We are living through a moment that demands even stronger courage from education. Our children hold in their hands devices that can summon centuries of knowledge in seconds, yet in too many classrooms, the future still feels far away.
Dumisani Tshabalala, head of Academics at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (Owlag)
We speak easily about the fourth industrial revolution, about AI and disruption, but a quieter question lingers beneath the slogans: are our schools equipping young people to shape what is coming, or merely to survive it?
Business strategist Jeroen Kraaijenbrink has described the emerging world as “brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible”. That is the world our learners are walking into. If we are serious about “steering the future”, education cannot sit in the back seat. It has to take the wheel.
Like the Renaissance, the industrial revolution and the first digital wave, today’s intelligent technologies are not just changing how we work; they are changing what it means to learn, to belong and to participate.
In South Africa, that transformation lands in a system still scarred by inequality, language injustice and under-resourcing. We are fixing the past and building the future at the same time.
I believe seven intertwined trends will determine whether education in 2026 and beyond becomes a lever for human flourishing, or a spectator to widening gaps.
1. From digital literacy to a human–AI partnership
Not long ago, being “good with computers” meant basic keyboard skills and the ability to search the web. That world is gone. Learners now ask chatbots to draft essays, debug code and summarise notes. AI is already in the classroom; the question is not if, but how.
There are two futures on offer. In one, AI becomes a shortcut: learners outsource thinking, teachers outsource feedback, and screens hum with confident nonsense. In the other, AI becomes a mirror that forces deeper thought: Who trained this model? Whose voices are missing? Why does this answer feel plausible but wrong?
The classrooms that matter in 2026 will be those where teachers treat AI as a thinking partner, not a magic wand. We will still teach content, but the real work will be discernment, ethical judgment and the ability to frame precise questions.
The winners in this new economy will not be those who blindly consume algorithmic output, but those who can interrogate it.
2. Trauma-informed and neuro-inclusive schooling moves to the centre
There is another system quietly steering learning: the human nervous system. Many of our learners come to school carrying invisible burdens: loss, violence, hunger, anxiety about money, pressure to succeed.
We see it in the learner who “zones out” in the third period, the one who explodes at a small correction, the one who simply stops handing in work.
For too long, we have misread these signals as defiance or laziness. Neuroscience tells a different story: a brain in survival mode cannot learn optimally.
Trauma-informed and neuro-inclusive schooling is not a soft add-on; it is hard infrastructure for real learning. It means predictable routines, emotionally safe classrooms, teachers who understand triggers and regulation, and policies that ask: “What happened to you?” before “What is wrong with you?”
In a country where many children grow up in chronic stress, this is not charity. It is strategy. A calm, connected learner will always out-think a terrified one.
3. Skills, not just grades, as the new currency
Walk into a South African lounge and you will see the evidence of effort: matric certificates framed on walls, graduation photos carefully displayed. Yet too many of the young people behind those frames feel unprepared once the ink dries.
They arrive at university overwhelmed by academic writing and independent learning. They enter their first jobs and freeze the moment a problem has no memo.
We have confused marks with mastery.
Good schooling is not measured by how much content a learner can reproduce, but by what they can do with what they know. Can they design an experiment, write a convincing proposal, interpret a dataset, lead a small team, and build a prototype?
When World Skills Day passes and the speeches fade, those are the abilities that determine whether they can navigate a volatile labour market.
The quiet revolution behind this shift is competency-based education. The best lessons now end with two questions: What did I practise today? Where will I use it next?
A Shakespeare essay becomes training in persuasive argument; a photosynthesis practical becomes practice in data visualisation; a coding exercise becomes a lesson in logic, debugging and resilience.
If our curriculum continues to treat knowledge as an end in itself, we will produce paper success and practical stagnation.
If we treat knowledge as a gateway to skill, we give our youth a fighting chance.
4. Data-rich, high-touch schools
Data has acquired a bad reputation in staffrooms. Teachers associate it with spreadsheets, league tables and public shaming. Used that way, it flattens children into numbers and corrodes trust.
But data, handled differently, can be an act of care.
Imagine a school where we do not wait until a learner fails Grade 10 Mathematics to discover that fractions were fragile in Grade 6. Imagine having a simple, living profile of each child that captures patterns in understanding, participation and well-being — not to punish, but to support.
