IIEP Strategic Debate: Education for 21st century children - English version

0:01 so good afternoon everyone I think we can start welcome to this first strategic debate of 2019 with the topic breaking the barriers huh so it's quite actually a challenging topic if we give ourselves and we have chosen the topic actually because we know that one in five children between the ages of 6 and 17 is out of school according to estimates from the UNESCO Institute for statistics son and furthermore many of those who are in school are failing to learn the basics son with as many as 6 and 10 children in primary and lower secondary age not achieving minimum

0:49 proficiency levels in mathematics and reading so what will it take actually to remove all barriers and finally get all children and use to learning so we are shifting actually the focus from schooling to learning huh and today's topic is 21st century children what is the nature of modern childhood and we are very glad and proud to have Tracy burns with us who will present the interrogations and the results from an ongoing research project at OE CD's our Center for educational research and innovation Surrey on the nature of the 21st century children how has the changing environment of children affected their emotional

1:37 well-being and the physical house and what does that mean actually for teaching and learning and what is it actually that we need to take into account when we prepare educational policies and educational plans no so of course it's a topic that is very much of concern to us as educational planners but let me first present Tracy she is a senior analyst at the OECD's area and she leads a portfolio of projects including innovative teachers teaching for effective learning 21st century children that's the one she will be talking about and trends shaping education and until recently she was also responsible for in city's work on governing complex

2:23 education systems before her time at the OECD she worked on social determinants of health and well-being so she has also quite some history on the topic and as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia she led search team and investigating newborn infants responses to language Tracey has a PhD in psychology from North Eastern University in the USA and then we have with us real Mira Korean is a colleague from UNESCO where he is the leader at the futures literacy research policy and foresight section in the social and human science

3:08 sector before he was head of foresight at the UNESCO Bureau of strategic planning a faculty member it's yours for teaching in the masters of Public Affairs and the principal administrators at the OECD Center for educational research and innovation so we have two former colleagues here sitting side-by-side and talking to each other and I think it's a very nice coincidence that I was not planning for but I found our time so we will have some 45 minutes of presentation from Tracy and then reel will lead us into the debate with some questions first to Tracy and then with some interrogations I'm sure he has as a

3:54 as a person who's very much concerned with trying to analyze the future and doing prospective analysis so the floor is your and perhaps I should mention also that you are very much welcome actually to use Twitter and to post your tweets on hashtag strategic debates it would be very happy to see what you are coming up with thank you very much and please Thank You Tracy thank you very much I will stand because I like to wave my hands around when I talk thank you very much for this invitation it's a pleasure to be here I came not from the OECD

4:39 headquarters a 10-minute walk away I came from Gulen which is where the education director it is of the OECD and it's always a great excuse to come on a sunny afternoon and have a little smile walk in Paris so Micaela said I will present our work on 21st century children it has three main questions and I'll just go straight into them so that you can sort of see where we're coming there there are spaces up here and I promise not to ask difficult questions of anybody who sits up here so feel free the work has three main questions the first is and yeah if you want to what is the nature of childhood in the 21st century and that's an it's an honest question is it different is it the same I mean we talk a lot about it as if it's

5:25 changed but it's actually a question I think we need to ask and then a question which is near and dear to the heart of a lot of educators which is how can we protect and guide children while still allowing them to be children and learn by making mistakes and this is something that in our modern world with preoccupations for safety there's a lot of worry about the risk we allow childrens to take and how how much risk is is a possible risk actually and the third one is of course what does this mean for teaching and learning the way we do this and it's very deliberate approach we have two specific elements why is that it's multidisciplinary so I work in the education Directorate but here we are drawing on research from the

6:13 physical sciences from biology from psychology from mental health many many different disciplines and also different policy traditions and secondly that it takes a lifespan approach which is for our purposes looking at childhood 0 to 18 and this is something that in an education we don't always do because we have particular slots that children fit into early childhood or K to 12 or three and then we think of them in that box as opposed to them as a person and so what we wanted to do in this project was sort of turn the lens around a little bit and say instead of saying how is the child doing in terms of education ask how is education doing in terms of the

6:59 child and the child's needs and the child's life we chose four main themes of study these themes actually came out of discussions with our countries the OECD's 35 member countries and they they are they identified them as the themes that were most important to them the four themes are physical health things like play eating habits alcohol and drug consumption and sleep emotional well-being things around stress depression anxiety socio-emotional skills and suicide technology looking at the digital divide information is power social networks and also cyber risks and lastly families and peers and thinking about changing values diverse families

7:46 aging parents and the role of peers and so one of the things that I want to underline here before I go through my talk is that this is an OECD project so it really looks at oacd countries and so I count on you to be able to fill in some of the reality from the much broader UNESCO reality and I acknowledge right away that this is very OCD centric so listen with those ears and please elaborate as you'd like to help expand it from from broader perspective the objectives of the work threefold first is to identify the relevant research and think about what that means for education research and policy secondly to get countries together to talk about it to share their experiences think

