The legacies of the past: Newtonian paradigm in education

Abstract

The world is now suffering from a deep educational crisis today. Our education system cannot keep up with our fast-paced world. We witness an increasing decline in confidence and public support for college education. Education and obtaining a college diploma, that once was considered as a taken-for-granted path to wealth and social advancement by most people, is now a source of countless debates. The Newtonian paradigm of schooling that worked so well for so many years is now not up for the job it was once set for. Products of our educational system (i.e. our graduates) no longer fit the needs and demands of the today's labor market. Employers are complaining about the incompatibility between job requirements and employee/ graduate qualifications, graduates are complaining about not being able to find a job because the employers either reject their job applications claiming that they are either under-educated or over-educated for the type of employment they have applied for, parents are complaining that the kind of academic education that opened so many doors for them no longer works for their children, and some politicians even blame the over-education of young learners as the reason for under-employment among the highly educated young people. Despite the numerous efforts to transform our Newtonian education to cure the very problems it has created, the basic notion of Newtonian schooling remained strictly unchanged over the last century. There are multiple reasons why we cannot transform our Newtonian educational system and shift to the Quantum paradigm. In this chapter, we will pinpoint those reasons and a few major misconceptions why the models of quantum paradigm often struggle to take root in education. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.