Future Ready – A Meaningless Phrase

 

Future Ready – A Meaningless Phrase

I have read at least one op-ed column that carries in its title the phrase, “Future Ready”, with or without a hyphen.

Even your astrologer does not know what his own future would bring. This was a wonderful point, made powerfully towards the end of the Hindi movie Lage Raho Munnabhai. Future is future only because it is the future. Not a tautology but reveals that no one knows what it could bring.

Did anyone predict refrigerator, the kitchen blender, the wet grinder, and any other kitchen gizmo, longest bridge, tallest building in the world, x-ray, PET (Positron Emission Tomography), the now dead audio cassette and the player, again, the dead Compact Discs (CD), CT Scan, STAADPro (a structural engineering analysis and design software), Primavera, MS Office suite, iPod, iPhone, and so on. No.

The fatalistic Que sera sera (whatever will be will be) song is not for me. No, I am not saying that I will be the sole determinant of what would happen to me. There are bound to be other factors. Therefore, neither would I make any prediction about my future, nor would I allow anyone else to do it for me or on my behalf.   Preparation for things other than what happens regularly or what is planned is vanity. Things that happen unprepared for are accidents, may be good, may be bad, yet accidents they are. I would not give into them. The quoted song carries a mood of resignation. Not for me.

Given the above, what does the phrase, “future ready” mean? Writers take only the future that they themselves can imagine as the future. This is not only limiting in the extreme, but also rejects anything else as fertile imagination. They are not aware that imagination is the mother lode of inventions and innovations. Any science fiction is necessarily a product of imagination, even the number “42”!

A corporate HR honcho who looks for the best only within what she knows is a dead wood for the organization. Xerox, Microsoft, Facebook and many others were invented outside of academia or corporate research, some in a automobile garage in the house, some in the broom closet of a dormitory ... Having become mammoth corporate, they now do research within the bounds of the promoters’ ropes tied around them, for the most part. If they wished to do cutting-edge science or technology research they create a functionally independent arm of the corporate entity. Even given their money power, we are surprised by something called DeepSeek, in a sense a bottom trawler finding treasures. It did not start out as what it has become. It came out of a finance trading company!

 Now I wish to put on my thinking hat to see whether the above realization (within me) can somehow be transferred to teaching, from 1^st grade all the way to PG studies in engineering. I will not be touching IT software as it seems to have its own pathways, quite distinct from the so-called traditional engineering enterprises.

I do not know in which elementary class (or earlier, in pre-school) addition with carryover is taught. It does not need to be through coloured cubes. Children can be taught place values without these or any other teaching aides. All that is required is imagination. 9 + 6 = 9 + 6 +1 – 1 = (9 + 1) + (6 – 1) = 10 + 5 =15! Voila!

There was this Tacoma Narrows Bridge failure. If one wishes to see for themselves, a video of the dramatic failure is available on the Web. Its designer went beyond what had been proven. But he wanted more. Fortunately, the only victim was a dog.

It was a single false step but a great leap for structural engineers!  One may not believe, but it is true that tall industrial chimneys have benefitted from the bridge failure. Look at a chimney and you would note a ridge of thin metal strip (strake) winds itself in a helical pattern around the chimney’s tubular structure, to avoid the fate of the bridge – Vortex Shedding. Just imagine the students being told this correspondence between an infrastructure item and an industrial structure. At least in some students and fledgling professionals, it could strike a match. Recall Billy Joel’s lyrics going “...we didn’t start the fire...”. Teachers can do precisely the opposite!

One has seen many drawing rooms in family homes have a curio, which is a bunch of thin glass wires stemming from a pot that projects different coloured lights, along their length and at the ends. This is exactly how colonoscopy and endoscopy work, did you know that? I have no idea which came first, but we can be sure that one came first and the other followed. Someone must have dared and succeeded.

Even brief mention of these in high school and even college courses could be enough on the condition that these neither can be nor cannot be included in the syllabus for the course ahead of time, but automatically get included if mentioned in the class.

“Future ready” should not mean being ready for the future which teachers or the text books foresee. The future must be envisioned by the students themselves. Teachers should prepare students for being surprised, shocked, for accidental encounters with the unknowns and such.   The bonus should lie in the unknown, the thing that happens with future-ready innovators and inventors.

Raghuram Ekambaram