8:31 about what works what works for them but also think about what doesn't work and that sometimes very hard for countries to share their mistakes it's actually a difficult thing for people to talk about and lastly identify the research gaps and where we don't know enough and I actually think this is probably one of the most important things that this project can do is identify what we don't know because in the absence of knowledge we sometimes like to fill in the blanks and it's done with the best intentions of course we care about children we want them to be healthy and strong and happy and so we are trying to do more and more for them but it doesn't mean that we always follow what the research says and to give you an example of that I'm just gonna tell you a little story about our

9:17 modern world and it's a story about technology and sleep actually and so here's this project called 21st century children and here are three quotes from writings about the modern world the first one says the complexity and rush of modern life is not only affecting adult sleeping patterns but it's reflected in children the second one says this is a sleepless age and more and more were turning night in today and the third one says the stress and strain of modern life necessitates increased brain activity insomnia brain fatigue are products of the last few decades why do I have these things up here because this is a talk about the 21st century

10:02 children and every single one of these quotes came from the turn of the 20th century so what I wanted to point out was that some of the things that we feel are so real because we are living it are actually things that have happened before and many of our concerns about our children motivated by the same pride and the same love and the same will to protect them are exactly the same as they was as they were before and I think one of the things that we would like to do in our work and insist on doing in our work is going back to the research to understand what has changed and what has not changed and one thing I think we can all agree on is that our love for children and our will to protect them has not changed so the question then is how much of the world has changed and

10:48 what's different and one of the examples I want to give you from research still on this story of sleep and technology is this is not a very pretty slide sorry but it's historical trends in sleep sorry and so here's the slide it was it's actually from a meta-analysis we was published in the Journal of Pediatrics and what it's looking at is sleep duration in minutes and it's looking at a number I think there were 37 different studies that they found yes 32 sets of recommendations these are recommendations for sleep by medical professionals from 1897 to 2010 and what they found recommended is the empty

11:35 circles and actual is the dark circles what they found in this study was that the recommended sleep duration consistently exceeded actual duration by around 37 minutes and that part is kind of constant actually if you look so there's something that was consistent regardless of the actual amount of sleep so it was like as if children always needed more sleep regardless of how much they were actually getting and what they say and this is what I wanna underline here is that the rationale for these recommendations were really was really consistent across 100 years that children were overtaxed by the stimulation of modern living that stimulation was embodied in whatever technical avatar was important at the

12:21 time whether it was school or the radio or television or now the Internet and that was what made them very worried about brain structure and sleep of children and so similarly striking these authors say is that all of these researchers who are doctors acknowledge that they didn't have any empirical evidence for their guidelines but they still publish them anyway and I'm gonna come back to this I'm gonna come back to this because this is one of the hot topics right now you will recognize in the amount of screen time children are allowed and should have and this you will see this it's continuing so this is my beginning of this what I will say now in terms of getting on with the talk is just giving you a sense of how we work

13:08 we work of course we start with the research we are not experts I work in education I am NOT an expert in sleep research I'm not an expert in obesity research certainly not an expert in mental health and so we work with the spec research but we also work with researchers in those domains we asked them for their help and we asked them what they are sure they know and what they would wear what they sure they don't know actually we also work with our countries we have created a questionnaire that asks them about their practices these are education ministries we ask them in working with them in seminars and what we do is we try and bring these several sources of information to a series of reports that we've published and I'll end with those

13:54 so if you're interested you can find them on our website that really for us tries to do two things it tries to understand what the state of the research is asked what it means for education and then also sort of take away the myth from or the hype from the reality try and peel them apart and understand what we should care about and why so just to remind you four main themes physical health emotional well-being technology families and peers what I'll do for the rest of my time is go through each one of these four in turn and just give you a lightning fast overview of what we have found in studying the research in those areas as I said all of this has been published and I'll put up at the end the the actual paper so you can look them up if you'd like turning them to physical

14:40 health this is a trend in physical health and it's sort of a sort of good-news-bad-news approach the good news is that in OECD countries young people tend to smoke less on average they tend to drink less alcohol and they also tend to consume more fruits and vegetables on the bad-news side they tend to sleep less they do tend to have a higher body weight and they are less average on act are less active on average just to give you an example of data here is obesity overweight these actually are not children but it's a cool set of data so I wanted to get to you anyway the data on children are similar this is looking at across all of these OECD countries and here's the OECD average the percentage of the total

15:26 population that is categorized as obese overweight and what you see here are the actual numbers for those countries and then the average is 1980 1995 and the latest one and so what you see is not only is the trend in the same direction for every single country there is no exception but the speed of change is increasing so that it's actually expected well actually they're they're hoping that it will level off soon but it's not clear that it has and for children this is this is huge this is immensely important it's hard to understate the impact that these obesity figures have on children diseases like diabetes diabetes and and cardiovascular

16:14 diseases were once considered diseases of adults and now you see them in children as young as two so this this is a huge trend and again there is not an exception in the OECD countries they all see even though of course some countries are still much lower than the average another example this is child deaths so this is accidental injury causing child death deaths between zero and fourteen the bar again for OECD countries is all negative so it has all decreased in this time and you've got a very small decrease there to a larger decrease here but the actual size is not as important because if you start with a low number the decrease might be small but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have you had a worse reaction so it's it's

