Preparing youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

On November 18, the British Council, in partnership with Vitoria Mutual Foundation Limited, staged the second Global Social Enterprise Expo as part of Global Entrepreneur Week at the Spanish Court Hotel in Kingston.

The annual expo is a strategic movement for the multi-year Social Enterprise in Secondary Schools Programme, with a focus on the vision of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It provids a platform for young, vibrant, creative, and critical-thinking entrepreneurs from various schools to showcase their social enterprises. The students and educators at this year’s staging spoke about issues surrounding unemployment, as well as issues affecting their schools and communities. Each school also gave creative ideas that they believed would mitigate problems through their social enterprise.

State Minister in the Ministry Of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture And Fisheries, Floyd Green, praised the British Council for taking the initiative, pointing out that the day was the start of the Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Quantum physicist Professor Patton Duncan, who has taught quantum physics in Jamaica for 22 years, spoke on the matter of preparing youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“When you talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s important to remember that Jamaica hasn’t yet fully come out of the agricultural revolution.

And for this reason, we have a tendency of copying the best practices, but not the policy. For too long, our country has imitated the language, lifestyle, and dress of the First World, so to speak. Now we’re about to make a similar mistake,” he said.

“Remember that when you transport technology, if there is not a supporting ecosystem – to use your word, ‘holistic system’ –what will happen is that the technology will become a concentrated aspect of the elites’ culture, thereby reinforcing the digital divide, unless we make sure that we really understand what a revolution means.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution comes out of Albert Einstein’s 1920 theory of relativity. All our technology come out of one revolution. All we are doing now is applying it to various medical areas.

For this reason, the holistic method of thinking is what Jamaica needs to retool, not just learning the new technologies,” he said.