In a Newsweek article, The Classroom of the Future, leading teachers, inventors and entrepreneurs were asked about their vision of what schools would be like in the year 2025 and how learning will change over the next 2.5 decades.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that technology will amaze, but teachers will remain at the epicenter of education. He said that one issue as a society going forward is to teach kids to express themselves in the medium of their generation. For the better part of the past century, the medium was the printed page and people consumed and wrote for that medium, Jobs said. The current medium is video and photography, but most of us are still consumers as opposed to being authors, he added.
“We see things changing,” Jobs said. “We are doing more and more with movies and DVDs. The drive over the next 20 years is to integrate these multimedia tools to the point where people become authors in the medium of their day. We think there is tremendous power in this. You should see the movies that kids and teachers are making now. They make movies to sell an idea and to lead a team.”
When students themselves are creating, learning is taking place, the CEO said. But teachers have always been and will always be essential to this process, he added.
“And teachers will be at the epicenter of this,” Jobs said. “Anyone who believes differently has never had a good teacher. I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”