Keywords

The main expectation from today’s education systems is to have students who are prepared for their future professions. However, during the concurrent rapid changes in labor markets, especially with the effect of information technologies, what kind of a future and profession should education systems prepare young people for? If the education a student receives loses its competence for the profession they will perform when they graduate, has the education system fulfilled its mission of preparing youths for the future? The overall unemployment rate in Turkey is estimated to be 10.8%, with a youth unemployment rate of 24.6%. Meanwhile, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that the average unemployment rate is 5.9%, with an average youth unemployment rate of 4.4% (OECD, 2021a). On the other hand, the OECD average of higher education graduates among unemployed people over the age of 25 is 3.8%, while this figure reaches 10.7% in Turkey (OECD, 2021b). This dramatically portrays the need to focus on the relationship between education and job markets. Moreover, talent shortages are growing every day, which adds doubt as to whether higher education can provide the workforce needed by the country or not. The difficulty of filling job positions with employees possessing the necessary capabilities remains a problem affecting 54% worldwide (Manpower Group, 2018). Of course, the rate of talent shortages is closely related to the developmental level of labor markets. However, higher education does not appear to have sufficient equipment for training a labor force with the capabilities required by existing job positions. In this case, the mission of education systems in training qualified workers is put on the table and the question of how able education systems respond to contemporary needs comes to the fore.

The idea that today’s education systems are unable to prepare children for the future is mostly based on the view that education systems have been shaped to meet the political and economic needs of nineteenth-century industrial societies. Nation-states programmed their education systems to provide public education for the purposes of nation-building, industrial development, and economic development. Public education is likened to a gigantic machine built for preparing the adult workforce needed by the industry. Schools are institutions that put children under a collective discipline on a time schedule arranged like the factory bell instead of a solar cycle. Toffler (1971, p. 398) stated students in public education to correspond to raw materials in the industry, teachers to workers, and schools to factories. In addition, nineteenth-century nation-states shaped their education systems as ideological tools that homogenize society for nation-building. In line with this purpose, the process of the nation-state is completed with an integrated society motivated in line with the developmental goals of the state by providing education in a common language, culture, history, and religion (Alesina & Reich, 2015). Public education has been an important element for ensuring the continuity of industrial society with the necessary yet limited education by transforming millions of people into an army of disciplined workers capable of endlessly repetitive jobs.

Saying that the most influential sociological view of the educational paradigm of industrial society belongs to Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) would be no exaggeration. Durkheim defined education within the framework of the political and economic conditions of nineteenth-century Europe and conveyed his views on its function, purpose, and content. Durkheim (2016, pp. 50–65) primarily defined education as “the influence of adult generations on the individuals who are immature for the social life.” He emphasized the purpose of education to not be altering individuals and communities but preserving and transferring the common naturally occurring thoughts, feelings, and practices in every society to future generations. On the other hand, education becomes important as an element of collective life when religious symbols lose their socially homogenizing impact, as in modern industrial societies. In addition, homogenizing a society on the basis of collective values encourages the differentiation and specialization of children according to their professional skills. Meanwhile, education gains a social character that cannot be left to individuals due to the vital function it has assumed in the context of societal existence and continuity. The state keeps education under control by programming it on behalf of society. While Durkheim’s view on education highlighting central governmental programs was at work in shaping the educational system of European countries such as France and England (Carlson et al., 2018; de Gaudemar et al., 1993), it also shaped the education systems of non-Western societies such as Turkey, which became a nation-state at a later date. Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), whose views on education played an important role in disseminating Durkheim’s sociological framework in Turkey, interpreted his views by adapting them to Turkey’s educational needs.Footnote 1

The education paradigm can be said to have not changed from being static, linear, and standardized in structure or from being ignorant of student differences in the twentieth century. Education, formerly a privilege of a limited number of people in the nineteenth century, had become accessible to the masses thanks to nineteenth-century developments in individual freedoms and rights. At the same time, all students had the right to an equal education regardless of their social origins. Thus, once built to meet the needs of the industrial revolution, public education reached its goal of massification in the twentieth century. The massification of education and widespread use of schooling around the world also triggered theoretical expansions in educational sociology. Structural functionalists attribute public access to modern education to the increased need for a highly skilled workforce and industrial development (Collins, 1971). Education systems prepare students by choosing them for their future status in accordance with their abilities and assuming a democratic role, especially as these systems enable disadvantaged social groups to attain professional status according to their abilities (Parsons, 1959). On the contrary, the conflict perspective argues schools to strengthen existing power relations and social hierarchies by serving the ideological and economic interests of the power holders (Collins, 1971). Focusing on schools’ organizational ties, Meyer and Rowan (1977) associated the massification of education with the political and ideological meaning attributed to education. The democratic belief that education is a condition for empowering civil society became widespread; this was related to the canalization of the masses toward education. In this context, schools can be said to have undertaken the mission of legitimizing modern values in terms of individual-society relations rather than being effective in preparing students for their future professional status. The spread of the school system worldwide implies the globalization of modern values as represented by schools. The mass education system should be seen as a dimension of international democratization and globalization patterns (Meyer, 1977; Meyer & Bromley, 2014).

