Jewish Education in the Age of Technology

Those of us who think that having schools put laptops in front of our students will prepare them for future changes in our society are sadly mistaken.

The purposes of education will so significantly change over the next 50 years, we will have to completely reconceptualize the very nature of schools. This provides exciting opportunities to create Jewish schools that truly fulfill their mission. The age of technology will allow us to think of schools as places where students become creators of meaning and identity within a future world society where change is the only true norm.

There are three fields that are already radically changing how we understand what it means to be a human being: cognitive neuroscience (understanding how our brains work), nanotechnology (taking something and making it really small) and bioengineering or life coding (taking one thing and turning it into something else).

The advancements in these fields will result in some significant changes. First, we will see technology, which is currently outside human beings, become internal — what is being called singularity: Technology will be literally everywhere and accessible all the time. Second, we will be living much longer. Human life spans could reach hundreds of years or — another way of putting it — human beings will be able to choose how long they wish to live.

If you think I am talking about science fiction, there are many indicators that we are already at this point. For years, Parkinson’s disease patients have had electronic pacemakers installed in their central nervous systems to help then neurally control life-debilitating tremors. A handheld device that we all carry around (cell phones, smart phones) is several thousand times as powerful as the first computer — created only 60 years ago — which filled two floors of an office building and needed six technicians to operate it. And there are now eight people walking around the United States with new bladders regenerated from their own cell types to replace bladders diseased by cancer. Labs across the country have regenerated esophagi, ears (for wounded soldiers), heart valves (a completely regenerated heart is, potentially, only five years away) and, most exciting, biologically engineered eyes, which could eliminate human blindness.

With all of these changes nipping at our heels, what are the implications for educating children? What if I told you that students will be able to access and manipulate information that will allow them to solve complex math equations in first grade? Or that a student could cross-reference the entire world of Jewish texts to answer a halachic question in a matter of seconds? This shifting nature of the human landscape means that schools cannot be considered places for the acquisition of knowledge or formal literacies. All of these profound changes will mean Jewish education can make central to its mission and practice those skills that build community and continuity.

Schools will need to develop centers of inquiry and evaluation whose main goals will be to teach collaboration, responsibility for the good works of the group, trust and creative integration of various fields of knowledge across disciplines (compartmentalization of knowledge) or the idea of isolated disciplines will disappear almost entirely. Classroom teachers will need to learn to be facilitators and negotiators of human communication and meaning-creation. The idea of teachers who know something that needs to be passed on to someone else, as if it were a physical object, will also disappear. Instead, instructors will need to be orchestrators of deeply felt human processes where the construction of human meaning (or meaning-making) will be the central purpose of the work of young people.

These centers of inquiry will be largely project based and will need to employ the highest skills of human collaboration possible. The idea of working together will not only be a means to greater productivity, it will be seen as a central human value. The idea of individual intelligence will have less and less value as we see technology become more and more integrated into human biology. Instead, how and why we choose to interact with others to build meaning will be a much more important educational objective in the future.

As children become part of this new world, they will actually become much more powerful and capable of participating in the creation of new technologies at a younger age. As they become so powerful, this new approach to education will meld with fundamental goals in Jewish education. Children will need, more than ever, environments for identity creation (how am I different from someone else?) and values identification and integration. Students will need to identify and distinguish their values (based on personal, religious and national traditions and history) and determine what they do with those values and traditions in order to create meaning, serve their community, and by what means they will impart these values to a future generation of Jews. Schools that reconceive themselves as places where inquiry, collaboration and meaning-making are central to their mission will be able to meet the dream of Jewish education given the radically changing nature of the world in which we live.

Jason Ablin is head of school at Milken Community High School in Los Angeles.