed this kind of education process into a standard institutional guideline, we are dictating it to students which not always take up on it in a way of self-motivated learning. When we ask students to inspire through telling their stories, ownership starts to unfold and students are starting to listen and to inspire each other. And I think this kind of self-learning is what we really need to be attentive to—this individual development and progress is so important.

Schleicher: I very much agree. The key really is to give learners true ownership over what they learn and how they learn, when they learn and where they learn over their life cycle. But that ownership really needs to be genuine, that one can feel to be in control of this process—that this is about me developing myself and not learning for a course. Where you do that, you will get a very different kind of outcome. I believe that future places of work are future places of learning. In a way, maybe a workplace will become more like a university and a university more like a workplace. We might see people going back and forth between different stages in their lives to not learn for their current job but learn for what they want to do in their future and maybe learn things that relate to nothing practical. My idea has always been that people should do two degrees in their lives—one thing you have a real passion for, something that really interests you, where you think you can really become good at, and then something else where you can make a living of. Maybe you will find bridges between those two things that are completely unforeseen later in your life. I think that ownership over the learning agenda is really important—and I think good education institutions are also good at that. That also means that educators need to become much more like mentors, coaches and facilitators, evaluators and social workers and psychologists—people who understand who you are and who you want to become and can accompany you on that journey.

Eigbrecht: What you are saying also shows that a paradigm shift on many levels needs to be set in motion in higher education. A change of the big picture is in front of us. Sometimes I feel that we begin to see here and there some progress already—maybe slower in higher education than in other domains. How would you say has the debate around Future Skills and about higher education evolved in the past years and what do you think is the role of the pandemic in it?

Schleicher: Of course the pandemic had a devastating effect—it has dramatically amplified almost any form of inequality in our education systems. If you were able to learn on your own, if you had access to great resources, an ecosystem that was supportive—maybe this period has been liberating and exciting for people. But if you used to be spoon-fed by your professors or teachers, if you had maybe no motivation to learn on your own, you were left badly behind.

But at the same time, what the pandemic has done is really put the locus of control at the frontline—it made educators really creative designers. It also made people more aware that learning is not a transaction business. If you were a great instructor, you were out of business that moment. Only when you could really reach your students, you could build that connection without having them under control in the classroom or the lecture hall—and I think teachers understood that message. What I see happening is that many learners go back to their professors and say: In this moment, I learned to learn independently. I learned to set my own learning goals, to structure my own learning processes, to discipline myself. I can see many educators who go back to their institutions and say: I did become a creative designer, I learned new things on my own, I created new tools with my colleagues. I built a good kind of team around me—and I want to work differently.

I think that momentum will remain, so learning will be different. Certainly, technology has become not just an instrument to conserve existing practice, but to truly transform it. The last years have been a turning point, at least an opportunity for that.

Eigbrecht: Not just in our own university but also during the Europe-wide podcasts which we did with students during the pandemic they voiced two issues: a big hope that things get back to normal and they can meet back on campus and be socially active. But also a fear that things will go back to normal and nothing will have changed, no modern, flexible and digital study opportunities any longer. How do you think we can move on post-pandemically and use the learning gains for the creation of a new form of higher education?

Schleicher: I think that the future will always be surprising us on this, and I think this moment of crisis is just one element on this pathway that will put into question the status quo. I believe educational institutions that will not fundamentally adapt are going to lose their relevance. The big challenge for us is not the inefficiency of education—even if we can talk about this as well—but that education loses its purpose and its relevance, and young people see that. Many employers at the high end of skill distribution do not longer look just at universities, but they found their own ways to facilitate learning, and you can see more and more alternatives of learning. We should not underestimate the number of people who discovered during the pandemic that things can be done differently and that there are other people thinking about the same kind of questions. Before, innovation was very isolated—and education has always been very insular, people looking inside the classroom, inside the institution. Now you can see people looking more outward—to the next educator, to the next institution, to the next education system. And I think that will remain—and where it doesn’t, where education goes back to normal, you’re going to see institutions very quickly lose in relevance. This monopolistic culture that we really have—we have mostly provider-oriented education in the higher education space—is not going to be sustainable.

Ehlers: The things that you are saying are resonating with me, because in our group, our thinking, our tradition, we are also very much driving this reform agenda for higher education. I am convinced that the way forward is again a bridge-building exercise—as it has been also in the past. As the futures of higher education are probably largely determined by the expectations of their members—students, teachers, external stakeholders—we need to work to build trust for the futures we desire and need to create a dialogue in order to console the existing expectations. Bridges between those who are now expecting to go back to the old normal and those who expect to create a new normal after the pandemic—and who feel slowed down, hindered, unable to move forward and to promote opening up education, and focus on learning and not on teaching. So I wonder—in your experience: what are possible future pathways? Are there international models for this and what are the mechanisms behind them?