The mass public education systems of the twentieth century were developed primarily to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century and reflected the principles of industrial production in various ways. In non-Western societies with a late industrialization experience such as Turkey, however, the motivation behind the development and massification of the educational system in the twentieth century was to create an educated mass in order to accelerate industrialization rather than train the manpower needs of the industry (Erdoğan, 2016). Another strong motivation of the education system is that education assumed a political mission in constructing national identities in the late nation-state building process. The fact that education is nationalist, secular, modern, and democratic helped determine the ideological orientation of formal education apart from its economic motivation (Sakaoğlu, 1992, p. 34).

The twentieth century was short lived; The first half is remembered through the crises of industrial societies affected by world wars, which reflected the structural problems of the nineteenth century. The second half includes the transition toward a new social model with the development of communication and information technologies. During this transition, the new paradigmatic suggestions can be said to not have been fully apparent while discussing the invalidity of the education paradigm of the old century. The linear and uniform educational paradigm is argued to have been unable to meet the twenty-first-century needs of societies or prepare youths for the non-linear, differentiated societies of the future (Robinson, 2011, pp. 9–10). In this case, determining the direction of the twenty-first-century society, what kind of education system this society needs, and what can be done for today’s education systems have importance.

Education Systems in the Twenty-First Century

The new types of automation that occurred in production mechanisms in the last quarter of the twentieth century being reflected on the consumption materials that could change daily life fueled debates on industrial change and were attributed a revolutionary character. Signifying humanity to be going through a new industrial revolution process, these discussions regarded technological development as the main factor of change. The fact that technological development had started to affect all areas of life from production to consumption, financial systems, entertainment, working conditions, and education highlights the determinist explanations that see technology as the main factor of social change. Associating the enormous change in educational technologies with the paradigmatic change in the field of education can be considered in the context of technological determinist explanations. For this reason, both the use of educational technologies while carrying out educational activities and the mission of raising a workforce that will take part in the production stages of new technologies relate the education field to the new Industrial Revolution. Industrial change should be understood, and education requirements should be determined due to the widespread belief that education is unable to keep up with the rapid changes in economic and technologically developmental fields in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

The modern school-based education system emerged as a requirement of industrialization and nationalization in industrial societies. The transformation phases of industrial society not only revealed new social models but also pointed to the cycle of the education system and its paradigm. Accordingly, three industrial revolutions have taken place in the last two centuries, and education systems have transformed within their scope. We are transforming again in the twenty-first century with the effect of the fourth industrial revolution.

Industry 1.0 was shaped through the production of steam power instead of muscle energy. In the eighteenth century, the first step in automation was taken with James Watt’s steam engine. The age of mechanical technology and machines lasted until the mid-nineteenth century when electricity was effective in production. When the structural characteristics of the agricultural society were still in place and industrial development started, educational activities took shape as knowledge transfer. The aim was to teach basic concepts through the one-way transfer of information (i.e., from teacher to student).

Industry 2.0 was shaped by the use of electrical energy. The invention of the electric motor and the enormous changes in electrical engineering in the second half of the nineteenth century started a new era. The electric age is characterized by the revolutionary changes that occurred through mass production. As discussed above, education at that time focused on meeting industry’s workforce needs. Educational content was shaped to support technological development, and schools were organized in a factory-like hierarchical order. With the mission of producing a workforce and knowledge of industrial production, education became a field where science and technology became conditions of one another. At the end of this process, a big increase occurred in the global rate of schooling, and this increase has continued exponentially. In 1870, the average number of years enrolled in education was 3.7 in the USA and 2.37 in Germany, whereas in 1960 these countries’ values had respectively become 8.9 and 7.53 years. These rates increased to 13.40 and 14.10 years in 2017 (Our World in Data, n.d.).

Industry 3.0 took shape with computers being introduced to the market in the 1960s. This caused information and communication technologies to become the center of industrial production. Because computers are able to process data sets quickly and flawlessly, this new process at the end of the twentieth century was called the information age. As the socialization of the Internet increased global communications, transaction speeds, and volume, this age is also called the communication age. A revolutionary change has started since the developments in information and communication technologies globally affected the business methods and relationship patterns established in all fields (e.g., politics, economy, daily life, education, entertainment, and sports). This new societal model of society is seen to have been referred to and described by various concepts such as Daniel Bell's post-industrial society, Peter F. Drucker's post-capitalist society, Y. Masuda’s information society, and Manuel Castells’ network society.

Masuda (1990, pp. 44–45) summarized the transformations in the education system in the information society where computer technology dominates social functioning in five items: (i) The restrictions of official schools will come to an end. When open education replaces face-to-face education, an “information network” will form. Thus, inequalities between urban–rural or developed-underdeveloped regions will be overcome. (ii) Personalized learning methods can be applied in accordance with each individual’s abilities. Thus, the system that is organized according to individual abilities and preferences will replace the uniform system of traditional mass education. (iii) While self-learning will become the basis of the education system thanks to computerized education, teachers will play a role in education as advisors or guides. (iv) A change will occur toward information creation in education. Education in the industrial society aimed to fill students’ brains with the maximum amount of information and technical education. In the information society, meanwhile, a change will occur toward a society that creates information that has value. (v) The understanding of lifelong education will prevail. While the current education system consists of compulsory education at an early age, the information society has educational opportunities that will enable adults and even older people to adapt to change in society by improving their skills.

