Of all the sectors that have been disrupted by advancing technology, education — and higher education in particular — has remained relatively undisturbed.
Yet the World Economic Forum estimates that 65% of children in primary school today will one day do jobs that do not yet exist, while the core skills required across existing occupations will be wholly different by 2020.
So, are we preparing our young people for the jobs of the future? Or will we soon be facing, as economic development minister Ebrahim Patel puts it, "a dystopia of mass joblessness and enormous rage by particularly younger generations deprived of the promise of a job, having invested so much time and energy in education"?
It is likely that future jobs will place less of a premium on specific degrees, such as engineering or mathematics, than they will on the skills taught within those degrees, such as problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity.
After all, if artificial intelligence one day learns everything there is to know about law, auditing, medicine and maths, it follows that what will really count is not textbook knowledge but the ability to put knowledge to good use in order to solve problems.
Flexibility and adaptability will be essential to success, says Paul Donovan, global chief economist at UBS Wealth Management, who advocates for the "Oxford University model".
"At Oxford you are not taught, you learn. If your university degree is reliant on memorising a textbook, you are a low-skilled worker, as you’re only useful while that information is relevant," he explains.
The other thing about Oxford, says Donovan, is its collegiate system, which places students pursuing wildly different academic disciplines together in colleges. "You have to be open to new ideas from outside your specific area. A monoculture in investing or economics in a time of dramatic change is dangerous."
Of course the irony of the Oxford University model, useful though it may be, is that higher education the world over has remained relatively traditional in its approach to educating.
"The whole education landscape is ripe for disruption," says Sizwe Nxasana, former CEO of banking group FirstRand and now co-founder, with his wife, Judy Dlamini, of Future Nation Schools.
As its name suggests, Future Nation Schools is attempting to future-proof students for the fourth industrial revolution, changing the way teachers teach and students learn. It has five pre-schools, two primary schools and two high schools in Gauteng, with plans to expand countrywide and eventually into the continent.
"Universities in SA are still structured in such a way that says if you’re in the humanities, you don’t need to learn technology or coding. But we know this isn’t true. It doesn’t matter what degree you’re doing, there are certain basic things you will need as part of your armoury. At a foundational level, you’ve got to know how to solve problems and be creative," Nxasana tells the Financial Mail.
Among the subjects taught at Future Nation Schools are African studies, entrepreneurship, leadership and technologies, which includes robotics and coding. A project-based approach to learning compels students to integrate content from various subjects and apply it creatively. There is also a firm focus on connecting education with what happens in the real world.
Nxasana tells of how grade 7 pupils produced books on the way that African people of old used micro-organisms for medicinal and food purposes. Alongside combining biology with writing and drawing, it also taught them, he explains, how micro-organisms can be used to solve food production problems, which could be a future challenge as populations urbanise.
Echoing Donovan’s sentiments, Nxasana says education will need to give people skills to reinvent themselves regardless of their chosen careers. He foresees the emergence of new higher education institutions that don’t have any baggage and can reinvent what education looks like.
This is already happening. Stadio Holdings, the Curro spin-off that recently listed on the JSE, says it intends to create a "multiversity" rather than a university, which "implies sameness". Stadio hopes to offer a "diversity of knowledge with diverse institutions catering for the diverse and relevant needs of the SA marketplace". It will educate "for life and for a profession", it says.
To be sure, higher education will be a difficult sector to disrupt. A combination of powerful vested interests and the premium, in many instances, which employers attach to qualifications from established institutions over newer, smaller players could protect the status quo for some time.
When massive open online courses (MOOCs) burst onto the scene in 2011 — think Coursera and edX — pundits believed higher education would never be the same and that access to education would finally be democratised.
This conviction was understandably strengthened by the fact that high-profile universities such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and hundreds more were making courses available online, in some cases for free.
Degrees in computer science, business and data science can be done via Coursera, developed by two Stanford professors.
Despite the promise of MOOCs, the reality has thus far been far less transformative than expected. Research done in 2013 found that few students were persisting to the end of a course and that the vast majority already had undergraduate degrees.
There are a number of reasons for this, none of which, argues futurist Martin Ford, are insurmountable.
For instance, facial recognition algorithms or those that identify plagiarism by scouring vast datasets online could in future solve the problem of cheating and verifying student identities.
Employers would have to recognise qualifications obtained via these online platforms and, for this to happen, there may need to be more widespread accreditation from existing institutions. Elite universities in particular have a clear disincentive to do this.
Still, "it would be very premature to declare the MOOC phenomenon down for the count", Ford writes in his book Rise of the Robots. "We may, rather, simply be seeing the early-stage stumbles that are typical of new technologies."
While a university credential, he adds, may become less expensive and more accessible, at the same time "technology could devastate an industry that is itself a major nexus of employment for highly educated workers".
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