South Africa, Jan. 27 -- We speak easily about the fourth industrial revolution, about AI and disruption, but a quieter question lingers beneath the slogans: are our schools equipping young people to shape what is coming, or merely to survive it?

Business strategist Jeroen Kraaijenbrink has described the emerging world as "brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible". That is the world our learners are walking into. If we are serious about "steering the future", education cannot sit in the back seat. It has to take the wheel.

Like the Renaissance, the industrial revolution and the first digital wave, today's intelligent technologies are not just changing how we work; they are changing what it means to learn, to belong and to partic...