Schleicher: I think the look outwards always makes you optimistic. I can’t say there is one system which has figured everything out, but you can see: wherever you find a problem, you see others who are very much advanced and addressing that issue. Looking at educators’ careers, one of the big problems we still have in Germany is to believe that you put educators into a kind of very good and long training program, then you put them into a classroom, and they are going to be successful for the rest of their lives. That’s outdated—but we can see alternatives. Lifelong learning of educators has become a reality where the training of educators no longer just happens in universities, but in schools and in learning communities. In Germany, teachers are well-paid and still not enough people want to become a teacher—because the work is financially attractive and intellectually unattractive. In other countries, they maybe pay a little bit less, but they give people a work environment where you can grow (in) your career, where you work with interesting people, where you have more responsibility, where you have more time to spend with the learners. That’s what makes me optimistic: the world is an amazing laboratory of ideas, we just have to look at it more carefully. The same is true for the higher education space. As an extreme alternative—in Singapore’s Future Skills program, they turned things around. They basically said: we’re no longer giving the money to universities to decide what they are going to offer to students—we are going to give to every person a credit when they are born and they decide what to learn, where to learn, what mode of learning is relevant for them, and then they build their own education pathways. Suddenly you have young people say: I don’t just do my Bachelor, my Master, my PhD—I do my Bachelor, then I work for some years, then I go back to upgrade my skills. You can change these models, and that’s really what makes me hopeful. You do not need to reinvent everything, you can today look at the different alternatives, how they play out and with what success and then create your own approach in your own context. Success is not about copying and pasting solutions from other places, but about what works in what context and how can you reconfigure these ideas, spaces, people, technologies and time in a way that actually works well in your own situation.

“As an extreme alternative—in Singapore’s Future Skills program, they turned things around. They basically said: we’re no longer giving the money to universities to decide what they are going to offer to students—we are going to give to every person a credit when they are born and they decide what to learn, where to learn, what mode of learning is relevant for them, and then they build their own education pathways.”

Ehlers: In our Future Skills Lab (next-education.org) we’ve just developed a method called “Personal Development with Future Skills”. In that we are working with students along their own boundaries of personal development and the development of individual learning pathways. By reflecting on their own, they learn how to become professional learners. The feedback we get, especially from experienced students, is very positive. They even say that this had been the first time for them to learn about Future Skills, reflecting their learning, ethics, decision taking, and so on. The stories which you are sharing made it very clear that we need a different way to think about education: more as a flexible, value-based, enabling and individual pathway and not as a predefined collective exercise in which the curriculum is perceived as a restraining must, limiting my possibilities to learn rather than opening up a pathway for my own as a student.

I would like to turn to another issue which is also very much on my heart: the issue of equality in education. All the educational reform ideas, our Future Skills approach for example, how can they become an opportunity for all, serve the agenda for just and equal opportunities and not just become reality for a chosen few privileged? During the pandemic times, we could see the disparities growing between those who could cope with the changing opportunities and structures, and the others, who have been really left behind. When we are now pushing the Future Skills agenda in higher education I wonder: how can we avoid disparities between those who are learning in environments where they can acquire them and who understand how to do that, who are having these skills to self-develop—and then the others, those who do not? How can we envision an inclusive future in that regard?

“You could say: in the past, democracy was about the right to be equal—today, democracy is about the right to be different.”

Schleicher: You point to one of the biggest challenges ahead of us—the challenge of opportunity. But I think that’s not just in learning—it’s a huge shift in our societies. You could say: in the past, democracy was about the right to be equal—today, democracy is about the right to be different. And I think the same is true for learning. Our learning systems have to understand people’s identities and individual capabilities and then find the right methods of learning. To me, that’s where the biggest potential of technology is: technology is becoming very good at understanding how people learn differently—it can figure out what makes you interested, where you’re bored, where you’re good at or where you’re struggling. This way, we can give people tailored learning opportunities and combine these with educators—educators who have that human capacity to understand who you are and who you want to become and will invest in you. The biggest misconception is that you provide everybody with the same learning opportunities and then will get equitable outcomes. It works when it is about the transmission of very basic facts and figures—it just doesn’t work when it is about advanced skills. Elite institutions have understood that—if you go to elite private institutions today, they are exactly focusing on those capabilities, on those human skills.

When you do your first job interview, that’s when you find out: they’re not just looking at your grades, your knowledge, they are looking at how you interact with people, how you manage yourself. And I think that education systems have to become much more nuanced and responsive to the individual capabilities of people—which also means to accept that people have different talents and that success is really multidimensional. We need to give up this notion that everybody arrives at the same skill set.

“The biggest misconception is that you provide everybody with the same learning opportunities and then will get equitable outcomes.”

Eigbrecht: One related question comes to mind: Future Skills development is demanding and more complex—more than learning facts. Looking at our research results we can see that while students today have a greater awareness of the importance of Future Skills, they also feel a rising pressure. It is not enough anymore to learn facts but also about personal development. They feel: I want to succeed in life, it’s my own responsibility, not just in class but all the time. The rise of self-organization which we describe in our research is opening new avenues but is also putting stress on students. This often is described by students as pressure that also evokes mental health crises, et cetera. What’s your perception on how to encourage students to Future Skills learning in a positive way which is not a way to put more pressure on individuals?