Information society can be defined by highlighting different qualities through its technological, economic, professional, spatial, and cultural dimensions. These five dimensions are noteworthily also the areas in which education interacts with the paradigmatic transformations of the information society.

Technological Impact

The development of information and communication technologies is claimed to have brought about change. While on one hand a determinist approach is displayed where technology drives all change in this claim, on the other hand, technology’s social effect is emphasized with the interactions of technological production processes with social, political, and economic fields placed in the background. However, the technology and production stages obviously cannot be independent from the social sphere. Political, economic, social, and cultural factors in each of the processes affect what is produced, how it is produced, and how it is used (Webster, 2006, p. 12). Although technology has been shown to have highly transformative social consequences that arise through its societal interactions, evaluating it by not taking into account the social sphere can lead to an incomplete analysis, such as the expectation that education technologies can solve all the problems faced by contemporary education systems.

The use of educational technologies these days such as electronic whiteboards and digital course content in classrooms is unquestionably accepted. In Turkey, all schools have been provided with electronic whiteboards. A national digital platform was implemented for all students and teachers to access where all course content and supplementary materials are available. Secondary education programs that offer full-time online courses have been implemented in the USA. Conducting educational activities in a company with new technologies is assumed to have certain advantages. All students will be expected to have in-depth learning thanks to educational technologies. Student differences being taken into consideration and the learning process being planned according to each students’ abilities are assumed. In addition, students are thought to be able to have equal educational opportunities regardless of their social origin. An educational environment where a student-centered educational activity can be carried out with educational technologies and where the teacher will show the students the way to learn instead of transferring knowledge is expected to be created. Thus, students will be able to learn how to learn on their own and develop self-confidence and lifelong learning ability.

However, different opinions are found opposed to the optimistic views that educational technologies will improve education. Although the quantity and quality of current research is insufficient to provide a general norm regarding the extent to which educational technologies can meet the expectations of teaching, studies should be mentioned to exist showing the exact opposite of the claims the educational technologies will provide student-centered teaching in education and teachers will change their teaching methods. While educational technologies are a neutral element in the classroom environment according to these studies, the factors that enable education to improve are still very diverse (Herold, 2015; Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Selwyn, 2011; Wang, 2001). For this reason, critics have pointed at the deep gap between the promises of educational technology and the improvements it creates (Cuban, 2004). In addition, some opinions are found to suggest the transformation of educational technologies into teaching tools will transform the socio-cultural makeup as well as the social structure people are accustomed to in the long run as a result (e.g., Bowers, 1988).

Education and training activities have been reshaped with the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic that broke out at the end of 2019 and has continued to affect the whole world. Under these pandemic conditions, countries are known to have attempted to transforming their education systems to provide online education. Systems that have become available to the masses with the cheaper and more widespread use of educational technologies can be predicted to lean more toward digitalization after the epidemic.

Economic Impact

The economic dimension of the information society is primarily related to the structural transformation of the labor force. The decrease in the rate of blue-collar workers through automation in factories caused the sociological meaning of industrial workers to transform and expert technicians to become the dominant class in the workforce. In the information society, the economy is based on service labor, rather than labor based on muscle power. Hence, interpersonal relationships and knowledge become important components of the economic pattern. The person at the center of the network is a professional who has acquired the skills required by the information society through their education and training. For this reason, the factor that determines social status in the information society is suggested to not be material wealth but knowledge and education level (Bell, 1999).

The information society inherited the mass education system of the industrial society. The expansion in higher education, especially after World War II, resulted in a great increase in the rate of education of the world population. In this process, being educated meant improved living conditions and vertical social mobility. However, as more and more people have vocational qualifications through education, the value of vocational qualifications and diplomas in the labor market has decreased. As the supply of qualified people in the market increases, more education and more professional competence are required for a given job, while the role of education in promoting the social status and promoting upward social mobility is weakened. Therefore, the fact that many more people in the information society have equal educational opportunities does not mean that these people have more earnings and status, as Bilton et al. (2009, p. 290) claimed. In the new society model, although education continues to be a necessary condition for a prosperous life, it ceases being a sufficient condition. A person is understood to need to have various types of competence apart from education for vertical social mobility (Castells, 2013, p. 178). The capitalist character of the industrial society maintains its continuity despite the democratic aspect of education in the information society. Economic and political privileges continue to be decisive in the social hierarchy (Yaylagül, 2018). Unlike the industrial society, an ambiguous “global capital network,” not a capitalist class, has new privileges, affects all world societies, and dominates financial flows in the information society (Castells, 2013, p. 627).

Spatial Impact

Information and communication technologies and the Internet have become determinants of social organization in the information society. As Castells (2013) identified, organizational forms in the “network society” can be more determinant in shaping social relations compared to the industrial society as they gain more flexibility and adaptability. Information and communication technologies have a great impact on the organization of time and space and play a role in the relationships of distant locations and times. As a part of the global network, anyone with an Internet connection in the world can relatively move away from the constraints of time and space. The walls of the school and the hierarchy arranged by age lose meaning as information becomes available from anywhere and at any time. Distance and open education are advocated with the argument that they provide better education while reducing its cost (Atik, 2008), which becomes more and more attractive every day.