We are moving towards data-rich, high-touch schools where information is not the end, but the beginning of a conversation:
Who is quietly slipping? Who needs a stretch? Who has stopped asking questions? Technology makes it possible to see these patterns early. Humanity decides what we do with them.
The future will favour schools that combine rigorous evidence with deep relationships, not those that chase percentages alone.
5. Mother tongue-based bilingual education: Reclaiming the cognitive advantage
There is a more subtle inequality woven through our classrooms: language. For decades, we have expected children to do their deepest thinking in languages they often only encounter formally at school. We then mistake language gaps for intelligence gaps.
A child who can reason powerfully in isiZulu, Sesotho or Xitsonga is not “behind”. She is already thinking in complex, structured ways, just not in the language of the test. When we refuse to build on that foundation, we waste cognitive capital.
Mother tongue-based bilingual education is not about choosing between English and African languages. It is about using the full linguistic repertoire of a child’s mind. That might look like brainstorming in home languages, drafting in English, code-switching to unpack a difficult concept, or reading a text in parallel versions.
Research has been clear for years: strong literacy in the mother tongue supports later success in English, not the other way round. If we want genuine comprehension, critical thinking and mathematical reasoning, we must teach in the languages that help children make sense of the world, not only in the languages adults feel are prestigious.
In 2026 and beyond, the schools that treat African languages as vehicles of academic thought, not just cultural decoration, will quietly change life trajectories.
6. Girls’ education as a quiet revolution
The next trend is both intimate and strategic: the rise of girls’ education as a driver of national futures. When girls stay in school longer, entire communities benefit. But access alone is not enough. The design of the learning environment matters.
A classroom that prepares girls for the future is one where their questions are treated as assets, not irritations; where leadership is practised long before it is formalised in a badge; where Stem is framed as a set of tools for solving problems they care about, not a test of whether they “belong”.
When girls learn to read data, build models, negotiate, code, critique and care, they are not just preparing for individual careers. They are quietly reshaping the future workforce that will tackle climate change, public health, infrastructure and governance.
Investing in girls’ education is not charity. It is a strategy for a country running out of time.
7. Critical competencies: The new measure of educational success
All of these trends point to a deeper question: what kind of human beings are we trying to raise?
It is not enough to sprinkle “21st-century skills” into policy documents. The future Kraaijenbrink describes — brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible — will demand a broad suite of critical competencies: the cognitive, social and emotional abilities that enable young people to apply knowledge, exercise judgement and adapt under pressure.
By critical competencies, I mean three interlinked families of capabilities that cut across subjects and phases:
- Cognitive competencies such as creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration and metacognition. These determine how effectively learners can analyse information, solve unfamiliar problems and work with others on complex tasks.
- Character competencies such as mindfulness, curiosity, courage, resilience and a growth mindset. These influence how learners respond to difficulty, feedback, uncertainty and change.
- Adaptive competencies, especially the capacity to learn, unlearn and relearn as contexts and technologies change. This is increasingly the core requirement for participation in a rapidly evolving economy.
A Brookings Institution report has already warned that, while many such skills are present in the Caps curriculum on paper, they are not “deliberately and systematically taught” in schools. Understanding that children need a particular set of skills to live constructively in the 21st century is not the same as understanding what those skills are, how they develop, or how to teach and assess them.
These competencies do not appear magically because we hope they will. They have to be planned for, practised and made visible.
That means departments mapping how, for example, collaboration or resilience is developed over time, just as we map algebra or essay writing. It means rethinking assessment so that invisible competencies are not excluded simply because they are harder to mark. And it means trusting teachers as designers and coaches, not only as deliverers of content.
In a world where knowledge expires quickly, critical competencies become the durable core. The future will not reward those who can memorise notes, but those who can make meaning, make decisions and make progress in uncertainty.
Steer the future
We often say that education prepares young people for the future, as if the future were a fixed destination waiting for them. It isn’t. The future is something they will write — line by line, choice by choice — in classrooms like ours.
If we treat AI as a gimmick, ignore trauma, cling only to marks, hoard data, sideline mother tongues, underinvest in girls and neglect critical competencies, we will steer the future in one direction.
If we choose instead to place human dignity, critical thinking, linguistic justice, well-being, capability and character at the centre of schooling, we will steer it in another.
Our task is not only to help children read the world, but to equip them with the skills, languages and courage to remake it.
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