Schleicher: I think the pressure felt is actually real. In a fast-changing world, our mental capacity to adapt is stretched. As humans, we are designed to keep the world in balance—we struggle when living in an unbalanced world. I think that is what puts enormous strain on young people, but the answer to this cannot be to make the world easier to make it easier for people to adapt. That would be utopian. The answer only can be to help students become more resilient, more actively capable to address these kinds of anxieties, to build stronger agency, a self-concept that is adaptive to future realities. A friend of mine who also works in education, Amanda Ripley, told me her own story. She was studying in a university in Canada, in a very demanding kind of program, and really struggling. One day she said: I’m going to give up, this is just too much for me, I cannot cope with this. She had a Chinese roommate who got up in the morning every day, worked, got to sleep early, seemed calm and managed everything, got good grades. She asked that roommate: I don’t know what I can do. I’m going to give up, I will not succeed. And the roommate told her: I can really see how you struggle, you must be under enormous pressure—and this is the first time you experience this. You know, I experienced this from first grade.

I think we often create a very artificial reality for people in education—a reality where we say we know what you need to learn, and this is what we’re going to test in the exam—a reality that is predictable. And then suddenly people find themselves in a different world when they get to university, or even after. I think this cognitive, social and emotional resilience is something we need to make a much bigger effort for—because we live in this time of accelerations, and there’s no end of this in sight. Our human capacity to thrive in this imbalanced, volatile world is going to be hugely important, and that is something that, from the earliest days in our lives, we need to pay more attention to.

Ehlers: Thank you for this story! Another thing I wanted to ask you is: when the OECD published their Future of Education and Skills 2030 concept, what was the reaction? Because this is also all about Future Skills. What was the reaction of your member states, of institutions and policy-makers?

Schleicher: This was one of the most interesting experiences for me. When I proposed that project to our member countries six years ago, their reaction was extremely negative. Curriculum is the holy grail—this is something that we do in our member states, we don’t want anyone to deal with that from the outside. Then we started with the work. We brought together students, educators, people from philanthropy, civil society, public policy to work on the OECD Learning Compass 2030—and you could suddenly see that governments became more and more interested in it. It became a rapidly growing community—I don’t think we have done anything that had a greater impact. In terms of change, I would actually say that this has been more impactful than our work on PISA.

To give you an example: last year we assessed social and emotional skills of people and the Koreans saw that there were 15-year-olds who were less creative than 10-year-olds. Think about it for a moment—if I would tell you your students do worse in mathematics at age 15 than at age 10, you would think that there was something terribly wrong going on in our school system. I actually met the Korean deputy prime minister to talk about this. She told me: for days, I couldn’t think of anything else. And then they started to look at this learning compass and to think about it: how can we actually frame our education narrative? We are so extremely successful academically, but we miss out on some of those other elements. What can we learn from that—can we work with it? It really created a movement in the country, and you can see how society is taking up that message. Educators are looking at that learning compass as something that can help them—so I think it’s that kind of tools we are lacking. In education, we have piles and piles of curricula that spell out the mechanics of learning and content—but we never ask ourselves about purpose. What are the Future Skills we want to teach? We teach people how to calculate an exponential function—but we don’t teach them the idea, the nature of that exponential function. And that is what you need to understand when you want to work on climate change or on a pandemic. I wish we had more processes in our societies where educators across borders, across subject area fields work together to ask themselves that question of purpose.

Ehlers: I think it is important to understand that Future Skills demand a different type of learning which is different from teaching and testing unconnected knowledge chunks but that we rather need a well-connected curriculum which is designing education around purpose and mission. Tools like the Future Skills approach (nextskills.org) or the OECD Learning CompassFootnote 1 help to create a narrative around purpose, around the future capabilities which we would like to stimulate and support in students’ learning. These tools are in a way functioning and serving as a counterpart to the curricular approach in order to unleash individual development—and they are carrying the Future Skills idea that there is much more to learn than the knowledge in the curriculum.

Schleicher: What we often do in the field of education when we talk about Future Skills is that we hide in the comfortable world of the things that we can easily define. If you look at our education systems, the big questions in our life do not appear: love, death, why we are here on this earth. Those are the questions that move us all, but we do not articulate them in education—because they are the ones which go beyond the easily definable. I think that question of purpose will be increasingly important in education—to help people find meaning in life.

Eigbrecht: Talking of purpose: I would like to ask you about your vision of education and higher education in the next ten, twenty years. How would you wish for it to be? What’s your ideal future education like?

Schleicher: Probably think less about education, think more about learning, think more about personal development. We will see higher education at any stage and in any part of our lives in some ways, less visible as institutions and places, more visible as an activity, more something that accompanies me rather than where I go to. And I think that working and learning will become very closely intertwined—as something that gives people inspiration and helps people find new meanings, new fields, new interests in their lives. Once again, we no longer learn for a job, but the job becomes our capacity, our willingness to learn—and learning environments should become responsive to these different needs of people.