There are many reasons to argue that education does not create trends, but follows them. Some time ago, academic education meant the opportunity to reach out to the latest achievements of mankind, to learn something really new. Now education often lags behind industrial trends and commercial trends, because most of the biggest research and technological breakthroughs do not belong directly to the academy, but to the commercial market, because there are huge profits behind this. Therefore, it is fair to say that education follows trends, and does not create them. There is nothing wrong with that, the world organization system has just changed. And it is important that education really follows these trends, and does not ignore them.

In this article, we will tell you about the 2021-2022 trends in education that will definitely affect how children learn in 2023. It must be understood that trends begin in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries in the world and then move down the socioeconomic ladder over the course of one to five years. Therefore, what we are reading about now exists in the States, in other countries it may find application in 2-3 years.

Soft Skills Training Gets into Picture

In general, high school and further undergrad and graduate universities are usually seen as a place where people train their hard skills, that is, direct knowledge and skills that are needed to perform certain specific tasks. And soft skills are typically developed in our elementary school or kindergarten. It is believed that there we are taught to communicate, to perform some common group tasks, and then we should acquire only highly professional knowledge. But now it has been proven that emotional intelligence and soft skills are so important for a person that two professionals with the same level of hard skills differ so much precisely because of the presence or absence of soft skills. That is why most quality educational institutions switch to training these soft skills, while allocating large parts of the program to them.

Distance Learning is Here to Stay

Both students and parents have very different attitudes towards online education. Many say that it makes it impossible to develop these very soft skills, and that teachers cannot give material at the same level as they give it offline. But it must be admitted that many universities, colleges and schools are restructuring to online education, if not completely, then at least part-time. There was a lot of speculation that when covid ends, distance learning will also end. But that won’t happen. Distance learning has reduced a lot of expenses, and as we have already said, we live in a world of business, in a world of commerce, and everything that is commercially effective will definitely be supported. And distance learning is quite effective, and therefore we must be prepared for the fact that education will be at least part-time online.

Students don’t Become Smarter or more Attentive

A slightly sad statistic shows that students are not getting smarter, and their attention span is only declining. Many blame the Internet and games for this and look for various reasons. And indeed the root causes are different. But here it is not the students themselves who should be blamed, but society as a whole. Or rather, no one can be blamed, because we are all getting dumber. We need to memorize much less information, we are much less trained, trained to cram the material and that’s what we talked about, the development of soft skills reduces the time we spend on developing hard skills. The world at large proves that empathic people, attached to their feelings, are in many ways better than professionals who absolutely do not care about everyone else and who do not care about other people’s lives. But the fact remains that it is often difficult for students to cope with a program that would have been easy for their peers 20-30 years ago.

Academia Tries to be more Modern. And Fails

Professors go to famous social networks such as TikTok and others, universities launch programs to attract young people who are interested in the newest media professions. But it must be admitted that, in general, universities and colleges have not been able to modernize enough to really train specialists in these media professions. Most likely, this should not be done, but again, higher and secondary educational institutions want to earn money and attract students who want to get such professions. If you are struggling with writing essays in new disciplines that don’t have enough academic sources coverage yet, address a reliable writing service, such as SmartWritingService.com for professional essay help. In most cases, attempts to modernize so strongly to the requirements of social media and youth trends do not lead to anything good, and now we see that there is a large demand for fairly conservative training that allows you to draw a line between some courses that can be completed in a few weeks and real specialties that require real education and long-term fundamental training.

Life-long Learning is Peaking

We’ve come to a point where the people who are most likely to be interested in a quality education are the most invested in learning and handling the toughest assignments, the over 40s. These are people who change their profession, master new digital professions, or just learn something new after retirement. Many universities were not ready for this. Many colleges and universities do not have programs for people over 35 years old, but now the trend is that they will massively restructure and even accept people 18 and 70 years old into joint programs, because everyone is now actively fighting against ageism. For some specialties, it is correct to allocate groups of different ages, but for many it is enough to simply adapt the program. With the average age of active life constantly rising in rich countries, and people managing financial planning more intelligently, we will see the maximum increase in this trend. They also say that people will work in various fun media jobs for up to 30 years, and only after that they will receive a serious academic education and build a career and family. But while this trend has not yet formed, it is only being talked about.

We hope that if you need to write an essay about trends in education, or you want to know a little more about the trends than how the academy world works now in 2022 and how it will work in 2023, this article was useful for you.