Change is now happening faster and faster, making “the future” arrive quicker. Important issues and problems have appeared in recent years, ranging from the effects of climate change already being felt to the impact of the digital age (addictions, hacking, loss of privacy, etc.). For example, artificial intelligence (AI) has, in just a few years, become a household issue. This accelerating development has made educators and policymakers realize that the content of curricula and teaching methods need to change, drastically and soon. A few weeks ago, the General Secretariat of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 36 highly developed countries, released a report titled “Trends Shaping Education 2019.” It analyzed the important issues that are changing the world economically, socially and educationally, such as: Climate change and its multi-dimensional impact; globalization and the shift of the economic center of gravity to Asia; the spreading of democracy and active citizenship; the impact of social media and citizen journalism; aging and longer living with important medical developments; and the digitization of large areas of our lives, from banking to the monitoring of individuals inside and outside their countries. The OECD’s report stressed the need to develop new tools to address these important issues. It called for more efficient and renewable energy systems to help sustain economies; blockchain as a potential solution for secure banking, voting and information exchange; worldwide efforts to safeguard biomedical research and its applications; greater emphasis on ethics in all areas; and education reforms to help with all these topics and issues. Indeed, the report reminds us that observers and policymakers often conclude their analyses of new trends and potential dangers with “the solution is better education.” The solution is sometimes indeed “better education,” for instance, when we analyze problems in under-developed countries. But, when the issue is rapid changes engulfing the entire world, we need to consider whether improvements in education as it currently exists will be enough. As an educator with more than 25 years of experience, I can add some observations to stress that education will not solve those problems with just “improvements.” Indeed, today’s students are “addicted” to their digital devices, and this has led to a shortening of attention spans Nidhal Guessoum In the first decade of the 21st century, the most important development in education was the internet, then Web 2.0 (people creating webpages and sharing content individually, in lieu of content providers). In the second decade of the 21st century, the digital revolution (the internet and apps becoming portable) engulfed the world. Both of these developments have affected education substantially. Indeed, today’s students are “addicted” to their digital devices, and this has led to a shortening of attention spans. Teachers have been struggling to come up with strategies to deal with this trend and let learning proceed without too much impact, but we have come to realize that drastic solutions are needed. Lecturing is becoming obsolete. Teaching needs to be rethought. In parallel, educational material has largely moved online: There are now digital platforms for courses (sometimes Facebook pages), where lectures, assignments and grades can be found, and sometimes discussion forums, while textbooks are being replaced by e-books (and not everyone is happy with this). Another important development is the emergence of Wikipedia and YouTube as the two go-to platforms for students when they want to find information. A survey by the Pew Internet Project a few years ago found that students are now accustomed to quickly googling questions and getting answers without exploring the web. Even more worrisome is the youngsters’ use of YouTube as their preferred search engine. Indeed, this is a troublesome trend because it is often a source of misconceptions, as students (and even experts) have no way of rating the quality of a YouTube channel. At least with websites, one can rate pages based on their hosts (educational, scientific or governmental institutions). Of course, one of our constant goals and challenges as educators is (and has always been) to train students how to carefully and patiently find good material, whether in the library or online. It is, however, much more difficult to filter results on the internet and so easy and tempting to just click on the first few results from a Google or YouTube search. As to the digital revolution and smartphone addiction, we may have to replace notebooks with tablets. That will be expensive to implement and may divide the world into haves and have-nots. And, even then, we will still have to ensure that students don’t have their social media chats open on another tab, ready to click on each time the teacher is looking at their own screen. One thing is clear, education will need to integrate the digital revolution and the impact that the internet and social media now have on youngsters’ lives and behaviors. And curricula will need to be revamped to include the big topics that have emerged in the 21st century, such as AI, genetic engineering, climate change, nanotechnology and more. • Nidhal Guessoum is a professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Twitter: @NidhalGuessoum Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point-of-view