The free movement of information in the global communication network enables the Internet to be considered as a factor facilitating democratization (Giddens, 2012, p. 904). Cyber platforms where people can freely share their ideas and connect with like-minded people strengthen democracy by affecting the expansion of the public sphere. At the same time, the free movement of educational knowledge outside school walls provides the democratization of educational knowledge by allowing students to meet with information sources beyond the textbook and teacher. However, the digitization of educational knowledge within the school system results in the national uniformization of information resources. In Turkey, the Educational Informatics Network (EBA) implemented by the Ministry of National Education offers a national school model with a digitized primary and secondary education, course content, simulations, and teacher lectures. However, the digitization of course content has led students with different abilities and learning levels to face uniform knowledge and knowledge interpretation. In addition, the number of privately-sponsored alternative content relating to the school curriculum for meeting students’ supplementary educational material needs remains scarce. This fact supports the process of standardization of knowledge. Digitalization does not provide diversification as is claimed; rather it provides uniformization (Erdoğan Coşkun, 2021). The digitization of educational content and educational technologies becoming the dominant tool of education-training activities have increased education’s link with profit-oriented markets while uniformizing teaching knowledge (Williamson, 2021).

Cultural Impact

The beginning of the twenty-first century is called postmodern because the information society creates a flood of information with various media that reshapes the uniform structure of the modern world as pluralistic and multicultural. Music, literature, film, painting, fashion, design, lifestyles in contemporary culture, and everyday life now generally contain much more information. In the face of this information explosion, people encounter too much information and resign themselves to the spectator position; this multitude of information distracts them and weakens their power of creating meaning. As the amount of information increases, its meaning decreases. Accordingly, humans in the spectator position have become the criterion of the accuracy of the information one encounters; one also has to question and be suspicious in the face of the information multitude (Webster, 2006, pp. 19–21).

The postmodernist critique of modern science is an important part of the debate on plurality and authority of knowledge and has been instrumental in shaping both contemporary and future curricula. Despite this philosophical debate not being addressed here in order to not deviate from the focus of our subject, we can remember in this context that the change in education in the case of books and teachers is the source and authority of knowledge. This change is illustrated not only by the decrease in the rate that students read books but also by books no longer being the sources students refer to when needing to research a subject. The ease of accessing a source can be considered effective in students choosing Internet sources over books as a source of information. However, digitization and student-centered education in particular can be said to have changed the teacher from being an authority providing information in the classroom to being a facilitator (Erdoğan Coşkun, 2021; Grasha, 2002).

Industry 3.0 emerged in the society model in parallel with the development of information and communication technologies. The transition from the industrial society to the information society also brought about a change in the educational paradigm. Before long, the new technological inventions that have taken place in the first quarter of the twenty-first century will bring about a new phase of social transformation that is claimed to be revolutionary. The fourth industrial revolution is claimed to have been experienced with the new automation processes and intelligent mechanization in the industry, and a new education paradigm has begun to be mentioned.

Industry 4.0 and Education

As an advanced process of digitalization, Industry 4.0 suggests a new relationship between society and industry. The German Ministry of Education and Research first voiced Industry 4.0 in 2010. It requires digital communication technologies to be integrated into industrial production stages. As a continuation of twentieth-century automation, the aim is to bring the industry together with digital culture (Mazali, 2018, p. 405). Among the basic components of Industry 4.0 are the Internet of things, Internet of services, and cyber-physical systems. Digitalization at the Industry 4.0 level enables the communication between humans and machines as well as between machines and machines. Cyber-physical systems are embedded devices that can be placed in any engineering object, thus enabling the object to communicate with other objects or people. Artificial intelligence is added to the object, thus allowing many services to be performed without the human element (Davies et al., 2017, p. 1290).

The fact that most production processes and the majority of service types will be performed by smart machines could mean a radical transformation of life, primarily on the economic sphere. According to Schwab (2016, p. 39), the process of mechanizing the many business lines that started in the twentieth century and require manual labor will continue; job positions such as lawyers, financial analysts, doctors, journalists, accountants, insurance brokers, and librarians will also be partially or completely automated. Therefore, automation will affect not only blue-collar workers but also white-collar workers in this process. Unlike previous industrial revolutions, very little (0.5% in the USA) new jobs are emerging, and 47% of employees in the USA are at risk of unemployment.

According to the Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum, while the rate of work demanding cognitive skills increases daily, the rate of work demanding physical skills decreases dramatically. While the automation of physical tasks can be fully realized, even professions that require human creativity such as writing are at risk of automation. Even now, robots can produce texts that are indistinguishable from the human text. For the foreseeable future, the low-risk jobs will be jobs that require social and creative skills in terms of automation. According to the report, those who have the ability to make decisions and develop new ideas in uncertain situations will stand out in the future world (Schwab, 2016, pp. 44–45). For this reason, an education system that prepares young people for future professions is expected to develop skills such as creativity and leadership. Thus, two poles can be mentioned regarding schools and their curricula: those that raise the creative and leadership elite in the education systems of the future and those that raise the masses who receive general education for the crafts that automation does not wield. As a matter of fact, according to a report from the International Labour Organization (2020, p. 68), higher education provides access to jobs that can be less automated, while vocational education at the high school level provides more automated jobs. Being a university graduate reduces automation risks by 8.8%, while being a vocational training graduate increases automation risks by 2.5% in OECD countries.

