New curriculum should provide learners with important life skills

There is a saying that goes; the more things change, the more they stay the same. This could be true. When we peer into the past through the lenses of history, we can identify recurrent patterns that have shaped our humanity and the progress of our societies. These patterns give us an intuitive sense that things will always be the same. However, when we look into the future introspectively, we can’t hide from the imminent presence of change and how different it seems to be from the past. Picture the accelerating pace of technological innovation, change in sociopolitical values, a revolution of our lifestyle and the implications thereof.

These are unprecedented changes, a manifestation of increasing complexity in modern day problems that we have to address. On a global scale, for instance, we have to address complex issues; the effects of unprecedented climate change and global warming, the threat of massive job losses and layoffs resulting from technological innovations that place many human jobs in the hands of robots and machines, socio-economic inequality depicted by the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots and emergence of global terrorist factions that threaten to advance ideologies of fear and destruction.