17:01 sort of just a relative change over time but this very clearly shows things like insisting on car seats safe play spaces things like that they make it different in the in the in the health and mortality of children and so these are all very positive things that we've seen and we've been able to identify in our research so just two examples and I will move now to the emotional well-being again the overall view sort of good news bad news the good news is that on average we can come back to this if you want but on average there are decreasing levels of youth suicide and I have those data which I'll show you in a minute the bad news is that there is on average increasing levels of pressure anxiety

17:46 depression and interestingly there is also decreasing levels of average life satisfaction so children are reporting that they are less satisfied with their lives in the last 10-15 years there doesn't seem to be much change in bullying and somatic complaint if you have an upset stomach if you feel a bit unhealthy and again that's an interesting bar because that's not what the media seems to highlight so this is important for us too to highlight and talk about what that actually means why do we care not only do we want our children to be happy and and well-adjusted and feel good but one in two adult mental health conditions begins in adolescence and so it's really

18:31 important to be able to follow and track and step in and give care to children or adolescents who are struggling in the early stages which will help them much more later in their lives so just a couple of the data points these are teen suicides this data is from the w-h-o so they actually have an enormous data set we just have the OECD countries here for the slide but you can find all the countries that the waho covers and it's 15 to 19 and here are the data from 2000 and 2015 on average it's decreasing it's a bit of a mixed bag in most countries it's decreasing the one really big exception is over here which is New Zealand and those are astonishing results actually

19:16 in 15 years to see that kind of increase and I talked to our New Zealand delegate to try and understand what was going on there and she actually didn't have very good answers I mean they're very aware of it it's something they talk about often they have many policy initiatives but they actually don't know what's driving it so these are the results we do not have data on children younger than 15 and that is something which is actually we really want to get those data because it's very important and it's something that's in the news a lot right now another example of data this is from our Pisa test the program for International Student Assessment this is a bit complicated so it's just the amount of bullying that's being exposed higher numbers mean more bullying less

20:02 bullying and essentially you can see a very big difference in the amount of bullying that students these are 15 year olds that they report having experienced in the previous month and this is anything from feeling left out to being made fun of or physically threatened having things taken away from you it's it's a very broad definition of bullying so those are the two examples I have from emotional well-being so we moved to technology and of course as you've probably noticed I've separated these as if they are discrete categories but they inter lap all the time and it becomes really clear when you get to technology because you actually start seeing the trends touching on each other but for the purposes of our being able to understand them we keep them separate

20:48 and again we've done the same thing with the positive and the negative so on in the positive line there has been much more increased access to technology Hoey city countries but many in most countries around the world technology is actually very useful in making friends it used to be around 15 years ago there was a worry that children who used a lot of technology would make fewer friends and that it would interfere with their making friends but it turns out that now that technology is everywhere and everybody's online it actually is kind of an extension of your friendship pool so it's not either/or it's and at least on a moderate level it's also very very interesting when you talk about children

21:34 as content creators not just passively watching or listening to YouTube videos or other things but actively being empowered to create their own content imagine their own futures talk about their own lives and that's something which is a huge difference to be able to have this capacity to reach so many people in such a short period of time and that's very clearly a positive on the negative side there is some very clear research and I have these data about feeling bad when not connected people start to feel uneasy if they're not connected this is research on children but I would argue actually that we might also ask adults how they feel when they don't have their telephone with them their connections it's a question for all of us I think of course also being

22:21 online more means that you are more exposed to risks and those risks are very serious and they're very well known there's some very interesting work that has been done both at the OECD and in many other places to categorize the risks and try and identify them and think about the best way to to attach a sort of stop or manage risk actually which I'd be happy to talk about later and then the negative downside is the second digital divide so if you remember the first point here was increased access that was the first digital divide some people some families had access to the Internet and some did not and the good news is is that many countries that divide has been narrowed the bad news is is that now there's the second digital

23:07 divide which is you might have access to it but what are you doing with it and we see again the difference between advantaged households and disadvantaged households and that divide is actually growing and so the it's they're doing less with it the skills are less they're less empowered to do they under they're less guided in what they can do and so this is a really serious concern for equity purposes that second digital divides and then there's a big category here where we just don't know part of its because technology moves really fast and it's really hard to do the research part of it is because we genuinely don't necessarily have a good sense of how you would do the research on this and one of them is about the increased time spent online I'll come back to this later but

23:52 we don't actually know moderate use we don't you know we don't know when does it become too much we know we all have a feeling that you know 10 hours a day is probably a bad thing but at what point is it too much and at what point should parents be worried we don't know very much about young children if you know Facebook Twitter snapchat all of those apps and and tools you're theoretically supposed to be 13 to use them theoretically all you have to do when you sign on is say that you're 13 or use your parents password or you know we know very very well the children as young as eight three five are using those and we don't know very much about the impacts on them and lastly the difference much of the

