The catalyst catapulting education into the 21st century

Education needs are changing. We’re still stuck in the model of education of late 18^th-century Prussia: teach the same thing to everybody, memorizing for exams, in an assembly line approach. Huge infrastructures of education, centrally planned and managed, have been very successful in achieving very high rates of education, but in many countries we’ve shut down the two mechanisms that create quality and value in any industry, which are competition and innovation.

If we want to take education to the next level, we need to open it up. We really need to develop skills in problem solving, creativity, communication, cooperation, as well as technological skills. And a broader method skill, which is learning to learn. We have an opportunity to change education and have broader human skills, a diversity of knowledge, and use technology rather than stick with one-size-fits-all.

We launched School 42 in Lisbon and Porto in the last three years. This is a school where there are no classes and where you really apply the fundamentals of learning by doing and learning with each other. The school has a platform like a big social game that leads students through various challenges. In the last three years, we have had more candidates in these schools than any single university in Portugal.

“The intersection of creativity and technology”

Now we feel there is a need to bring this education model to younger students too. So the first Tumo center will be launched in Coimbra in October. These are centers for creative technology for kids 12-18, where they spend four hours a week developing a portfolio project in the three areas that they themselves choose out of 14 possible areas. Our curriculum covers a range of artistic disciplines, including creative writing, music, photography, animation, programming, and robotics. We are always at the intersection of creativity and technology, using technological tools and creative tasks.

The learning model is project-based and peer-to-peer. The goal is to develop the creative technological skills but also to develop their human skills of problem solving and cooperation. It’s totally funded by philanthropy. Our goal is to be the catalyst of change in education and bring in a much more personalized and effective education model for personal development.

There’s really no reason why kids should be more excited about playing online games than about learning. They spend enormous amounts of time playing sometimes very complex games. If education was equally as exciting, I think that their time could be applied much more effectively. Education is still very expensive, very rigid, with very high drop-out rates, and there’s a mismatch between what the education system is producing and what is required. All these are symptoms of a system that can be made better.

A new model for lifelong learning

We need to experiment, innovate, and allow many different systems to compete with each other until we improve.

We’re also still stuck in a model where we have an education until we’re 22 or 23, work until we’re 70, and then retire. It doesn’t make any sense. The reskilling and upskilling needs are huge, and our traditional educational institutions are not geared to doing that at the required scale. We need to figure out new models—a responsibility for societies as a whole—but ideally we want people to see themselves as managers of their own human capital.

We need to provide them with the tools to enable them to assess whether their human capital is up to speed with what they want to be doing. We need to provide educational experiences to improve their capacity for lifelong learning, and again, technology can help. Finally, we need governments to create the environment that leads to these outcomes.

Urgent adaptation to a societal challenge

Online education is still very limited; you have practically all the knowledge available to you, but a lot of the courses are very lonesome journeys. It takes a lot of will to succeed. You learn better when you’re motivated by a mission, by a problem you want to solve, by a challenge, because learning is also a social phenomenon. You need to be learning with other people. A tiny fraction of people are able to sit by themselves with a book or learn online. It’s very tough.

There’s a sense of urgency now. The way we work is going to change rapidly, profoundly—just from playing around with ChatGPT and other AI engines, you can see that it’s going to change quickly, so people need to adapt quickly. There really is a societal challenge that we need to address.