The near future, which is thought will be shaped by the automation of business lines, puts expectations and pressure on the students in today’s education system to prepare for the requirements of the future. This expectation and pressure are based on the acceptance that acquiring twenty-first-century skills is not possible with the twentieth-century education paradigm. For this reason, education systems are undergoing a paradigmatic change. The idea is that students need to gain certain values and skills in order to be prepared for the job markets that will be shaped by the technological developments that are expected to occur in the near future. The new trends that stand out in the literature (e.g., Öztemel, 2018; Peter, 2017) on the education of the future and that are beginning to affect today's education can be summarized as follows:

Teaching Without the Constraints of Space and Time

Students will be able to find educational opportunities in different places and times without being limited to school buildings and educational hours. With e-learning, theoretical lessons can be learned beyond the classroom, while practical lessons can be carried out face-to-face. The effects from thorough learning achieved through activities such as scientific trips outside of school have begun being subjected to research (Eshach, 2007). Also, today’s schools have started to open up beyond their walls, collaborating with other schools and even international networks. In addition, scientific organizations, universities, non-governmental organizations, and technology companies are among the institutions that schools cooperate with within the framework of the new education concept. This situation can be seen as the first stage of schools and education overcoming space constraints. This development has started to make lifelong learning more effective with each day. The adequacy and necessity of the traditional school system has been discussed with the consideration that compulsory education is insufficient at providing individuals with the knowledge and skills one may need throughout their lifetime. For this reason, the aim is to provide individuals with learning opportunities throughout all stages of life starting with pre-school and to lead a learning-oriented life outside of school (Fischer, 2000).

Personalized Learning

Educational technologies will be able to adapt to students’ skills and provide a learning path that suits students’ personal needs. Informatics and technology are the most common tools used for personalizing learning. By personalizing the learning process, students can learn difficult tasks by pushing their limits; this ensures that students have the time and an environment where their learning can be reinforced without the strain of pressure from the classroom environment or lesson time limits. In addition, teachers will be able to more easily identify the areas in which a student needs help in the special education environment. In a study on public schools in the USA, Pane et al. (2015) revealed that students have higher academic achievement with personalized learning.

Free-Choice Learning

In addition to educational content, the learning path can also be an area where the student is able to apply personal preference. Because students are free to use their own teaching tool, they will be able to use the tools of their choice that they’ve gotten used to and thus be able to adopt the teaching processes flexibly. Free choice in learning is the learning style where individuals have control over what, when, where, with whom, and with what learning occurs (Falk & Dierking, 2002). Free choice is a feature that complements lifelong learning.

Project-Based Learning

Students learn in depth and actively by researching information and discovering it on their own. Because students will need different field knowledge as required by a project’s topic during research, they gain interdisciplinary knowledge-based learning experience. While gaining individual and team-work experience, project-based learning also establishes a relationship with the real-life equivalent of school knowledge. Unlike the hierarchical business organizations of the industrial society, those who have appropriate skills (i.e., flexible values and cooperation) will be successful in the twenty-first century. The education system will prepare students for a job market where different values such as teamwork and creativity are effective (Bell, 2010; Saralar Aras, 2020).

Experiential Learning

Because educational technologies will facilitate teaching the theoretical parts of the curriculum, more time can be allocated to the sections on experiential learning. There will be room for acquiring skills that require human knowledge and face-to-face interactions, skills that are reinforced by the transfer of experience. Despite the criticism that modern industrial education educates students outside of real-life experience behind school walls, students will have the opportunity of practical education with twenty-first-century education. By increasing their knowledge and skills while experiencing learning with their students, educator enable students to develop the awareness of contributing to the society in which they live (Buehlmann & Espinoza, 2014).

Critical Thinking

The power of interpretation will become more important as computers become able to perform intellectual tasks such as creating statistical data, calculating, storing information, generating data, and even analyzing data to determine future trends. The education of the future will focus on the issue of evaluating, interpreting, and drawing conclusions from data. For this reason, education will aim to develop critical-thinking skills. Critical thinking is the “process of making reasoned judgment based on evaluation” and is accepted as a twenty-first-century skill (Susiani et al., 2018).

Measurement and Evaluation Without Exams

The complaints that exams made with multiple-choice questions do not reinforce learning and that the information learned is forgotten after the exam is a problem that today’s education system has to deal with. With e-learning in the education of the future, students’ knowledge can be measured while learning, and information reinforcement methods can be used. With project-based learning, the student can be tested while working, whereas standardized tests fail to measure twenty-first-century skills (Bell, 2010).

Students as Stakeholders

Students and teachers will be able to participate in the creation of the curriculum. Because students and teachers can criticize the education and training process and identify the deficiencies in teaching, their stakeholder status has importance in determining the curriculum. In addition, a curriculum understanding that can expand according to new needs will ensure that the curriculum is not static but dynamic. This will also allow the curriculum to be customized according to students’ abilities.