24:39 research the sort of newer research on technology is still looking at Facebook but technology moves so fast that now Facebook's you know for grandparents and so I've put Instagram and snapchat there but that's probably already gonna be old by the time by the time this gets published so it's it's one it's coming from a research perspective it is inherently hard to do good research on this topic and so the criticisms that remember to get into our accurate but it's with a very sympathetic eye it's not expecting the field to do more it's asking the question of what do we want to do about this because this is going to concern everyone that technology is moving faster than most of our systems can handle just to give you some examples of the data here are Pisa data from 2012 and 2015 so it's only in three

25:27 years a super-fast trend looking at about when children use the Internet when they're six years old or younger in 2012 they were there were fewer of them than in 2015 so children are using it younger we know that the other thing is the disadvantage advantage point this is just a question in the Pisa test that said do you agree or disagree that the Internet is a good source for obtaining information and what you see consistently in every single country that's up there is that advantage students were more likely to agree with that than disadvantaged students and there's this is one example there's a series of questions it's very clear that the ability to use and understand the opportunities is broken down by a number

26:13 of lines including gender coming to this point about the connection between the themes here's then obvious one between new technologies and emotional well-being these are piece of 2015 data basically these are the children who self-identified as extreme Internet users this is the percent those are the countries extreme Internet user in the Pisa test is defined by children or 15 year-olds out of school who spend more than six hours a day online and you have from almost 30 percent in Chi day to much lower percent in Korea and China the average is 18 point three percent this is self-report so maybe they're

26:59 exaggerating we don't know maybe they're under estimating over six hours a day outside of school on line on a school day these are the percent of kids who say they feel bad if they're not connected it's very variable not much gender difference mixed and it's higher than extreme users obviously which means that most people in fact feel bad if they're not connecting I had to go somewhere the other day and I left my phone at home and I spent the whole time being like what if something happens I'm not gonna be able to tell somebody I was like Who am I gonna tell what's gonna happen it's okay you can go to the bakery without your phone but it was really I was really like oh and so you know we can worry about that but I think we can also ask ourselves how

27:45 comfortable would we be putting our phone down and just wandering away I think we might all right pretty highly on that one and just to hone in this is the area where we really wanted to highlight the research gaps because there's a lot we don't know what we are concerned about this is ourselves or colleagues in other domains at the OECD our Science and Technology colleagues as well as our health colleagues is this mismatch between what is happening in the public discourse and the media and the evidence available there is very there is not strong evidence that using

28:30 social media for example causes depression or anxiety there is evidence that they're related but you don't know if one causes the other and the effect could be the other way you could use more social media because you're anxious and depressed for example this we need more research on I'm not trying to say it's not important but we need to be very careful how we report on it and how we want to operationalize it in schools and in families we don't have almost any information on young children not on what it does to their brains not on what it does to their bodies not on what it does for learning both positive and negative by the way there's lots of great research on potential positives but we don't know we have a lot of correlational research this is associated with this but we don't actually know of what causes we need

29:16 longitudinal robust data but as I said longitudinal data on technology is really hard because technology changes so fast if you've started looking at 15 years ago what would you even be studying you wouldn't what was Facebook around No yeah so I don't you know it would be irrelevant now so if there is a real question about how you construct a research project that has a longitudinal component which means that it's still relevant and comparable to a modern day because technology is so fluid that it's actually not you know that's a really serious issue and then that's this point we don't know much about the Internet of Things the newest social media developments peer to peer online activities and again for good or bad we

30:01 genuinely don't know and when we report on this to our education colleagues that's it's not very satisfying if you are a policy maker you want an answer I mean you you're worried you want to know and you want to do the best you can for the kids in your classrooms but we feel that it's actually very important to say when we don't know people can make their own choices based on that but we have to acknowledge that we don't know and then the last one that we look at is families and peers this is the one we're still currently working on so we don't have the NEET slide that sort of goes plus and minus but what is very clear is of course there's a progression a long life from early childhood where you have this strong parent-child attachment and a good strong version of that is

30:47 associated with positive physical social and emotional development middle childhood you start seeing the increasing importance of peers five three years when kids start going to school and hanging out with more peers you see their importance but the family is of course more central and then in adolescence the peers become really really important and in fact sometimes more powerful immediate influencers then family but at the end of the day family is still important one of the things we're very interesting in is sort of modern parenting styles this is the connection between parenting and technology there isn't very much research so this is just kind of an overview helicopter parenting you know what that is it appeared in the 1960s but is really emerging more and

31:35 more now there is research on it what it's associated with in terms of child outcomes and self-esteem and confidence in school outcomes since 2004 so we'll be doing some publishing on that there's Tiger parenting which is kind of a version of this more recent and more connected to some elements so there's a lot it's much harder to get good research on this and we're doing more work now on this and these questions I'm not sure these terms are going to stick but the concepts you can understand phubbing so when you're actually on your phone instead of taking care of your child and Sherin ting which is when you post pictures of your pad on the Internet right so two things about this we don't so you can see by when they emerged by the research I don't have a lot to say

32:20 because it's all new but that's not gonna stop me from sitting a few things.first rubbing one of the things to be really worried about here is going back to that second digital divide it seems very clear from the research that's there that the parents who are most likely to be on their phones during dinner or at the playground or out for a walk our parents who are less advantaged who have less access to cultural activities who are busy doing other things who maybe don't have time to sit and work and have a nice face-to-face conversation over their dinner and that is gonna cause the second digital divide to be even bigger and is very concerning and the sharon

