Education has always been focused on getting students into one track and finding them jobs in that discipline. But in a digital age, students need to be more adaptable, wiser, and think more critically than ever before. I spoke with Joseph Cevetello about injecting empathy into education to help build strong human skills.

The current educational model focuses on results, diplomas and technical knowledge to get people into jobs. But in a digital age, where information is everywhere and AI is charged with processing that information, we need to rely on our human skills even more. While education has focused too much on fast-tracking students into hard-skilled employment, the wisdom, contextualization, evaluation and empathy that have always been treated as peripheral skills now need to be put front and center.

Re-centering education around our human skills will ensure that our society and our future workforce can work alongside AI to achieve truly great things, and that these essential abilities aren’t lost as our society changes and progresses.

Wisdom and evaluation

The education-to-job pipeline has traditionally helped to fulfill a country’s working requirements simply by teaching people a specific set of hard skills for one particular profession. In the modern, digital era, however, companies have a truly globalized workforce to choose from and a myriad of cross-functional roles to fill. This has resulted in a situation whereby entry-level positions require a degree to stand out in an ever-growing talent pool, to the detriment of adaptability and ‘soft’ skills that are becoming increasingly important. “Higher education institutions are trying really hard to show a correlation between what students learn at university and getting a job,” says Joseph Cevetello, an educator with more than twenty years’ experience in higher education and the current Chief Information Officer of the City of Santa Monica, “this needs to be suspended for a while so that students can get that latitude of thinking.” Given that the majority of process-driven, hard-skilled work is already being taken care of by automation technologies, students should not have a laser-focus on one career path that does not do justice to their wisdom, creativity or diversity of thought.

“Where AI differs from human knowledge is both in terms of wisdom and contextualization,” says Cevetello, “wisdom in my definition is knowing which body of knowledge to apply to a given situation, and contextualization is our ability to decipher how a situation is changed by that knowledge.” Humans are far more capable than the current education system gives credit for – “if you think in terms of the DIKW pyramid humans are far above that basic information processing” says Cevetello – and shifting education’s focus away from hard skills will allow us to build on our own wisdom, contextualization, and evaluation abilities. “If our education system isn’t teaching us how to evaluate information properly,” Cevetello continues, “then people get stuck with their ideas and don’t see that there are other perspectives that need accounting for.” With such a huge volume of information and opinions now available at any time, humans are already falling into the trap of simply absorbing and repeating ideas without thinking critically. As Cevetello puts it, “I think people have started confusing volume of information with validity … if we rely solely on AI to analyze all this information then we will lose that human ability to influence it, interpret it and make an impact with it.”

Re-design thinking

It is not easy to change your ideas once they are bedded in, however, and we need to build on another of our key human skills, empathy, to try and open up the educational system to new ways of thinking. “Teachers and professors are also human and we also get attached to our ideas,” says Cevetello, “I think it takes a lot of humility, it takes exposing people to very dissimilar bodies of knowledge to show that there are different ways to approach a problem.” Trying to understand and incorporate others’ perspectives, even for experienced educators, is a difficult and highly self-reflective task, and the educational system that tends towards absolute ideas and discrete subjects does not encourage this kind of compromise. For Cevetello, design thinking is a way to inject empathy back into education, as a structure that encourages diversity of thought and ‘trial and error’ approach to learning.

“Design thinking starts with empathy and that is key to educational contexts, because you need to suspend your existing belief about the topic being presented to you to be able to truly listen,” says Cevetello. Starting with empathy allows students and educators to open up a common foundation of understanding, to collaboratively “define a given situation and the appropriate body of knowledge to apply,” says Cevetello, and continue through the stages of design thinking – ideate, prototype, iterate – together. “To me that's the type of education that we should be focusing on if we want people to understand each other and build their own wisdom,” he continues. Changing education in this way will require a huge amount of work, however, as the current system does not allow enough flexibility neither for the student nor the professor, and “there is too much of an assumption that an 18 year-old can know the trajectory of their life,” says Cevetello. “Empathizing is meeting someone where they are as a student and giving challenges, and that is messy, that takes someone very willing to go that extra distance,” Cevetello continues, “we need to create environments that have a framework but let people get lost and discover things they didn’t know about, that's truly where you learn the most.”

Scaling empathetic education

Bringing empathy, evaluation, and wisdom back into education as core abilities to learn and enhance is not an easy task, but a vital one if we are to move away from an educational system whose cracks are showing. While the current focus of education is to move people from one subject into work in that field, Cevetello argues that centering education around empathy and our human abilities is more important: “education is about listening to people where they are and helping them along their path,” he says, “not knowing 100% where you’re going is okay in an educational context.”

Getting back to an educational system that offers young people the chance to explore their options and become adaptable, critically thinking, and wise individuals is a much better fit for today’s diverse world of work. In fact, it might be the only way to achieve a healthy and productive future of work.

This article was written by Charles Towers-Clark from Forbes and was legally licensed through the Industry Dive Content Marketplace. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.