When the World Wants Innovation, What Should Education Produce?
For most of us, the practical purpose of education is not difficult to understand.
We want children to learn. We want young people to acquire useful knowledge and skills. We want them to become employable, build careers, earn a decent living and achieve some degree of financial security.
There is nothing wrong with saying this openly.
In today's world, employment, career growth, financial security and a better quality of life are closely connected. For millions of families, education represents one of the most important investments they will ever make.
So perhaps the question is not whether education should prepare people for employment.
It should.
The more interesting question is:
Is the education system preparing people for the kind of employment that is emerging today?
The workplace has changed
For much of the industrial era, organisations needed people who could perform defined tasks reliably and efficiently.
Education could respond to this in a relatively straightforward way.
Learn the knowledge.
Acquire the skill.
Practise the skill.
Demonstrate competence.
Get a job.
Of course, the real world was never quite that simple. But the basic relationship between education and employment was reasonably clear.
Today, the relationship is becoming more complicated.
Businesses compete not only through the products they manufacture or the services they deliver, but increasingly through new ideas, better solutions, new technologies, new business models and experiences that differentiate them from their competitors.
And therefore employers increasingly want people who can do more than perform an existing task.
They want people who can question, adapt, solve unfamiliar problems, generate ideas and contribute to innovation.
That creates an interesting problem for education.
We are asking education to produce people who can create what does not yet exist.
But much of our educational machinery was designed around learning what already exists.
Can creativity actually be developed?
For a long time, creativity was often treated almost like a personality trait.
You were either creative or you weren't.
Some children were naturally imaginative. Others were considered more academic.
But that understanding is changing.
PISA 2022 assessed creative thinking as a domain that can be measured through students' ability to generate, evaluate and improve ideas. Its assessment looks at students' ability to generate diverse and original ideas, and to evaluate and improve ideas. It has even assessed creative thinking among 15-year-olds across written, visual, scientific and social problem-solving contexts.
This is important.
Because if creative thinking can be developed, then perhaps we should stop asking whether a child is creative.
We should start asking:
What kind of educational environment helps a child become more capable of thinking creatively?
And that takes us somewhere much more uncomfortable.
What are we actually training children to do?
Imagine a child who has spent twelve years learning primarily to:
- find the expected answer;
- reproduce what was taught;
- avoid mistakes;
- follow instructions;
- complete assignments;
- prepare for examinations;
- and obtain good grades.
Now imagine telling that same child at age twenty-two:
“We want you to be innovative. Think differently. Challenge assumptions. Come up with something nobody has thought of before.”
Perhaps we should not be surprised if that feels difficult.
Innovation requires experimentation.
Creativity requires room for possibilities.
Problem-solving requires encountering problems that don't already have a model answer.
And learning to improve an idea requires being allowed to produce an imperfect first idea.
None of this means that knowledge, discipline, mathematics, science, language or examinations are unimportant.
They are not.
The challenge is whether our educational system can develop these foundations while also deliberately developing the ability to use them in unfamiliar and creative ways.
The OECD's research points in this direction. Its analysis of education systems found that creative thinking is increasingly present in curricula, but also identified barriers including overcrowded curricula, limited assessment focus on creativity, and insufficient teacher training and resources.
So perhaps the problem is not that creativity has been completely ignored.
Perhaps the problem is that we have not yet figured out how to make it a normal part of everyday learning.
What might education look like if we took this seriously?
I don't think the answer is to create another subject called “Innovation.”
Nor do I think every child needs to be turned into an entrepreneur or forced to produce the next great invention.
That would simply create another form of standardisation.
Instead, perhaps the change needs to happen much deeper in the educational experience.
A young child might be encouraged to ask, “What else could this be?”
A science student might be asked not only to explain an experiment, but to design one.
A mathematics student might encounter problems where there is more than one possible approach.
A language learner might be asked to create rather than simply reproduce.
An older student might be given real problems with incomplete information and asked to decide what information is needed.
Assessment might include the development of an idea—not just the quality of the final answer.
And perhaps failure would sometimes become evidence of experimentation rather than simply evidence of poor performance.
None of these ideas require us to abandon academic standards.
They require us to rethink what we consider evidence of learning.
Perhaps the bigger question is this
If employers increasingly need people who can think creatively, solve unfamiliar problems and contribute new ideas, then education cannot simply continue producing people who are very good at giving the answer that somebody else has already decided is correct.
That doesn't mean we need to throw away the existing system.
It means we need to ask whether we can add another dimension to it.
Knowledge matters.
Skills matter.
Qualifications matter.
But perhaps so do curiosity, experimentation, idea generation, judgement and the ability to improve an idea.
And perhaps these abilities need to be developed much earlier than we traditionally assumed—not because every child must become an inventor, but because the ability to think differently may increasingly become part of being employable.
That brings us back to the original question.
If the world of work is changing, should education simply teach children to fit into that world—or should it help them develop the capacity to shape it?
I don't have a simple answer.
But I think it is a question worth asking now.
Because perhaps the future of education is not about producing more students who can give the right answer.
Perhaps it is about developing more people who can ask a better question.
And maybe that is where we need to start...
thinking differently about education and learning.
Official OECD links
- OECD — PISA main page
- OECD — What is PISA?
- OECD — PISA 2022 Assessment & Analytical Framework
- OECD — PISA 2022 Creative Thinking
What do you think? 👇
I'd be interested to hear from teachers, educators, lecturers, academic leaders and other education professionals who have experience with these issues. If you have a different perspective, a classroom experience, or an approach that has worked for you, please feel free to share it in the comments.
Thoughtful disagreement is welcome too. The aim is to learn from one another and keep the conversation going. Thank you!
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