Apart from shaping the curriculum, ensuring students’ stakeholder status at every stage of education is also important in order to be organized on the basis of students’ needs. The following points can be mentioned in this framework. (a) Learning objectives can be determined clearly. These goals are shared with the students and clarified so that each can say “I can.” (b) feedback can be given to students so that students can evaluate their own progress. (c) Student learning and having them be stakeholders can be supported through evidence-based practices. Students can have data over which they can do their self-assessment, self-management, and self-monitoring. Thus, students have the opportunity to accurately assess and report their performance levels and progress, as well as identify their strengths and needs regarding their goals (Chan et al., 2014).

Mentoring

In the near future and with the flexibility of education and training, students who become independent from school education will need more guidance and mentorship. In this context, teaching will gain more importance, and as they move away from the burden of theoretical teaching, they will be able to perform their guiding instructor roles with care. At the same time, lifelong education and personalized education understandings and practices will cause individuals to need guidance and supervision while making decisions in all areas of their lives (Longworth, 2003, p. 65). For this reason, mentoring will gain importance as an area of expertise and business.

Ethics and Moral Issues

The twenty-first century is the age of advanced technological innovations such as cyber-physical technology, social media, artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of things, and 3-D printing. These innovations also prompt questions of ethics and morality. Answering questions about ethics and morality has become increasingly important regarding areas such as the integrity of the human body, the amount and ways in which artificial intelligence can be involved in human life, instrumentalizing advanced technology into a war technology that can cause great destruction, democratizing programming processes of artificial intelligence that can make decisions instead of humans, and the use of big data in violation of personal privacy. Unless solutions are found for ethical and moral problems, decisions in these areas will be left to advanced technology manufacturers and engineers. For this reason, education systems have to add ethical and moral propositions to their curriculum as well as teaching the knowledge and skills required to produce advanced technologies. In the near future, specialization in ethics and morality may become as important as technical specialization (Çelebi & İnal, 2019).

In order for the education of the future to meet the needs of the society of the future, changing the teaching methods alone will not suffice. As a social institution, education is under the influence of the ideas, trends, and movements that affect society. For this reason, students should also receive education in addition to technical education so as to ensure that technical developments are sustainable and humane. OECD (2018, pp. 5–6) has defined the competencies that today’s youths who will be the adults of 2030 should have in the society of the future; OECD identified three types of competencies that will transform society.

  1. i.

    Creating New Value: New growth resources are needed for sustainable development policies. Innovation can offer solutions to the social and economic contradictions and problems caused by growth. Educating today’s students with the idea of innovation can mean that the society of the future will have a less contradictory and less problematic structure.

  2. ii.

    Reconciling Tensions and Dilemmas: The political and economic structure of today’s world has certain tensions and dilemmas that are considered irreconcilable and irreversible. There are many different points of view and solution suggestions regarding these facts, such as equality through economic growth, sustainability through innovation, security through freedom, and responsible citizenship through autonomy and democratic process. In the world of the future, individuals will need to balance conflicting thoughts and think more holistically. The people of the future will need to have the ability to evaluate the interdependence and conflict between problems and phenomena.

  3. iii.

    Taking Responsibility: The orientation of taking responsibility, which has been necessary for each model of society during all eras, will become even more necessary for twenty-first-century society, because having individuals think for themself while working with others in a society experiencing innovation, rapid change, and the resulting uncertainties is of vital importance. Taking responsibility for one’s own actions and taking initiative in the face of risks and problems stand out as competencies that need to be gained for social sustainability. In addition, taking responsibility is important as it is a prerequisite for the other two competences.

The educational needs and conditions that are thought to emerge in the society of the future are seen to be based on the change in the contemporary world and to emphasize individual creativity, responsibility, and initiative. Individuals’ social and cultural capital can be said to be more determinant upon their education and daily business life based on the fact that individual knowledge has gained importance. However, in world countries with large populations, how mass education will provide an equality of opportunity that equips individuals with the necessary equipment for their future jobs is a matter of curiosity. Even if one assumes that digitalization will facilitate public access to education in the long run, how digital education will educate individual traits remains uncertain. When considering the criticisms of sociologists such as Bourdieu (1986) and Bernstein (2003) regarding social inequalities in the mass education of the twentieth century, one can say the society of the future will fall behind in terms of social equality. Likewise, one can say the world is moving toward a more equitable and just society with the assumption that human potential will be revealed more.

Preparing for Industry 4.0

In the contemporary world, the literature repeatedly states technology use and technology education in schools to be effective factors in preparing societies for Industry 4.0. In this direction, countries are making innovations in the context of preparing for the future within the framework of national education policies. The US Department of Education Office of Educational Technology (2010) has set five goals within the scope of digital transformation policies in education: Strengthening students’ learning abilities in and out of school using technology for measurements and evaluations, measuring and evaluating what is important for continuous improvement; supporting educators with technology that enables them to access data, content, and resources for more effective teaching; enabling all students and teachers to access comprehensive infrastructure wherever and whenever they need it; restructuring all educational processes; and utilizing technology to optimize learning outcomes and increase systemic productivity. The Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of National Education set two main goals in the learning process for digital content and skills-assisted conversion in its Education Vision 2023 (2018): establishing an ecosystem for digital content while improving skills and developing content for teacher education by making the necessary arrangements for digital materials to become the basic teaching resource and associating digital materials with printed materials.

