Envisioning the future of education and jobs

Editor's Notes

• #5: Note: Income refers to real household disposable income. OECD average refers to the unweighted average of the 17 OECD countries for which data are available: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Some data points have been interpolated or use the value from the closest available year.
• #6: Note: Northern America includes Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, USA and Mexico.
• #9: Note: OECD average refers to the average of 32 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxemburg, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sweden and the United States
• #15: Note: Where the data for countries were not consistently available in the same years, figures from the closest year are used.
• #18: Half of the jobs in the industrialised world are potentially automatable, because the things that are easy to teach and easy to test are also the things that are easy to automate, digitize and outsource.
• #19: Notes: Includes extrapolated figures for Upwork based on most recent annual growth rates. Registered number of users for the two platforms combined.
• #20: Note: The figure is based on average data for 26 OECD countries. These include Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom
• #22: Goldin and Katz call this the race between technology and education.
• #23: Note: Data refer to the number of IP5 patent families in artificial intelligence (AI), by filing date and inventor's country, using fractional counts. AI refers to the "Human interface" and "Cognition and meaning understanding" categories in the ICT patent taxonomy as described in Inaba and Squicciarini (2017). 2014 and 2015 figures are estimated based on available data for those years.
• #24: *
• #28: When we looked at this more closely in 2008, many teachers talked about schools as rather innovation-hostile environments. For example, just a quarter of teachers said that if they were more innovative in their teaching, they would be rewarded, and this is not just about money, we looked at any form of recognition. The figures are particularly low in Belgium, Ireland, Denmark and Australia. A higher percentage of teachers, though, said that innovative practices would be considered in appraisal and feedback, though you would really want to see this figure to be closer to 100%.
• #29: Note: Countries are ranked in descending order by the average voting rates for the period 2010-18, covering national parliamentary elections from 2010 to the latest year with data available. Voting in Australia, Belgium and Luxembourg is compulsory. Vote was also compulsory in Chile until 2012 (the two elections comprised in this graph for the 2010s period, 2013 and 2017, were thus held under voluntary suffrage.
• #31: Notes: Countries are ranked in descending order of life expectancy gains.
• #35: I want to conclude with what we have learned about successful reform trajectories In the past when you only needed a small slice of well-educated people it was efficient for governments to invest a large sum in a small elite to lead the country. But the social and economic cost of low educational performance has risen substantially and all young people now need to leave school with strong foundation skills. When you could still assume that what you learn in school will last for a lifetime, teaching content and routine cognitive skills was at the centre of education. Today, where you can access content on Google, where routine cognitive skills are being digitised or outsourced, and where jobs are changing rapidly, the focus is on enabling people to become lifelong learners, to manage complex ways of thinking and complex ways of working that computers cannot take over easily. In the past, teachers had sometimes only a few years more education than the students they taught. When teacher quality is so low, governments tend to tell their teachers exactly what to do and exactly how they want it done and they tend to use Tayloristic methods of administrative control and accountability to get the results they want. Today the challenge is to make teaching a profession of high-level knowledge workers. But such people will not work in schools organised as Tayloristic workplaces using administrative forms of accountability and bureaucratic command and control systems to direct their work. To attract the people they need, successful education systems have transformed the form of work organisation in their schools to a professional form of work organisation in which professional norms of control complement bureaucratic and administrative forms of control.