33:06 singh one oversharing about your children on social media it might sound like fun but we had some experts come to an expert meeting and they there their work was on adolescent identity and when you're an adolescent that's when you define yourself you get to say who you are and for many of us sir at least people my age you to do that if she lived in a small town maybe everybody who knew who you were but you could go to a big city and redefine yourself if you wanted to you could imagine something new and you could start a new story or you could at least really decide who you were and go with it but if you think about kids today they have a digital imprint which is in their name which is the real name for most of them from perhaps before they were born and they were never asked

33:51 if they wanted that super cute picture of them with the funny little face and pile over their face posed they were never asked if if it was okay to show them with all their friends when they were five years old and this is a difficult conversation I'm not saying it's not okay to do that but I am saying that if you think about it from the child's perspective of Who I am I'm ten years old I want to invent Who I am there is a whole history which you didn't create are you created of course but you didn't decide it what went on there and that's a very different thing and I think one of the things that I find most interesting in this research is really that question about identity in a digital age and what does permission mean you know obviously if you're our Canadian delegate said I feel I'm really worried

34:37 now I'm not worried about Sharon ting I'm worried about grand Sharon ting because he could put pictures of his grandchildren all over the Internet and I mean it's I think these are good questions we don't have any answers right now one thing we do have an answer on is sort of the ubiquity of some of these things I talked about helicopter parenting being the most common one and the longest one of this and I thought when we first started working on this just I'm from Canada I thought well maybe it's sort of you know from my cultural background maybe this is just one of the terms we use in my country and so I just asked my team I said well you know where you from Hungary Sweden in different places do you have a term and they're like oh yeah we have a term and so I said okay I'm going to put up a word document on our shared drive and can you just enter your terms and they

35:24 did there's four people they did and then later in the afternoon I opened the document and there was like 15 different terms because they had sent it to other people from other countries and within I think 12 hours we had this and we had this and in fact we stopped because I can't get any more on the slide but on the slides but effectively except for one Greek colleague who claimed that helicopter parents in Greece are just called Greek parents every single language had a term even if it was just a version of helicopter parenting which was in Anglicism and i and i the turks debated because they felt that turkish mothers would be justice as likely to be

36:12 hovering over their children as greek mothers but in fact they have a term in turkey so so they debated it but so only to say that this is something obviously that resonates with many many countries in the OECD and externally and I'm sure it would be interesting to know how much we can extend this list so just to finish off with one more data slide on the importance of peers this is some more piece of data and this is just 15 year olds talking about how happy they are with their life how satisfied with their life they are this is the change whether or not they hang out with their friends after school so the thing to notice is except for this small non significant result here in french

36:59 belgium the rest of it is all positive so they report being happier if they hang out with their friends after school which sounds reasonable and you've got a high up here in russia - the OECD average here and then all the way down at the bottom there but so that I mean we know this in a way this is just the data but you have friends you feel good about yourself you feel more inclined to go to school and you feel happier at school and we know that that is associated with strong learning and good learning so now we come to the delicate point in the conversation where people always say well what does this mean for education and we're getting there in our work we created a policy questionnaire

37:44 where we wanted to ask Minister what are you doing about this I mean we can tell you these results and and we have we know that this actually goes hand-in-hand with a huge push to thinking about 21st century skills we know that it goes hand in hand to thinking more about modern education where everybody's involved in the classroom not just the teacher who closes the door but the community is involved in a broader discussion but then there's a real question of well how are you going to make this happen because there's a lot of people involved in all these special areas and teachers are very busy people they are not experts in sleep they are not alcohol and drug counselors they are not you know I mean individuals might be but

38:29 they're not necessarily trained for that and I think there's a really serious question about when we want to deliver this kind of holistic well-being for kids and one of the main vehicles is schools there's a question about well how are we gonna make that possible how are we gonna support the schools the teachers the parents the principals and so we wanted to ask our countries what they were doing in all of the four areas and if they had examples of what they considered a real success what they were proud of we also really took a closer look at partnerships and teacher education and training we just the survey is actually closing tomorrow so it's not finalized yet so I don't have

39:14 any results to show you but what we wanted to do was really what I want to do is just give you a little bit of a sneak preview of what some of the main challenges that are coming out and the first one is the biggest challenge is I eluded it to the beginning at the beginning of my talk which is this is a very holistic view of childhood and understanding the whole of a child and I think many people resonate with that it's important they understand that children are not just grades and mathematicians I mean they're they're people who we have to think about their well-being in a very broad way but education is very compartmentalized structures and it's not clear who is responsible at what point and who should

40:00 be responsible at what point because there's a real issue around how we want to deliver the service and how we want to make it work really really well in terms of what is the content of what we're going to teach we talk about things like digital literacy or health literacy I mean these are sort of new concepts of these this is what you need to know to do very well in these domains and they're very important to get right we have to understand them in a nuanced way can't be just a very traditional very simple way of thinking about these things but then how do you connect them to measurement and accountability measures maybe you don't want to that's also fine but then at least in OECD countries is a real question about what

