With both China and the United States accelerating their embrace of new quality productivity, I have been discussing the issue of “upgrading education” with friends recently. The main group of friends are middle-aged people, and it is natural for everyone to discuss the issue of education.

It is easy to establish a consensus on this issue that the current education mechanism has significant problems.

The core productivity of each industrial revolution is different, and the demand for talent and education is also different. The education model of the past cannot be continued.

During the first industrial revolution, the core technology of productivity was the steam engine, which required everyone to compete and exert their strength. Therefore, the textbooks of schools and religions around the world had a strong revolutionary color, vigorously portraying individual heroism. The standard of a good child is to dare to challenge the old order, and even to argue that education is useless.

During the Second Industrial Revolution, the core technology of productivity was the assembly line, and everyone needed to be honest in their own positions. Therefore, the revolutionary and heroic content gradually faded from the textbooks of schools and religions around the world. The standard of a good child suddenly shifted to obedience and discipline.

Nowadays, especially in the big cities in the east, we are in the process of moving from the third industrial revolution to the fourth industrial revolution. With the acceleration of China and the United States, the younger generation will directly welcome the wave of the fourth industrial revolution. However, unfortunately, the textbooks and education for children in China are still based on the second industrial revolution, striving to cultivate a group of obedient and disciplined children.

Even from the questions and scores of the college entrance examination and middle school entrance examination in recent years, it can be seen that the thinking of the examiners is still stuck in half a century ago, and the ultimate test of students’ seriousness, attention to detail, and ability to follow rules has greatly reduced the difficulty of the exam, and the score difference between candidates has also become particularly tight.

This education model of the second industrial revolution, which educates and selects talents, can barely run through the third industrial revolution in China, because the core technology of the third revolution is digitization. China has also obtained a large number of basic jobs in the global division of labor, and the main requirement for talents is to have fewer bugs.

And one of the core of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is intelligence. The emergence of artificial intelligence has caused children who follow the rules and are serious and meticulous under the current education system to completely lose their labor value. After all, if a person is diligent, careful, obedient and honest, they will never be able to compete with AI.

Our emphasis on educating children also needs to gradually shift.

On the one hand, we need to shift from nurturing children like machines to allowing them to become living beings, allowing them to make mistakes, breaking conventions, and supporting them in learning things they love and cherish.

Children need to transition from rote learning to machine learning, injecting enough time into areas they truly enjoy and excel in, and gaining a competitive advantage over their peers.

On the other hand, we need to expose children to more artificial intelligence and use it to help them learn and serve in areas they enjoy and excel in.

The Internet of the third industrial revolution has greatly reduced the information distance between people. Word workers, voice workers and video workers can use the Internet to achieve

And the fourth industrial revolution will definitely further reduce the distance between people’s feelings. Any interest or hobby will quickly form a circle. As long as they have a relative advantage in the circle and add artificial intelligence buffs, children can quickly stand out in a certain group.