Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

‘water tables [are] falling annually over much of the country by between one and three metres’. And this in a country whose population will eclipse that of China in 2045. (In fact, by 2016, the United Nations predicts India will have a larger population than Europe (Russia included), Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and the United States
combined
.) And in 2009, the controversial Venezuelan Hugo Chavez president exhorted his countrymen and women to spend less time in the shower each day. ‘Some people stay in the shower singing for at least 30 minutes. Three minutes is more than enough,’ rallied Mr Chavez. ‘One minute to get wet, another to put the soap on and the third to take it off. Any more time than this is a waste.’ 9 Of note is the fact that, according to a scientist on Radio 4’s
In Business
, ‘We have no technological limitation to purifying to the highest degree all of the world’s oceans.’ 10
    12 Mass famine in ill-organized countries
    According to a report in
The Guardian
in 2007:
    Some 40% of the world’s agricultural land is seriously degraded. Among the worst affected regions are Central America, where 75% of land is infertile, Africa, where a fifth of soil is degraded, and Asia, where 11% is unsuitable for farming.
    ( www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/aug/31/climatechange.food )
    13 Destruction of life in the oceans
    Heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? 11 It’s a soup of non-degradable suspended particles of plastic waste spinning endlessly in the North Pacific Gyre. How much is there? Oh, about 100 million tons. How big is it? According to one estimate, ‘maybe twice the size of the continental United States’. It will never go away … .
    14 Possibility of world war with nuclear and biological weapons
    Einstein again –‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’
    So, there you have it. Feel better now? Let’s say you choose to reject all of them but one (and Martin’s particular front-runner is number 10) it doesn’t really matter. TEOTWAWKI is TEOTWAWKI and we only have one world.
    The good news is every single one of these ‘mega problems’ as Martin calls them is solvable. Human beings are infinitely resourceful. We’ve been through all sorts of rubbish in the past and pulled through. The thing is, it’s not you, me or James Martin who are going to solve the problems. After all, we created them. It’s going to be the children whose coursework you were going to mark before you picked up this book; it’s going to be that bottom set year seven maths group you so dread teaching on a Thursday afternoon; it could even be – and this is where the pressure really is on you and your colleagues – that girl you are just about to permanently exclude for not following the school rules. These are the people that James Martin refers to as the ‘transition generation’. They are the ones who are going to get us out of this mess. But they can only do that if we, as teachers, equip them with what they need to achieve this. That’s not just knowledge but the skills, attributes, passion and commitment to make a difference, all of which need to be combined with the ability to think, not our thoughts, but new ones of their own.
    The Director of Stanford University’s Ventures Program, Tina Seelig, teaches her students of entrepreneurship to approach such problems with relish. ‘Every big problem is a big opportunity,’ she says, adding, ‘No-one will pay you to solve a non-problem.’ 12 What, then, are you doing in your day-to-day job to ensure that you are equipping the future saviours of the world with what they need to complete that task successfully, bearing in mind that, as Einstein said, the mess isn’t going to be sorted by using the same thinking that created the mess in the first place?

Chapter 2
The future’s coming
    Next time you get the chance, open up Google and type in ‘Goldman Sachs Global Economic Paper No: 99’. Economics may be the ‘dismal science’ as Thomas Carlyle called it, but don’t let this paper’s unassuming title fool you. I’m not sure what was covered by the 98 papers preceding it or any they have published since, but this one paper caused a very big stir and coined a name that has become a ‘household word’ in business, shorthand for ‘things are changing!’
    The report from 2003 subtitled ‘Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050’ 1