We remember yet that there were wired phones in every house but our children already ask us what the first iPhone looked like. There are fewer bookcases in homes, gadgets replace books and people stop reading. We can see how professions appear and disappear. Everything is progressing with a high tempo and it's obvious for everyone that there's no way forward without education. It's a very hard task for mankind to understand what this way will be today and try to make predictions in the epoch of uncertainty. But meanwhile Veronica Zonabend, founder of UNITED WORLD COLLEGE DILIJAN is investing her powers into the future education today.
The world is changing and the whole society systems change with it: education, politics, economy. Parents send children to study according to what they think is or will be a prestigious profession today and in the future when children will start their career. But as a result of technological progress and development of artificial intelligence many professions appear to be in a risk zone because most of the industrial and administrative functions and actions connected with the data processing and at some point even communication with people will be robotized. At the same time new professions appear and more often than before: if it was about once in 30 years, so now it is once in 2–3 years. Today we don't know 80% professions names of 2030–2035. There is another uncertainty more: what skills and knowledge will be indemand in future? We can follow the dynamics of demands to a person comparing competences' Top-10 with prognosis on 2020 (according to The World Economic Forum data). Many people learn things inertially, get attested, take diplomas, 'paper' so to say, and then get embarrassed trying to understand what to do next. Old schemes lost their energy, aren't working any more; reality demands a new creative attitude. And UWC gives this attitude.
We live in the post-industrial epoch and there's no place for dogmas in it. The modern man asks questions and doubts everything. The time of big quantity of standard operators is finished. Mankind's dream came true: we can be free of the routine work — we got time and strength to build, create and invent. But yet the world is made the way that people are used to follow instructions and carry out prescriptions. We know that 95% of children owns creative energy. And then the outdated system destroys it in a person — only 5% of adults are creative. In UWC we don't only teach children, we try to save their creative potential, their will to make the other way, their own way.
Education in developing world should be multi-lateral but it should also help to choose your own way. Teachers and students in UWC try to find the road to the future together in UWC in Dilijan. To create you need energy and it should have a source — one should be by all means happy to become successful. Happiness is when you do what you like to do and success is always where work brings pleasure. Our teachers help students to understand what they'd like to do in future, what suits them and what they love to do. Every time I come to college I feel the energy of young people full of life, hope and optimism. The circle appears: we do something, create and share with children. They in response radiate a creative energy and give it back to us giving us power to go on with what we stared and belief that our efforts are not in vain.
I'll never stop to admire and be surprised by unbelievable stories of students of UWC. One of our students from Ethiopia, Workne had a hard life before he came to us: he was cleaning shoes day time to earn money and buy kerosene — there was no electricity in his house and then he spent evenings reading books under the kerosene lamps trying to get enough of knowledge. He dreamt and dreams to change his and his country's life. Thanks to his donor's support (Nikolayevs' family) who paid for his education in UWC Workne had this opportunity. In September 2018 he will continue his education in Harvard where he will study biochemistry and do a serious research. I am sure, he will do what he planned to. There's already plenty of stories like this — 16 of 200 graduates of UWC study in prestige universities in London.
Teens from 82 countries study in UWC in Dilijan. Education is designed to give them knowledge and skills demanded in XXI century and as well to broaden the horizons of students, show them the diversity of cultures and ways of thinking. We teach to realize the importance of understanding each other without loosing one's authenticity. It is a miracle to observe how energy is born when our students communicate being so different. They start to realize that a single person can make much and at the same time there's a great power in their joint activity. Children communicate, discover something in each other and a real friendship get born between them despite the fact that some of them traveled all over the world and others got on the plane board for the first time to come to Armenia.
All our students are the links of a long chain — their education is financed by those who are already held and successful; they want and they have a possibility to share what they know and can. Our 'donors' receive hand written letters from their financed: children tell how much college gave them, changed their life and affected their will to change the world for better, they sincerely thank for everything. And then they grow up, become successful and help the next generations of students here — chain is unbroken. And it's unbe-lievable power is in it.
I always count on our students to become the people who will be able to change the world for a better place, to turn it to the good side. There's not much positive on the political arena. Intelligent and talented people are rarely leading, and world elite representatives often bring the negative energy. We try to change the system which doesn't bring up those who can and wills to change the world for good.
I realize it in Dilijan: we don't live in vain, our job has sense. Feeling the positive impact on children starting their life in this world I get power to go further and I want to make more. To create. Children in their turn will invent something new — in a chain. That's how we see here in UWC the future education — a joint creative light charged by the energy of good.