40:46 is valued and how you value things that you can't test and that's a whole other topic for discussion that I'd be happy to pick up on third one is the importance of aligning the system and really thinking about if we want teachers to play a role in these things then we need to support them we need to actually ask them what they need and how we can help them and that means also we need to help the teacher educators because they didn't grow up being perfect at snapchat and if they need to think about digital risks and awareness to help the teachers then we need to think about who's training those trainers of teachers and so it cascades all the way down the system and the other one here of course is thinking about what that means in reality and here I'm going to use the technology

41:34 piece again to talk about partnerships and governance and regulation so we asked about partnerships do you have partnerships with mental health do you have partnerships with parents most systems do do you have partnerships with mental health experts physical health experts dentists doctors guidance counselor's I mean whatever we had the many systems quite a bit of variations but more or less doing okay until we got to more of the cyber things do you have partners too partnerships with cybersecurity experts do you have partnerships with law enforcement or any kind of policing that might understand what you would do if there was hacking we right now in our classrooms we have data that is coming from almost every single

42:21 exercise that a child will do on a computer that's that's just that's just what comments of doing work on a computer and schools of course are charged with protecting that data but they're not cybersecurity experts and I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to become cybersecurity experts and so we have a question in thinking about how we want to support those partnerships who's responsible how you keep abreast of the change because even if you give all your school principals training in one or two years technology will have changed so much but unless you're constantly training them which I would argue is not actually feasible it's not a long-lasting solution so you actually need to partner with the people who know and who are constantly updating because that's their profession but then

43:07 you have all kinds of questions about ownership and proprietary information and that's also another thing that we can discuss that means something for governance too because by the way there is a lot of international work on this there are people who know much more than I do who are working on the governance of risks and thinking about international treaties and protection of children online but those mechanisms move very slowly and we know that technology doesn't and so there's always a game of catch-up for any kind of governance issue and the same with regulation and so I think these are fundamental questions not just for education but from an education perspective I think education needs to really think and address those issues and lastly just to end we have a couple

43:53 of lovely lovely initiatives and promising practices just in not in technology we're still going through the data I'm sure we will find some in technology but just to give you a couple of tastes of things in Japan for example in big cities they have farmers that come to the schools and talk about their jobs talk about being a farmer in downtown Tokyo where a lot of those kids don't get a lot of access to farms and just just that I mean it's it seems very simple but actually what a great way to make that connection and to actually think about the physical health and real world at that connection of your kids and they were proud of that they shared that with us in New Zealand the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education are working together in a set of pilot

44:40 schools to really work on mental health to really tackle mental health particularly in their Maori and Pacific Islander population and trying to really understand how do we support these kids from the youngest age because they already know who is most at risk and then in Canada my country and in fact reals country there's really a lot of work in the province of New Brunswick to really rethink integrated service delivery which is something we've been talking about for 30 years and which we can routinely say doesn't always work very well and so really trying to rethink that and challenge themselves to do it well so I will end there as I promised I will show you the working papers that give the reviews of the literature we've done thus far we've

45:27 done one on physical health emotional well-being new technologies and we have just published one on the impacts of Technology on children on the neuroscience and physical biological not I mean the out the bottom line is we don't know a lot but it's a really fascinating review of the literature we're doing the family and peers now we are analyzing the questionnaire and we'll hope to have those answers for you soon and and we'll continue we're publishing something in the summer which looks at the intersection between technology and emotional well-being and we'll be continuing to work with our experts and our conferences and our countries because we want to keep pushing this and keep asking the hard questions um so I will stop there and thank you for your attention thank you

46:18 very much Tracy for very clear and very timely presentation at the point in time where we really wonder about school systems and how in schools how they adapt to the children and not the other way around and I think that there are quite a number of challenges out there both the systems and schools and also teach so I think we have to look at these things of course it's a multi-level perspective um real would you like to take the floor and be the discussant uh thank you very much a great pleasure to be here thank you to the IEP and thank

47:05 you very much Tracy for a fascinating presentation of a critical issue absolutely central obviously because children are central it provokes a lot of thoughts in my mind about the way we frame these issues and I think I think the the the terminology we use and even the the perspective we have on it so and I just wonder extending the idea of helicopter parenting which I take to mean hovering and being able to monitor and be sure of the safety of children I wonder if we're not doing helicopter policy and and and worrying to a certain

47:53 extent about you know being in control and knowing and being able to ensure coherence and rationality and evidence and real-time and when you put forward the the quotes from the turn of the century when electricity was becoming generally accessible and therefore day and night were becoming merged because all of a sudden at night you could be like in the day you know are we really undergoing as significant a change now as we were then and to what extent did the need for policy to determine what was you know good and bad what's harming us what's hurting us how much does you know that this this imperative that

48:39 we're experiencing to and to just extend it a little bit more to the psychological and the health and well-being isn't that in some sense creating an ambience of anxiety should we be surprised if children are you know having you know find that contagious and that the anxiety of the helicopter state and the anxiety the helicopter policymaker and the anxiety of control and and and in trying to let's let's get rid of that uncertainty you can't have that maybe all that safety is as part of the neurosis psychosis destructiveness just just a thought to see if you can rebound on