In today's world, the results from preparing for the “Industry 4.0” society have begun to be seen. The use of technology in education and providing students with technological skills in particular are positive data shown as factors that improve students’ future. For example, Piliouras et al. (2014) measured the results from the US Department of Education’s digital transformation policy in a school with technological transformation and found a positive relationship between the use of technology in school and student preparedness for the workforce. In addition, the study conducted by Nafea and Kilicarslan Toplu (2020) on the technological skills and competencies of Canadian higher education students showed students’ use of educational technologies in the classroom as well as their own computers and smart phones to affect the abilities of the Industry 4.0 society. Even Erdoğan Coşkun’s (2021) study in Turkey indicated that high school students are able to effectively use smartphones in particular as a technology in education. As predicted in the futurist literature, this may indicate the ability of technological transformation to be holistic. However, the changes and transformations in the national education systems can be said to have triggered the industrial transformation in countries. In other words, the most important motivation of the will for change is determined by market needs.

In the countries where Industry 3.0 is still a dominant economic production model such as Turkey, the Industry 4.0 model makes the case for a model of the future when considering the low level of investment allocated to innovation, research, and development (Yazıcı & Düzkaya, 2016). Therefore, the Industry 4.0 societal model and education goals are the goals of the future for many countries. As one of the goals for transforming into an industrial society, education is expected to train the staff that will realize industrialization, and Industry 4.0 education goals are implemented not to meet industrial needs but because they are expected to trigger industrial development.

Future Type of Society: Society 5.0

While Industry 4.0, also known as the concept of the information society, refers to the advanced technological transformation pioneered by Germany, Society 5.0 was brought to the literature by Japan to express the philosophical development of the information society. With the statement made by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2017 that technology should be perceived not as a threat but as an aid to people, Society 5.0 has begun to be used to express the cooperation between society and technology. Based on the contradictions between artificial intelligence and ethics, Society 5.0 evaluates artificial intelligence and robots from a sociological and ethical perspective and suggests a “super-smart society” that reevaluates the relationship between humans and machines (Saracel, 2020, p. 31). Salgues (2018, p. 1) defined Society 5.0 as “the artificial intelligence society that strongly connects the physical and cyber spaces.” Guiding science and technology is essential for solving social problems while ensuring economic development. Therefore, Society 5.0 is the intention to use the technological innovations of Industry 4.0 for the benefit of humanity.

Society 5.0 comes to the fore regarding certain developments that are expected to become widespread in the near future and are subject to ethical debate. Among these developments are the scientific and biotechnological interventions in the physical and cognitive structure of human beings. The singularity, termed by Kurzweil (2005), refers to the human–machine civilization that will emerge when the cognitive, physical, and biological nature of human beings combine with machines to overcome weaknesses such as sickness and old age. The singularity emerging as a result of scientific and technological developments in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (artificial intelligence) will eliminate the distinction between human and machine as well as the limits of human biology and the brain. Human technology combines with human intelligence; the human–machine (cyborg) that is born from this combination removes all human weaknesses and reaches the power to decide when to die or defeat death (Demir, 2018, p. 99). According to transhumanism, the superior characteristics provided by the singularity will transform the human into a super-human, and this will be the solution to social problems such as global warming, terror, and poverty (Köksal, 2019, p. 149).

Transhumanism has today become the slogan of orientations that support techno-futurist claims regarding the violations of human biology. Nowadays, discussions of psychopharmacological drugs used to increase cognitive functions or parents who want to choose their children for genetic strengths are evaluated within the framework of the transhumanist trend. Its primary focus is on emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial reproduction tools, information technologies, and cognitive sciences. Although transhumanists do not advocate the radical transformation of the human species, their demand for the use of new technologies for human development constitutes one of their common characteristics (Ranisch & Sorgner, 2014, pp. 9–13). The human type (cyborg) advocated by transhumanism can only come to life in the Society 5.0 model (see Table 1). Although the concept of human enhancement and development, which transhumanism targets, constitutes the attractive side of the trend, this concept raises ethical debates on whether invading human biology is transcendence or a transgress (Lilley, 2013).

Table 1 Economy and human types according to society type
Full size table

Transhumanism is the advocacy of the techno-futurist human type that is expected to emerge in Society 5.0, where technology is integrated into daily life. As societies connected with technology, Society 5.0 is committed to providing services equally regardless of social categories such as age, gender, region, or language. The claim is that it will be a prosperous society where people can easily access the goods and services they need.

Society 5.0 and Education

Although the singularity and transhumanism focus on the benefits of technology to humanity, the techno-futurist movements of Society 5.0 cannot yet be said to have developed their ideology at the level of social action or education. For this reason, the model for education systems deemed necessary by the information society that emerged with Industry 4.0 still maintains its validity as the goal of the future for today’s world. However, Keidanren [Japan Business Federation] (2016, p. 18) as the first advocate country of Society 5.0 prepared an outline on the educational understanding of this societal model. In this outline, two basic educational values foreseen for the world of the future are explained. These two values constitute the principles of the education reform to be carried out today in order to ensure the active participation of individuals in Society 5.0. Thus, students are aimed to acquire the basic values for being able to cope with the world of the future instead of preparing for a job market that is predicted to change structurally in their future.

