KAILUA-KONA — Imagine a world in which your computerized vehicle wakes itself up and drives itself to a repair shop to be serviced by a staff of robots; a world in which airborne drones buzz about your neighborhood delivering everything you could possibly need to your doorstep; a world in which your starter home can be 3-D printed in less than a day.
That world sounds futuristic, but self-driving cars already exist, drone delivery is a developed technology and 3-D printing of homes has been gaining traction in China for years. Due to rapid technological advancements, transformations to our everyday reality — not to mention our economy — are imminent.
“As fast as technology is moving, people can’t comprehend how quickly this will come,” said Justin Brown, the career and technical education program coordinator at Kealakehe High School. “Paradigm shifts based on technology are accelerating. We’re not just speeding up, we’re speeding up how quickly we’re speeding up.”
But what does an increasingly automated world mean for education?
A longstanding economic principle is that technology increases efficiency. Efficiency leads not only to higher quality products made at a lower cost with potentially fewer negative environmental impacts, but also decreases need for human labor. The human labor that remains necessary requires a higher level of technical skill — essentially creating, managing and dictating to automated mechanisms.
If vehicles can operate themselves, then who needs a taxi driver, a bus driver or a truck driver? And transportation is hardly the only industry being transformed by exponential leaps in computing power and processing power, which unleash technology on the world and its institutions.
Maintenance, cleaning and delivery services, retail and even construction are likely to have ever-decreasing employment potential. Data-mined, automated journalism might even render shoe-leather reporting obsolete.
Brown believes the economy is approaching an inflection point, and if systemic changes to the education system aren’t made, the consequences could be dire.
“What if everything we’re teaching kids is basically ensuring that they never have jobs?” Brown posited. “Every low-skill job right now that people can do and support their family and which services the community, what if 100 percent of them become automated? We’re lying to the kids. What we’re teaching is not actually preparing our work force. We’ve basically been training a group of bad robots.”
A new path
Brown said the “bad robots” schools are churning out need for a new model of education to remain competitive in an ever-changing marketplace. Kealakehe High School will start down a path toward such a model in the 2016-17 school year, when it opens up a STEM Academy for 40-60 incoming freshmen.
The STEM Academy was made possible by a $50,000 grant from the Hawaii Community Foundation’s STEM Learning Partnership launched in 2015 after being funded by The Hawaii Island New Knowledge Fund, or the THINK Fund, said Hawaii Community Foundation Director of Neighbor Islands Lydia Clements.
The academy will allow Brown and others at the school to incorporate the 26 STEM competitions present in the after-school robotics program directly into the daily curriculum, creating a school within a school.
“We take out a set of classes students were already going to take, make them interdisciplinary, make them high tech, start teaching engineering and in that, we start embedding these skills,” Brown said. “You give kids this fire and drive along with a small set of skills, then hold them to really high standards.”
The academy will integrate engineering and design principles, computer programming and coding with more traditional math, science and English classes.
Brown said that currently, the students benefiting from STEM are a self-selecting population. Both he and Kealakehe Principal Wilfred Murakami envision the STEM Academy’s expansion to include every student, particularly disengaged students as well as those without time or opportunity to attend after-school programs like STEM because they must work or care for their siblings.
“That is the direction we absolutely want to move into,” said Murakami, adding that student diversity — both demographically and regarding past levels of educational achievement — will be a priority beginning in the program’s first year.
Taking it further
West Hawaii Complex Area Superintendent Art Souza wants to take the idea of the Academy even further and hopes by utilizing the HOKUPAA Program — an area initiative developing the concept of creating authentic community partnerships between schools and local entities — that the Academy model can be spread area-wide.
“No one can do it alone,” Souza said. “We are hoping we can create this model in West Hawaii that can be replicated across all of our schools.”
Not every educator agrees with Brown’s theory that traditional educational skills provide little to no economic value for students who will soon enter the workforce. English Department Chair at Kealakehe High Jessica Dahlke is among them.
Dahlke ceded that English and math are still tightly tethered to standardized assessments, which don’t necessarily prioritize the hands-on, project-based, high-tech learning the STEM Academy will emphasize. But she maintains that requiring kids to read critically, analyze text and determine the credibility of both information and its source remain important abilities.
“I think (Brown) is not 100 percent correct (in this area),” Dahlke said, a sentiment with which Murakami agreed when he referred to basic literacy as the gatekeeper of jobs in the new economy. “I’ve always supported interdisciplinary connections between classes, and I think the skills we’re teaching are ones that will translate to what (Brown) has envisioned for the STEM Academy.”
Mark Solien is a retired vice president of ExxonMobil who managed 1,500 employees in the company’s geo-science department. He now volunteers as a mentor in Brown’s robotics program and believes, like Brown, that STEM education is the way of the future.
“The STEM Academy is one enormous step forward,” Solien said. “In my former work life, we tried to hire the top of the top. Those are the same values and skills that the STEM Academy will teach kids. Once that becomes commonplace at this school, these kids will be highly sought after for technical, top-level jobs around the world.”
What the future looks like
The goals of the academy aren’t limited to preparing students for a changing economy, but also educating communities in West Hawaii, or as one of Brown’s star pupils Courtney Nelson put it, “taking STEM to the streets.”
It will require more grant money, but Brown believes within a few years the academy will develop community outreach classes. In Brown’s vision, upperclassmen will be paid $25 per hour to teach classes like app development to community members using Kealakehe facilities.
Brown said efforts like these can help Hawaii, and the nation as a whole, avoid a dystopian future characterized by wars of wage and work, where poorly trained “human robots” will be incapable of competing with machines and unemployment will skyrocket.
“People don’t like to talk about this stuff because it’s scary,” Brown said. “But the system is absolutely failing students, and we can pretend like it’s not, but that’s irresponsible and immoral. What are we going to say to these kids? ‘Sorry, we really messed this up, and you’re going to be poor and desolate for the rest of your life?’ If we don’t change this stuff, we should just tell the kids to stop coming to school and learn how to hunt and fish. No technological paradigm exists where those skills aren’t useful.”