49:27 what we've actually thought about this a lot and for physical health I mean one of the really fascinating experts we had at one of our meetings is somebody who actually works on trying to make play spaces less safe not because she doesn't care about children she has three children but in North America which is where she's from the push has gone in her mind she's a population scientist and a health professional too far that things have become so safe that kids actually don't really know what to do if they fall down I mean they I mean they

50:12 still fall down but they don't scrape their knees the same way they don't fall off a bike I mean there's there's less chance to have accidental injury which I put up earlier of course that's a good thing but then there's a line of well what do you do when you don't ever experience a problem and what do you know what do you do if you've never seen it a little friend crying before because they hurt themselves I mean what what does that mean for sort of understanding what to do in those situations and so she does really great research not trying to advocate for you know throwing children back into some sort of early 20th century stage where there is all kinds of dangers but trying to think about where you might want to add a little bit more risk in their lives

50:58 to allow kids to make mistakes in fact and to allow them to just to experience a little bit of disappointment and I think that there is I think it she's on to something but I understand at the same time that it's super difficult and from a policy perspective you will never ever win an election by saying let's let kids get hurt more often I mean this is just this is not a way to go and so in some ways it's very hard to come back from that position and actually I'll just give you one last piece of her argument which is she works with parents and she asks parents what are you most worried about about your kids what what are you most afraid about and the first answer was well actually I maybe I can ask you what would you what would you think would be

51:44 the thing that parent would be most worried about about their child sorry health okay a specific example so exactly physical health what what kind of what might happen to your kid okay you're more you're more conservative so the first thing that these parents said was they were really worried about their child being kidnapped actually that somebody it would come up in a van and take them away because that's terrifying in fact I mean it is right that's everyone's worst nightmare the tech the chances of that happening are extremely remote but they were worried about it the second thing was that they would be seriously hurt and they would not be

52:30 there and they would not be able to help them but the third biggest thing that they were most afraid of was being judged as a bad parent by the other parents and having social media like I'm calling the police because you didn't and this is a very weird thing because it's very easy to say we need to push back I okay I I can't change policy but I can change my own family and then you have this pressure from yourself and from your peers which is a whole different world so I find this super fascinating actually it's not my area of expertise but I think there's something which is really important and I think one of the things we need to do is talk about it more and and and talk about it honestly thank you so just to go a

53:15 little bit further so let me riff off off that and and kind of push it push it a little bit further I mean so let's take it let's take it to the broader picture of development let's take it to the broader picture of climate change let's take it to the broader picture that you know the way we treat children is not something isolated from the rest of what we do that it's part of the way we exist in the current world and it seems to me that that you know having been at the OECD for a long time myself and now at UNESCO and having been a civil servant for a long time one of the big questions is is about the the fundamental ambition the desire the drive and it's not just a question of

54:02 rationality and coherence and making sure that things fit and that you know we've done the best that we can to ensure that we know what we're doing and that everything is under control but it's more than that I think it has to do with with this issue of our relationship to the world around us at a very basic level in other words what I see and I do work on the future is that we're fundamentally at odds with the universe meaning we're really in a very bad position with respect to the world around us that the anticipatory systems and this goes for children as much and their parents the anticipatory systems we use because

54:48 we're not very aware of them and because we don't try and elaborate them result in essentially a form of pain and cognitive dissonance that is very profound you know we're trying to control the world we're trying to colonize tomorrow we're trying to make sure that the safety and it and for me safety wouldn't even be a physical thing there's a really big difference if in your mind you're ready to take a risk in other words it's a mental attitude and it's a question of experimentation it's a question of exploration it's question of a responsibility is allocated in your own thinking about your identity and who you are in quite a few cultures responsibility is not ex-ante it's not designated in advance you will be

55:34 responsible for this call the fire department when this happens you're responsible when it happens because it's happening here and now and you are enabled in such a way that you look for something that's relevant in the context that you're in in other words it's spontaneous it's not prepared it's not planned and it's you know the the whole discourse and framework that we're using and I'm it's not to be critical of it you know the the the the rigor and diligence and transparency of what you're doing is outstanding but it's part and parcel of what seems to me and this is some of the work that we're doing on something called futures literacy that that calls into question

56:21 in some senses the entire framework of preparation and planning if we really take seriously the capability approach the sender spawn that capacity is the is the key issue you can do all sorts of wild things and destructive things and terrible things with capacity if I know how to read and write I can you know do poetry or I can make war if I'm capable of reacting not according to plan but on the basis of what's actually happening and taking advantage of it I'll do something completely different than what I had in mind because I'm stuck to my plan and I'm anxious because oh dear oh dear I wasn't sufficiently prescient I wasn't

57:07 sufficiently well prepared in order to do what I was supposed to do so I don't see the obvious that's right there in front of me because I've lost my connection to complex emergent reality and I've swallowed the myth that we can actually play God that we can determine the future we can know the future we can prepare for the future we can plan for the future and so this comes back to something really basic why aren't we playing more why aren't we all playing more and Tracy said the aw that's what Piaget said and yeah that's right because if you look at what goes on you look what happens when we play we learn we know that play is emergent I do lots of games with people thinking about the future and there's something fascinating about when you

