An interview with Ilya Savchuk about education trends, which we do not want to notice, about teams as main drivers of changes and perils for the education development.

What kind of education tendencies in the world are we unaware of or don’t want to be aware of today?

First of all, we absolutely ignore several trends – increasing complexity of information pressure and a “do-it-yourself” culture. It’s funny that the last mentioned trend flourished in Soviet Union. Our engineering breakthroughs have derived from it.

So, our educational strategy contemns the increasing complexity of the world, we do not want to take into account that today “proved for years methods” do not yield the results. On the contrary, they work negatively. For instance, let’s consider Fukushima case. It’s clear that the system complexity appeared to be exorbitant for the human. Correspondently, we should teach such thinking models, which will allow not going amiss in the information flow, controlling this increasing complexity.

“Do-it-yourself” is the second trend. The essence of it is that 3D printing, biological materials work technologies (including those on the level of genetic modifications), availability of technologies, which utilize nano-dimension effects – everything above-mentioned will move from expensive labs to the garages everywhere in the nearest future.

It is also a new thrust in the culture of world exploration – we would be even able to make some human organs crafted. We would only need to download a library of modes, genetic code decipherment and to order a set of materials. It is a trend that will give a good shake to the education in the nearest future.

Third issue is “Education of tomorrow”. Today leaders of educational market tell about “Education 3.0”. Not even this way – they say “Education 3.0” is important, while this notion includes “upbringing”. So, this tendency is about insufficiency of all today’s decisions taken in the sphere of education. Education and new knowledge generation are synonymic in this paradigm. Ed3.0 is multicultural, global process of creating something new, some kind of creative destruction — non-destructive one that opens new markets. This very direction is chosen by such “pioneers” of new education as University of Singularity (established by Google and NASA), Institute of Complexity in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States (SFI), MIT. Project studying, a project itself are ahead of the curve, the result of studying is alteration of the world. As a project, in the University of Singularity (http://singularityu.org/) students should create something that can change the lives of billions of people. First of all they devise a change and than work on the project, which creates this change. It is called “to work with future”.

And if we want “to cut off” now in order to stop hurrying after the world, which has gone on two steps of technological paradigm before, we need to choose pointwise and precisely what and how we should change. We need to select that level of institutions, where these changes could be transmitted, and go ahead – for the bright and radiant future!

Who actually triggers the changes in education?

People. Not single ones, but teams of people. If you decided to change something, change it. All the rest is secondary, frankly speaking. If there is a team, you will manage to change something; no team – no state assistance will help.

It’s necessary to correctly detect an institution to have changes implemented. If we take a school – it’s not bad, but not enough, and demographically less promising. A state is too big, and now this system is being manually operated, the state is unable to conduct huge systematic projects of such complexity. But if we take a university, it fits the idea very well! It’s both big enough, self-sustained to try changes’ projects and mobile enough to observe feedback and react promptly.

Who is hazardous for the education development?

The most hazardous thing is the desire to carry a face of a good person, for example, when drawing a report about innovative development or for enterprises, when proposing “own” specialists. The worst thing is to follow the political frame in order to please the content. Today simulacra built on new-fashioned memes, are more harmful than corruption of any scale. It’s obvious, because nobody eventually understands the real state of affairs. But what is more detrimental is that it’s quite difficult to discern real useful solutions in this flow of simulacra.

Recently, I’ve overheard a story from my colleague – about a panda in Vienna zoo. This panda could be taken on lease from China for a huge amount of money. The panda eats bamboo; she prefers doing it basing itself upon the stone near water. Only at this very moment it’s interesting to observe the panda, whereas usually it’s a boring animal.

So, in Vienna zoo they did a proper stone and a lake, and the zoo collected huge revenues. At the same time London zoo was not so successful, while there was no stone, and a lake was far from the fence. English people saw after Vienna zoo and moved several stones over in order panda could sit comfortable and people could watch it. As the results, investments started to be covered, and everybody was happy.

Well, our problem is that we at the very least learned how to place the stones – to write proper words, to collect marvelous pictures, to make presentations, to rename departments, but we do forget about panda in order to please the desire of carrying a good face!