Learning to Adapt
Aberdonians born in the 1950s joined the workforce in a very different city to the one they will retire from. The architecture around Union Street and Old Aberdeen may be pretty much the same and the glorious landscape beyond untouched, but not too much else is.
The population has risen by 10% since 1960, but the real change is in who that population is: 25% of Aberdeen’s current residents were born outside Scotland, most of them outside the UK. People born abroad work everywhere from corner shops and schools to hotels and multinational energy companies.
The arrival of oil has transformed the city from regional centre to the oil capital of Europe. It has not only brought multinational companies and foreign workers into the area, but caused local businesses to become far more internationally minded.
Other changes are less unique. The rise in digital technology in particular. Aberdonians can book a flight, a hotel and a taxi, buy a change of clothes for their trip, and check in - all without leaving their front rooms. They can download boarding passes to smart phones, which they can then use to guide them around their final destination and video chat with home while doing so. The stuff of Science Fiction just 30 years ago.
These are not just changes in what we do, but how we think about what we do. The mobile phone was made possible when Motorola engineer Marty Cooper asked his development team the seemingly simple question, “why do we take it as a fact that when we want to call a person, we have to call from a particular place?” Marty’s breakthrough came not by technical ability alone, but through a willingness to see the world differently.
It is a far cry from the Primary school student who told a school’s inspector, “I get it; science is just like spelling. You just have to memorise it and it doesn’t make sense.”
Our children’s world is more complex than the one their parents and grandparents were born into. It is not enough to ‘know’ information any more - to build up a store of useful facts in our first two decades of life to see us through the next five. Marty Cooper and his team refused to ‘know’ that telephones were fixed in a particular place. Like most people who thrive in our current world, they could apply a deeper understanding and think beyond the ‘known’ to create a new possible.
If I have one prediction about the future it is that society and technology will continue to change, and probably at an even faster rate. The most fundamental fact of any society is the energy that powers it. When, two hundred years ago, Europe transformed from muscle based energy to fossil fuels it upended the world. Aberdeen is at the heart of a new energy source - wind. Renewables won’t simply replace fossils; they will be part of a new way of living.
A 21st century education does not simply transmit past knowledge to a new generation as though set challenges are fixed across time. It should equip students with those skills that allow them to adapt to thrive in circumstances not yet foreseen. Like Marty Cooper, students need to see their own assumptions so that they can move beyond them.
In Thistle Talk over the last month, I have introduced the ISA’s identity and mission, its values and its basic philosophies of citizenship and learning - all of which are summed up in our guiding statements. Over the next few weeks, I will talk about some of the unique features of an international curriculum that make it the preferred choice of UK and other world universities.
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