The arts could become more important for young people than maths in the future, according to a leading education expert.
Researcher Andreas Schleicher, who leads the Programme for International Student Assessment at the intergovernmental economic organisation OECD, believes that young people could benefit more from the skills gained through creativity than test-based learning.
Schleicher, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading educational thinkers, said: “I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths.
“We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite,” he said, suggesting that science and maths may become ‘softer’ in future when the need for them decreases due to technology, and the ‘hard skills’ will be “your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience”.
His comments follow concerns that a traditional STEM curriculum could make young people less prepared for the demands of the future.
“When you look at the types of tasks that students are doing, they are more those that are associated with the past than the future – the kind of things that are easy to teach and easy to test. It is precisely those things that are easier to digitise.
“The modern world doesn’t reward you for what you know, but for what you can do with what you know,” he said.
Source: thestage.co.uk (edited)
