With the rise of digitalization and technology, a new set of skills is needed for future work. These competences are not related to any specific domain of work. Instead, they are valued as vital for future professions in general. When these new skills are discussed in the context of educating next generations, most reports focus on a change in high school and university systems. However, it might be better to start at an earlier age given the type of skills that are at stake.
The demands of the job market are changing. Main reasons are the shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, the interconnected nature of the business world, the increasing need to interpret data, the automation of many routine jobs, and today's fast-changing world in which the education of adolescents will not be sufficient for the 40-50 years of work that follow. An increased demand for creative, analytical, collaboration and communication skills manifested. As a result, these skills are becoming a pressing topic in the discussions about the education of future generations, and school systems are being reevaluated all over the world. The focus is mainly on changing the school curricula of students between the age of 15 and 24. Starting at that age, however, one can wonder if the attempt to develop these kind of skills will succeed.Creative and imaginative thinking, for example, are automatically present in the minds of children. Exemplary are the endless questions from the average 4 year old about matters most adults consider as obvious. A child’s ability to think “out of the box” (creative and imaginative thinking) is more natural because there is not yet “a box to think in”. By the time a child is 10, however, he or she is much more likely to be concerned with getting the right answers for school than with asking good questions or having imaginative thoughts. This has everything to do with the school systems young children participate in: repeating what has been taught is rewarded most, and this diminishes creative and imaginative thinking.Analytical thinking, to give another example, involves the use of propositional logic and preferable predicate logic, which are usually only taught in academic philosophy classes. These forms of logic are crucial to prevent fallacies in the analysis of a problem, argumentation, information, etc. When it comes to the development of these types of logic, they have a lot in common with mathematics and grammar, the later they are rehearsed, the less a student will be able to grasp and use them effectively. Instead of starting with analytical thinking in high school or university, a basic form of logic has to be implemented in the curricula of young children if analytical thinking is to be cultivated. The same reasoning could be brought forward for collaboration and communication skills; cultivating them needs to start in primary school.If this happens, your child might argue in the future that, although you told him “when he eats his supper, he will get dessert and since he didn’t eat his supper, he doesn’t get dessert,” he can still have dessert because your reasoning contains a logical fallacy.
