Giving Compass' Take:

• Tony Wan at EdSurge interviews Stavros Yiannouka who believes preparing students for tomorrow requires challenging past assumptions and conventions about how we live and learn.

• What is being added to the curriculum to provide students with the necessary lessons they need? How has the future availability of work affected the way students learn? 

• Read more about this topic and building entrepreneurship skills in students.

It’s common to opine about what new skills or competencies today’s students will need for the future. But Stavros Yiannouka believes there’s just as much value in “relearning” and “unlearning.”

Those two words form the core themes of this year’s conference for the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), where Yiannouka has been CEO since 2012. WISE is an initiative backed by the Qatar Foundation that convenes researchers, entrepreneurs and policymakers to share and spotlight the latest education innovations around the globe.

“In education, we naturally talk and focus a lot about what we should learn. We also think there’s an important role to play in unlearning,” he says in an interview with EdSurge.

What follows are highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity. (EdSurge is a media partner of the WISE Summit.)

What do you mean when you say we have to relearn or unlearn certain skills?

Yiannouka: There are a lot of potentially disruptive trends happening in society today. Climate change is front and center among our concerns, but so is automation and artificial intelligence. They could potentially dramatically reshape the workplace, both in terms of displacing people from jobs, as well as opening up new opportunities and new ways of doing things.

Read the full article about new skills for students by Tony Wan at EdSurge.