Learning 3.0

We are three educational researchers working with three different populations: children, students and professionals. IFB, founded in 1987, is a major player in vocational training in France, specialising in the acquisition of soft skills. Ifomene, a leader in negotiation and mediation training, opened its doors in 1998 on the campus of the Institut Catholique de Paris. As part of her work at the Universities of Lund and Malmö (Sweden), Alexia is conducting research into how education policies fit into their economic, cultural and social environments.

What has just happened in France with the snap parliamentary elections inspires us to reflect on the crisis in the French education system, which is no longer able to fulfil two of its fundamental missions: integrating citizens into the community and training (future) workers for the changing realities of the workplace.

Whatever our political leanings, we believe that the difficult situation in which France finds itself at the start of the summer of 2024 can be partly explained by collective disarray, general anger, a mismatch between individual expectations and the opportunities on offer, and the unpreparedness of a generation for a new kind of reality.

While the world as a whole has gained in prosperity since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, thanks to globalisation, there is at least one category that has been an exception: the Western middle class. The spoilt child of the thirty glorious years, accustomed to the welfare state and social protection, Europe’s ‘little white man’ has aged. The average age in 2024 will be 42 in Europe, compared with 39 in North America, 30 in Asia (27 excluding Japan and China) and 18 in Africa. The growing imbalance between consumption and social protection on the one hand, and working hours spread over the course of a lifetime on the other, has gradually made them less competitive than their counterparts.

Over the years, it has sometimes been replaced by :
1. Low-cost workers, often of foreign origin: in construction, roads, transport, delivery, cleaning, nursing and security. These workers, who single-handedly kept the system afloat during the Covid era (2020-2021), revealed the relative usefulness of middle-class bullshit jobs, tucked away in the shelter of confinement.
2. International skills or outsourced assets with high added value, such as prestigious shopping centres (Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal).
3. Automation, based on mechanisation, robotics, digital platforms or artificial intelligence.
The French middle class now feels downgraded. It is less easy for them to find their place in the economy. They are used to comfort, security, mass consumption and freedom of movement and opinion. All they want is to grow old in peace and quiet or to achieve individual fulfilment. For them, democracy is simply an inalienable right that allows them to freely express their discontent or their complaints. The cognitive bubbles that suck her in through social networks comfort her in her certainties of denunciation and demands. She no longer thinks about what she can do for her country, but only about what her country should do for her. They sometimes vote for extremes with fanciful agendas, because it is easier to point the finger of blame than to implement concrete solutions.

It seems to us that we would not have reached this point if the French education system had done its job properly and prepared the population for the realities of a different world. The technological lead that Europe had at the end of the twentieth century over the emerging countries of the time has now melted away. There is no longer a captive market or natural resources to appropriate. Europe must now share the cake equally with the rest of the world, and even more so with Asia, which is younger and more industrious.

So let’s take advantage of the window of opportunity that seems to be opening up after the uncertain elections in July 2024 to put things straight. Let’s imagine that for once it is possible to rethink, on a blank page, the entire global knowledge transmission system (GKTS), a system that includes schools, universities, vocational and continuing training, corporate knowledge management processes, and all the tutorials, publications and educational media. Let’s rethink this SGTS from the ground up, in much the same way as Descartes in his Discourse on Method envisaged rebuilding Philosophy at the end of the Renaissance by wiping the slate clean of all preconceptions.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the Third Republic, when Jules Ferry introduced free and compulsory primary education with the law of 28 March 1882. The aim was to respond to the technological, economic and social upheavals brought about by the first industrial revolution, when the fate of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and the outbreaks of revolutionary violence (1830, 1848, 1970) implied a serious revolution in thinking. Public education set out to develop the transmission of useful knowledge and its preservation in the human memory.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a post-industrial « service » economy developed, which consisted mainly of manipulating information. School and university education then evolved, as did the beginnings of continuing vocational training. The emphasis shifted from memorising knowledge to reasoning skills. As Montaigne put it, it was better to have a good head than a full one. Written essays, requiring verbal virtuosity or intellectual coherence, became a tool for socio-professional selection, while the storage of information was gradually delegated to electronic memories. Calculators were allowed in the classroom, as long as students could juggle abstract constructions brilliantly.