57:54 play when you give people playing cards because we've been most of us have been socially conditioned to accept that a playing card is an arbitrary choice we don't fight it we accept it and then we play with it then we try and do all sorts of wild and crazy things okay but that's because it's play and that gives us permission and so much of what we're talking about so much what we do so much about education so much about preparation for the job market for climate change for 21st century skills so much of that preparation the 21st century skills approach does move towards a more capability and competency based approach but the issue becomes you are what you eat that the medium is the

58:40 message and the way that we instill these competencies even if it's playing within the four walls of the school and not simply just listening to the teacher even if you're playing within the four walls you're still a bang obeying the law that requires that as a child you be it's compulsory you go to the school and you're still obeying a rule that's very convenient for your parents who go to work and you're still fitting in to the shop on time follow the rules interact with strangers rules of the factory or the office and so we have to I think begin to really open up our thinking about not just children but how you know

59:26 the child's within us has been in some sense it's completely eliminated because and I'll end on this I know so the children might my children the children might are now having their children so I'm but just about in grandfather arrange um and so it's nice to see but you know what you see with little kids I mean you know one two five four five is that they're testing testing testing testing their brain I mean they're not doing you know they does this work oh that works but then they forget and then they have to do it again and then the circuit does and they're testing and they're testing their experimental and we know this from the literature and from the cognitive stuff experimentation gets somehow diminishes after age what seven eight something like that come on we live in

1:00:14 this unbelievably rich universe which is experimenting not because we're so you know brilliant or we're creating these but because these experiments just happen all the time and what's our capacity to appreciate that experimentation to sense and make sense of that experimentation and it seems to me that these are some of the issues that the that if we're going to open ourselves to questioning what is the nature of childhood which was your opening point that we really need to you know push past helicopter policy to to to to the to the bigger kinds of questions not that it's irrelevant but it's what's the relationship and are we ignoring one at the expense of the other

1:01:00 and what's the relationship between the two so that would be my my little comment on kind of using the future to think about childhood yeah I think you're real I think it's an important point actually questions a little bit how we deal with uncertainty yeah and what is it that we can do when we when we try to plan and can be really planned and how should we plan I think it's a very crucial question of course to our Institute thank you both of you for the presentations I think we can open up the floor now for a series of questions or comments to both our

1:01:45 speakers and I would suggest that we take three in a row please present yourselves I say give you affiliation and then your question and then we will have also some questions from our online community later or none so who would like to ask some questions if you have eager who else yeah please you can of course speak in English and in French huh mmm see we'll play and who else do we have a third question no but then then we go with two for the time being you can see to jalapao all

1:02:43 thank you for the the presentation it was really a very interesting and interesting to see how we want to take into consideration what changes into the definition of child into the 21st century with the overall social changes and technology technological change I have a question which is it also relates what you define as new challenges would say for children in 21st century also relates to the question of how we want to define school and what school should do and maybe not to and out of the Feder any of these issue should be dealt with in school it's a provocative question of course but in a way the question that we have to raise is that school have to

1:03:30 take into charge some of the shortcomings or even failures of the overall society not only parents and families in society I'll just give an example that I think he's close to what you said I learned that in Denmark they are now learning empathy in school to kids is it what we want to do in school well when we see that we say that's fantastic but it's also a major failure of the overall social you know social link social interaction so I think it's a little bit provocative but I think it also relates to what kind of school do we want for what kind of scale of kids the second thing is about the the method you presented that as an approach which is

1:04:16 interdisciplinary it is in a way but I'm also wondering how you take into consideration everything that relates to findings which are not in a way quantitatively reachable or that we cannot grab through quantity now a lot of disciplines that are not here and help us really to think about that about what the child is how we define child and thinking of philosophy of religion thinking of history of geography and so on so how do you grab these findings which are not quantitative merci bien merci de Manila

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1:07:37 upon from Yahoo sees a party property which tetra comment on the work defeated me / a definite away confirmed affirmative Memphis Aubrey Pascal lamb Cunha presentism volatility coos Oh Edie shorty demon past panic watsuhita Emily Sara na present Asuka Jeffy mercy be a [Music] thank you for I'll just I'll just add a little little piece on the on the technology bit and the openness of it all since I've been I've been at the game for a while you know back in the

1:08:22 back in the the the 90s when I was the OECD not in Surrey but in the international futures program we did some work on the future of the Internet and you know the typical concerns you know AI is coming nanotech is coming biotech is coming oh yeah yeah yeah yeah you know it's the latest thing okay so we we thought about the internet a little bit and and one of the metaphors of the internet back then was that it opens up new frontiers that it creates open spaces well we know something about open spaces and power it's not like we have you know this hasn't been something that humanity's face before when you create new territory people occupy it and there

1:09:08 might not be any rules and the person with the gun or the you know strong they will dominate so we need rules so we need rights we need do process we need transparency these are all things that are pretty straightforward and you know we've been doing this over centuries now actually and so when it comes to a lot of these tools that open up and that are essentially symbiotic I mean there was another part of this which which had to

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