The World Economic Forum, held each year in the postcard town of Davos, Switzerland, is typically associated with the global elite. It’s a place where someone like Bill Gates can be found craning his neck in the audience to hear the latest intellectual superstar — someone like Malcolm Gladwell or Malala Yousafzai.
And while it is known for just that, this past summer it was also the place where a fortunate contingent of Oak Park and River Forest High School students got to hobnob and dine with people at the peak of global influence during a trip there this summer.
Twenty-nine OPRF students attended the Global Student Leaders conference in Davos, which was held in conjunction with the famous World Economic Forum. And two of them — OPRF senior Nick Drain, 17, and junior Annabel Huber, 16, — found themselves eating lunch with people like the creator of Angry Birds, a British Knight and a U.S. cultural ambassador. The two students created videos that were picked as top-24 finalists from a pool of roughly 1,500 student videos produced by youths from all over the world.
The prompt for the video was to explain a crucial skill for education in the future.
“I picked computer coding, because it’s really important for the future and it will be a skill that everyone is going to need five to 10 years from now,” Drain said.
Drain, who aspires to go into visual communications and is currently learning to code in an AP computer science course, said the skill opens up a lot of career possibilities.
“During my research for the project, I learned that when my generation graduates from college in four years, there will be a huge job disparity with respect to people who are skilled in coding. There just aren’t enough kids interested in the subject,” he said.
The 17-year-old said he believes that the United States should mirror countries like China, which integrates computer science into the general curriculum and makes it a requirement for advancement.
“Here in the U.S., there are only a few states that have made it a requirement. We need to start by introducing the subject into the larger curriculum,” Drain said.
For Huber, the crucial traits most necessary to future learning were open-mindedness and acceptance.
“If students don’t feel accepted, they won’t participate or ask a question they need to ask. If we created a safe environment and ensured that they’d be accepted, they’d be more [participative],” Huber said.
An aspiring engineer, Huber said she’s naturally shy, so she knows firsthand what it feels like to be uncomfortable in social settings. At Davos, she had to interact with a group of 10 strangers — students from all over the world.
“We had to work with 10 kids we’d never talked to or seen before who live all over the world. I’m a shy person, so adapting to that setting was kind of hard for me,” Huber said. “But the kids I was with taught me to socialize and make friends way quicker.”
During their special lunch, Drain said he was seated next to internationally renowned education thinker Sir Ken Robinson, who was knighted in 2003 for his work in art education.
“It was kind of surreal,” Drain said of the encounter with the celebrated education activist. “Earlier in the day, he was one of the keynote speakers. He gave a really powerful speech and presentation that all the participants loved. So we talked about his presentation and he asked us about our own projects.”
So what big idea would Drain impress on a captured Davos audience if he had the chance?
“I could reform education, I’d make things easier for students who already know what they want to do,” Drain said. “If I know I want to go into art, for instance, there should be more class options in that area to better prepare students to study the subject in college.”
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com