The first of these is the arrangement to be made in education systems and content so that all citizens are people with independent thought who create new values by bringing together different elements while working with others. In this model of society where access to information is easier and does not make differentiate among individuals, knowing who the person has more importance than knowing everything. Critical thinking becomes essential for people to know how to think and solve problems. For this reason, a process-based learning model should be applied to increase students’ planning skills, abilities, and habits (Duman, 2007) as opposed to a topic-or product-oriented education process.

The second principle is education that supports lifelong learning. With the opportunities provided by information technologies, individuals maintain their learning positions throughout their lives beyond formal school education. In a world where science and technology develop and expand exponentially (Kurzweil, 2005), the possibility that the knowledge learned in the contemporary world may become obsolete in the near future requires people to maintain their position as learners. For this reason, information technology literacy should be developed at primary and secondary education levels in contemporary education systems. In addition, the promotion of creativity is another necessary condition for sustainable learning. Acquiring the motivation to learn, learning to learn, and the availability of educational resources anywhere and anytime are other conditions of lifelong learning.

Conclusion and Evaluation

The education systems of the modern world are transforming to meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Countries strive to have varying levels of the information society’s characteristics depending on their own nation-state interests and market structures. Educational reforms carried out with the aim of adapting education systems to the conditions of the information society for industrial progress differ with respect to countries’ industrial development level. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population is experiencing similar social change processes as consumers of new technologies. Due to Industry 4.0’s advanced technological products that radically transform daily life, the entire world population has either a positive or negative perception of new technologies as a consumer, even if they do not produce them. On one hand is the negative view that focuses on the degenerating effects new technologies have on social relations, while on the other is the positive view emphasizing the level of prosperity these technologies bring. While the pessimistic view suggests that digitalization in education has completely changed the ecology of education, the optimists view that educational technologies are still a solution for all the problems of education systems, from learning difficulties to social inequality. However, when looking at contemporary education systems and the results from the reforms that have been carried out, no need can be said to exist for expecting a radical change in the near future.

In a study on what the educational sociological issues of the new society might be, Mehta and Davies (2018) showed that the issues that emerged since the second half of the twentieth century will continue to determine the education agenda. Two of these issues stand out in terms of seeing how the basic claims of the information society can take shape in the near future.

First is that education has maintained its central position in the social policies of nation-states. In the neoliberal era, education became part of the debate focused on social insurance and social safety nets because, in addition to being an employment-providing factor in the post-industrial period, education was considered as a factor that decreases crime rates, increases the tax base, and thus affects economic growth. Despite these neoliberal orientations, governments continue to support education systems as a social policy that enhances the well-being of individuals and offers them the opportunity for social mobility. This situation adds uncertainty to how the assumption of the information society, which argues that the importance of formal education will decrease, will take shape in the face of democratic demands.

The second issue is how economic inequalities, which deepen daily, continue to be the factor that feeds inequalities in education despite the widespread use of information technologies. The issue of inequalities in education has been at the center of educational sociology studies since the 1970s. Within this framework, various regulations have been implemented by governments and schools to ensure equality within the scope of equal opportunity policies in education. According to Khan (2018, p. 186, 190), although the proportion of ethnic and religious groups such as African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Asian-Americans has increased in US universities, this change has not caused a decrease in inequalities; the elites continue to increase their share in national income and wealth. In addition, as the public schools’ curricula become more and more standard, elite schools have also begun implementing their own unique programs. While public schools exclude the education of arts from their programs, elite schools provide training in unique specialties that will allow their students to stand out from the crowd. A similar situation also began to develop in Turkey. With the effect of digitalization in education in particular, the curriculum of public schools has become standard in a way that has reduced the voices of the teachers who personalize the educational content for their students in the classrooms. Meanwhile, as explained by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE, 2018), its Education Vision 2023 highlighted private education institutions’ privilege of implementing different education models. While the private schooling rate was 4.7% in the 2007–2008 academic year, it increased to 14.7% in 2017–2018 (Eğitim Reformu Girişimi, 2018, p. 164). In this case, the claim that digitalization will provide very cheap access to high quality education (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 225) has become valid for the masses. However, how the privileged positions of elite schools will take shape in the near future is a matter of curiosity. Will mass education be sufficient for the highly qualified jobs of the information society? With a high degree of automation, what future will mass education offer to the masses?

Today, we can talk about the prototypes of the society that human beings will build with information technologies. Meanwhile, biotechnology is accepted as able to end inequalities in the model advocated by the singularity and transhumanism. Together with genetic inequalities, human–machine association can put an end to social inequalities. However, the possibility that biotechnology may reveal genetic classes contrary to expectations is not to be underestimated (Fukuyama, 2002). In addition, the question of how this trend will be socialized is raised by the deep contradiction among the transhumanist discourses, which are secular and dissolve human expectations from God, religious institutions, and their discourses (Klichowski, 2015; Köksal, 2019; Lipowicz, 2018). Education Vision 2023 (MoNE, 2018, p. 7) states, “Our singularity is the unity of mind and heart rather than the unity of man and machine” after referring to the singularity, possibly due to this social contradiction. Which voice will be dominant in the society of the future continues to also be a curious matter.