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Future of Education: Part I

The Reinvention of Lifelong Learning

9 min readNov 16, 2017

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn — Alvin Toffler

City Montessori School (CMS) in Lucknow, India is the largest school in the world. Founded in 1959 with just 5 pupils on borrowed capital of $5, it boasts 55,000 pupils and 4,500 staff in 18 campuses in Lucknow today. This is not it’s most striking feature. For the purposes of this story, the schools most praiseworthy feature is its motto which is ‘Jai Jagat’ which means Hail World instead of ‘Jai Hind’ (Hail India).

For a school founded in post independence India, the message is very futuristic. The most important consideration in building the global educational institutions of the future is inclusion. No one should be left behind. Today, more than ever, there is a need to connect hearts globally and work holistically to solve challenges bigger than one country alone can handle.

The most important trait in educators of tomorrow should be character: putting humanity above all else. This article looks at the challenges and solutions to designing the education of the future including EdTech.

What is Education

As per the Oxford English Dictionary education is ‘The process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university’.

For some, that education is obtained on the streets and is solely about staying alive one day at a time. An education consists of fighting society’s long standing stigma against educating the girl child, not getting married at a tender age, being able to earn enough to feed hungry mouths and possibly learning humanity by being a criminal.

Therefore, education has to be looked at more holistically by enlarging the radius to include the slums, shanties and the streets into the debate along with the advent of technological disruption.