An important question is whether more refined methods for capturing people’s skills beyond what is taught at school will become a source of liberation, allowing academic institutions to focus more on learning and less on sorting, freeing up economic resources for both individuals and society.

– Back to the Future of Education, OECD

Kairos is the time of cleverness, chronos the time of wisdom.

– The Clock of the Long Now, Time and Responsibility

It is not altogether true that time and tide wait for no man. This is a proverb and not an idiom. Unlike idioms, proverbs are statements of fact. It is suggested that a plain reading suffices to make meaning clear. Idioms differ in this respect; they require a non-literal interpretation to make sense – Against the clock. While the literal meaning of this proverb may be true, its idiomatic meaning is misleading.

The expression Time and Tide Wait for No Man is used to inspire action because time flies and worms too do not wait around for late birds. The suggestion is that it is entirely possible to miss the boat.

This conception of time is linear and in fixed units. Twelve months may be a good time to take stock of where we are and what we have achieved or it may not be. It really depends on what we are trying to achieve and the nature of our time horizon.

Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates writes about time cycles and the importance of having the right time horizon. He suggests that time is a cultural construct. For example, he says, “… to Americans 300 years is a very long time. For the Chinese it is very recent”.

Time is a subjective construct in the sense that it can drag or whiz by depending on the qualitative nature of experience. 30 seconds can feel very long if you are performing high knees on the spot and 30 minutes can feel too short if you are on a scenic boat ride.

The Foresight Conference Report 2019 (FCR 2019) released by the Centre of Strategic Futures, Singapore states, “different cultures measured and valued time differently” and that there are “different registers of time”. It distinguishes between time in virtual reality and physical reality.

To make the point that time is really a human construct instead of an objective reality, the report gives the example of how in the 1960s “US cities were designed around ‘car time’ or the time taken to drive from one place to another”. An establishment which is 10 minutes away by car could take significantly longer to reach when travelling by foot. Whether a building is near or far would depend on how long it takes to reach. It goes on to say that “today” “foot time” is “becoming more important”.

It recommends that children should therefore become ‘multilingual’ in terms of time, “comfortably operating in multiple registers and speeds, and potentially translating between them”.

Students need to understand the concept of time horizons, that time is subjectively experienced and cause and effect in the physical world could seem a lot more laborious and protracted when compared with the virtual worlds of games. While a building can be constructed in seconds in SimCity, it might be painful to sit by a flower and wait for it to bloom.

Some tasks would require them to operate quickly in a race against time. They would require skills such as scanning and multi-tasking. For such tasks, they should be able to shift focus between and among a multitude of elements which could change in time. Spending time on computer games, online auctions, social media and clicking on headlines by different news outfits which appear on their Google feed, would stand them in good stead for such high-speed endeavours.

Realities like “market-driven economics”, “the next election perspective” of some democracies, “acceleration of technology” (Brand, 1999) and the consequent 24-hour news cycle with its premium on breaking news is suggestive that students would do well to take heed of the Red Queen’s advice to Alice or the prognosis of Klaus Schwab who pointed out quite a long time ago (relatively speaking of course) that “We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to a world in which the fast eat the slow” (Brand, 1999).

When Alice ventured forth to meet the Red Queen in the Garden of Live Flowers, she said she wanted to see what the garden she found herself in was like. The Red Queen and Alice began running to take in the sights. The strange thing was no matter how fast Alice ran; the Red Queen kept asking her to go faster. After a long time of running, they ended up in the same place where they had begun. Alice was greatly surprised and told the Red Queen that in her country, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing”.

To which the Red Queen replied, “A slow sort of country!” and compared it with hers where, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

There is however also an equally compelling case to develop skills of slow deliberation and sustained attention. Developments in technology are measured on the dimension of speed. If we have technology to process things quickly, do we also need, like the Red Queen, to go faster and faster?

An OECD report on trends in Education, released earlier this year and which uses Singapore and Finland as exemplars for the world, considers how schooling could evolve to prepare students such that they are not replaced but differently placed in relation to technology.