At the start of the 21st century, the context in Western Europe is even different. From their connected screens, everyone can have direct, free access to almost all universal information, that of the living and that of the dead, while artificial intelligence is beginning to spread everywhere. The cost of processing abstract information, like that of storing it, is tending towards zero marginal value. Human aptitudes for intellectual reasoning are being or are in the process of being downgraded. The whole purpose of the SGTS needs to be reconsidered.

There is, however, some good news to accompany this bad news, as a new need is emerging at the same time. While the physical work of blue-collar workers in factories and the intellectual work of white-collar workers in administrative plants have lost their added value, new and useful tasks are opening up for the European middle class. These are a range of person-to-person services that can be grouped together under the name of the Relational Economy. A new economic sector is in full development, that of the « quaternary » (relational services), complementing or succeeding the tertiary (digitised information processing), secondary (robotised industrial activities) or primary (mechanised agri-food activities) sectors. This quaternary sector is proliferating wherever there is a person-to-person relationship: medical consultations, hospital follow-up, home assistance or care, personalised advice from a financier or expert, coaching of all kinds, private lessons. It still has a bright future ahead of it, because its scalability, i.e. its automation, is by nature more limited. The quaternary sector is ushering in a Singularity Society, by definition resistant to mass processing, a Gesellschaft rather than a Gemeinschaft.

So why not imagine a SGTS for our time, one that would prepare for the needs of tomorrow, rather than those of yesterday or the day before? Rather than asking cohorts of 30 students, crammed into a single room, to passively listen to standardised information of a quality that is often inferior to what they might find if they took out their smartphones, could we not instead ask them to experiment with postures and behaviours that would guarantee them a place in a less standardised, less centralised, more autonomous, more evolving economic fabric? Instead of training generations of pupils to dissertate on classic texts that nobody reads any more, why not offer them theatrical, social or entrepreneurial experiments, in partnership with businesses or civil society? Why not train the ex-pupils of the ex-school in the behavioural skills they will actually need to find a place for themselves in the fabric of the Relational Economy: listening attentively, valuing or motivating their interlocutor, expressing themselves intelligibly and convincingly, calmly asserting their point of view? The SGTS could bring together schools, universities, continuing education and corporate knowledge management processes. The storage of knowledge and the processing of written information could be replaced by workshops involving interaction with real people or the management of interdisciplinary projects, such as the production of a documentary, the organisation of an event, the federating of a community, or the launch and promotion of an online platform.

The dedicated place could be anywhere, in real life, or at least outside the Jules Ferry classroom. The dedicated time could be anytime, in real life, and certainly outside the predefined and standardised timetables. The dedicated support person could be a real-life economic or social player, or in any case not necessarily a CAPES or agrégation graduate. The budget for this SGTS, built and reconciled with the real world, would therefore be much lower than current costs. We could even imagine a barter system or an alternative currency, like the Saber, used by students in Brazil who are short of teachers. The premises could be partially replaced by coworking or co-learning spaces. The ministry’s administrative services and non-teaching staff, who by 2022-2023 will account for around 300,000 of the 1.2 million staff, or 25% of the national education system’s workforce, could be partially re-engaged in the front office, in contact with learners. The administrative investment made by training organisations in the formal renewal of their accreditation files could be reallocated to operational educational research.

This would put schools back at the service of the nation, and not the other way round. Vocational training could once again do its job of developing skills instead of putting together compliance dossiers. Disorientated citizens could regain their place in economic and social reality, and at the same time find meaning in their lives. Future generations could once again invest in collectively useful action, rather than in blind anger born of confusion that is no less so.

Alexia Bocquet, education researcher, graduate of the University of Amsterdam and Malmö,
Chimène Bocquet, Director of Ifomene (ICP, Paris),
François Bocquet, Director of the IFB Institute (Paris).