Why education must embrace uncertainty and prioritise resilience

Florence Robson
Nov 21
3 min read

Updated: Nov 26

The following insights are drawn from an October 2025 roundtable focused on the fundamental challenges facing education systems as they prepare learners for an uncertain, AI-driven future. The provocateur for this roundtable was Melissa Loble, Chief Academic Officer, Instructure. Melissa spearheaded the integration of academic rigour and customer-centric strategy across the Instructure learning ecosystem, ensuring the educator experience remains central to digital innovation.

Now more than ever, the world needs resilient people capable of continuous adaptation — something current educational models often fail to deliver. The challenge is not merely technical; it is systemic, requiring institutions to look inward and redefine their core purpose. This means moving away from content delivery and toward the holistic formation of character and capability to better prepare learners for uncertain futures.

Systemic constraints on change

A significant obstacle to educational reform is the rigidity of its own structure. A roundtable participant contended that the current higher education system, little changed since the early 1900s, suffers from the "tyranny of the credit hour" and operates in archaic "three-credit-hour siloes." This structure prevents the necessary horizontal and vertical integration of learning required for the modern world.

What's more, the system is failing graduates by asking them to invest in an expensive degree while entry-level roles are disappearing due to automation, leaving the incentives — and the traditional bridge to a mid-career role — misaligned.

Reimagining “skills” as “formation”

Traditional academic values — which often reward general, backward-looking theory — can be antithetical to the real world's need for context-specific, future-oriented problem-solving. Recognising this disconnect, educators worldwide are increasingly shifting away from being content-first (e.g., memorising dates) towards a skills-first approach, where content is used to support the development of essential skills like problem-solving, critical thinking and the ability to "fail fast".

However, multiple roundtable participants argued that referring to "skills" can be misleading, implying a focus on technical ability. Instead, the goal should be "formation": developing a person's leadership, character, values and capability to find the best path in any environment.

This pedagogical pivot asks us to make the implicit explicit, moving beyond assuming durable human skills are a natural byproduct of education, and instead making them the explicit foundation of curricula.

Embracing uncertainty through authentic, experiential learning

A key challenge is the slow pace of institutional change in the face of rapid technological advances. Ms. Loble highlighted that the natural inclination of educators is to block new AI tools used for "cheating", when the more effective — but harder — strategy is to incorporate these tools into the learning process through methods like authentic assessment.

The traditional "sage on the stage" model fails to ready students for the continuous, experiential, and inquiry-based learning required in a professional context.

To truly prepare for uncertain futures, education must embrace an iterative learning approach, where making mistakes is not only permitted but is central to the experience. Since content is now available at the learner's fingertips, the value lies in how we deliver it. After all, in the modern workplace, learning is already largely experiential.

Finally, to create real, rapid change, it is crucial to break out of the higher education bubble and engage people from across society in these conversations. Changing the structure, culture and incentives of general education and lifelong learning is paramount to igniting a new movement.

Thank you to our roundtable partners: the Global Business School Network, International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure, ABET, Lenovo 360, Instructure, Engineering for One Planet and Tyton Partners.

Thank you also to everyone who attended this roundtable. We look forward to continuing this urgent dialogue as we actively work with partners across education and industry to build innovative models that prioritise human qualities in an AI-driven future.