It makes the following observation: Important to curriculum design is the recognition that students develop meaningful understanding through prior knowledge transfer, epistemic reasoning and meta-cognitive skills rather than by accumulating facts in an ever-growing variety of topics.

Algorithms can do wonderful things very efficiently. However as discussed in FCR 2019, relying on them entirely might lead to very skewed outcomes and leave users ironically disempowered. For example, “one could build a game avatar but would actually be playing someone else’s game”.

Indeed, there are in existence, thinkers and outfits asking for “Algorithmic Justice”. Epistemic reasoning, highlighted by the OECD report is about questioning the assumptions behind how the algorithms are designed. In this way, equity is not sacrificed for efficiency.

The machine could be right always. Even so, it cannot be relied on to always produce the best or even right outcomes. Some may be wondering if judges could be replaced by artificial intelligence because a machine could theoretically process more precedents across relevant jurisdictions, the applicable law and a set of facts to produce a verdict based on impeccable legal reasoning – many have explained cogently why this would be an elegant path to gross injustice. Another concern, Chen (2017) says “it remains an interesting question whether AI can adapt legal reasoning to new scenarios which are not found in available legal sources”.

The OECD report contemplates a possible future where the “teaching professional has vanished… where rich learning opportunities are everywhere and individuals have become prosumers in their own learning”. This scenario naturally includes the word “machine”.

Again, machines cannot replace teachers because according to the OECD report, there is “wide evidence on the key role that motivations and emotions play in teaching and learning” and teachers have to be “attentive to the emotional needs of pupils and actively build warm relationships with them”.

Even if a machine can diagnose needs, cognitive and also emotional, given facial recognition technology, it is very difficult to imagine a warm relationship with plastic and steel.

So then, there is a need to develop sharp reasoning ability tempered with applicable social values and culture specific ethics. Without such ability, students would become price takers rather than setters because they are unable to question assumptions. There is also a need to develop soft skills such as emotional awareness.

The Government Report on The Future, published by Finland, states, “future needs for competence are associated with the so-called non-cognitive skills or meta-skills, such as the ability to learn new subject matters, manage one’s own use of time, identify the essential and think critically”.

It is quick to qualify this assessment by pointing out that “wicked problems… the interpretation of past and future times, or unravelling the secrets of man and the universe will still require profound study and erudition, as well as human empathy, curiosity and various increasingly intricate professional skills”.

Profound study, empathy, intricate professional skills and the ability to think critically about assumptions cannot be achieved on any fixed timeline. Returns on certain investments could also take a long time. FCR 2019 notes that “We might need longer time cycles to make bigger bets” on useful solutions such as green tech and laments that many great ideas are not sufficiently funded because there are no quick returns on investment.

Intricate professional skills relevant to a changing landscape cannot be achieved with a basic, master’s or even a post-doctorate degree. The OECD report discourages “credentialism” and characterises it as an “imperfect” measure “to screen prospective workers” and that employers are realising this and are hiring based on skills and dispositions. Since hires can and will have to be equipped with skills on an ongoing basis anyway, dispositions more than credentials become material.

In this connection, the report says lifelong learning is a must and that we “must endeavour to instil, especially in children, a taste for self-learning that will last a lifetime”. Lifelong learning is the relevant concept for both hard and soft skills. Empathy would require accumulating experience from suffering without which the suffering of others cannot be accessed.

It may be true that time, tide and technological progress wait for no man. That is quite alright because it is also true that man can await his time and the tide to turn. Going too fast might result in a blur of images, leaving one dizzy, panting and in the same place.

Since lifelong learning is the relevant concept, there is no need to rush around like White Rabbit which led Alice down a hole. This might instead result in a case of The hurrier I go, the behinder I get. That is to say, we might misunderstand people or events.

White Rabbit never said such a thing. Of course, only someone who took the time would have realised this.

The Brain Dojo