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Commentary: The classroom of 2075 may look nothing like the one we know today
Future schools could become spaces for creating, debating, experimenting and mentoring as education shifts towards building human capability
- PUBLISHED: Mon 21 Sept 2026, 10:37 AM
- By:
- Dino Varkey
The author is Group Chief Executive Officer of Gems Education.
For much of modern history, we have thought about education as social infrastructure: something every society needs to create opportunity, strengthen communities and prepare young people for adulthood.
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I believe we need to think about it differently.
Education is economic infrastructure.
Every technology company, hospital, financial centre, laboratory and manufacturing facility ultimately depends on the same resource: people with the knowledge, skills, judgement and character to make those systems work and then imagine what comes next.
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The countries that thrive over the next 30 or 40 years will not simply be those that invest in physical or digital infrastructure. They will be those that develop the human capability to use, improve and reinvent it.
Yet there remains an uncomfortable lag between the world outside a traditional school and what happens inside it.
For generations, education was organised around an industrial model: children grouped by age, moving through standardised content at broadly the same pace, with examinations determining what they knew. That model served an important purpose. But the world our children are entering demands something different.
The default can no longer be “everyone on the same page, at the same pace.”
When I imagine the classroom of 2075, I do not imagine the end of classrooms. I imagine their transformation: studios for creating and building; seminar rooms for debate; laboratories for experimentation; spaces for coaching and mentoring; simulations where students can practise real-world situations and safely fail; quiet spaces for deep work; and community hubs where students, families and the wider community come together.
The purpose of education must shift from transmitting knowledge to developing the capacity to question, create, collaborate, adapt and lead.
Ultimately, the most important capability we can give a child is not mastery of today's knowledge. It is the desire and ability to keep learning when tomorrow's knowledge is different.
How can teachers sustain curiosity?
We must be able to sustain their curiosity and love for learning. In education we refer to this as embedding a growth mindset in our students. But as we look forward 30 or 40 years, with the rate of exponential change that we are witnessing, a student's ability to unlearn, relearn, and find clarity and connection in complexity, alongside the values and character that they exemplify, will be key.
This requires us to rethink assessment, too.
For generations, education has focused on testing the quality of the answer. As knowledge becomes increasingly accessible, we should become more interested in the quality of the question.
Can a student identify the problem worth solving? Distinguish evidence from assumption? Create something that did not previously exist? Work with others? Demonstrate resilience and good judgement?
We should increasingly measure continuous demonstration of competence and character rather than allowing one high-stakes examination to become the primary signal of capability.
This makes the teacher more important, not less.
The world faces a global teacher shortage of around 70 million. At the same time, the learning crisis accelerated by COVID-19 has put an entire generation at risk of losing significant future earning potential. We cannot solve a challenge of this scale through traditional approaches alone.
Some things AI just can't replace
Artificial intelligence can help personalise learning and remove some of the administrative burden that takes teachers away from their most important work.
But AI cannot replace what a great teacher does: see human potential and inspire it.
A useful principle for the future is: AI for personalisation. Humans for transformation.
There is another reason schools matter beyond the classroom. In a world experiencing increasing disruption, they are becoming essential community infrastructure.
For too long, mental health in schools was understood largely as a support service: a counsellor available when a student was struggling, often working separately from the wider learning environment.
We are moving towards something more ambitious: mental health excellence embedded into the school itself.
That means connecting teachers, counsellors, pastoral teams and parents so changes in a student's behaviour, engagement, relationships or emotional wellbeing can be recognised early and understood in context. The aim is to move from responding to problems once visible to creating an environment where wellbeing is continuously understood, supported and strengthened.
This is why the future of education cannot be reduced to curriculum, technology or examination results. It is about building human capability and resilient communities at the same time.
If human capital is the engine of every modern economy, education is the infrastructure that creates it.
The strongest education systems of the future will connect schools to the world around them, give teachers the time and tools to do their best work, use technology without diminishing human relationships, and prepare young people not simply to enter the economy but to shape it.
We should not ask only what jobs today's children will get.
We should ask what companies they will build, what discoveries they will make, what communities they will strengthen and what new economies they will create.
The most important infrastructure any country can build is its people.
And the work of building that infrastructure begins long before a young person enters the workforce.
It begins at school.