The Relevance Reset

For Dr. Nicole Bien, education has always been about more than access to learning. It is about creating the conditions in which every young person has the opportunity to thrive. Her career, spanning schools, non-profit governance, educational advisory work and global education leadership, has been shaped by a commitment to advancing equitable and inclusive education.

Since joining the International Baccalaureate (IB) in 2016, Nicole has held a series of leadership roles, including Global Director of Learning and Teaching and Chief Schools Officer. Today, as Chief Community Partnership & Development Officer, she works at the intersection of education, partnership and social impact, building collaborations that seek to expand access to high-quality education and empower young people to contribute meaningfully to their communities and the wider world.

Her academic journey reflects the breadth of her perspective, with a PhD and MA in Education from the University of Sydney, an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Yale University. Her doctoral research into high-stakes assessment policy further deepened her interest in how education systems can create — or constrain — opportunity.

Schools have become remarkably good at producing accomplished students. They prepare learners for examinations, credentials and, increasingly, the demands of the workforce. But there is a more uncomfortable question education must now confront: are we preparing young people to become capable, purposeful adults?

This is the question at the heart of the TAISI conference theme, "adult deficit", which Dr. Bien suggests, is a possible consequence of students moving through education without developing sufficient agency, resilience, identity, purpose and real-world competence.

The distinction matters. A student can perform well academically and still struggle to make decisions independently, navigate uncertainty, and find meaning in adulthood if they have not learned to fail or are driven by intrinsic motivation to be a lifelong learner. 

From Achievement to Agency

In The Disengaged Teens, Anderson and Wintrhop examine the four modes of learner engagement: Passenger, Achiever, Resister and Explorer.The challenge becomes clearer when we look at how students experience learning.

 The Explorer combines high engagement with high agency—The Learner is curious, active and invested in the learning process. Yet only 7% of students in Grades 3–12 report experiences that support this mode. The largest proportions fall into Passenger and Achiever modes, while Explorer experiences decline to below 4% as students enter middle and high school.

That raises an important question: what happens when achievement becomes the destination rather than a by-product of meaningful learning?

The answer may partly lie in another finding presented in the Winthrop and Nitkin's research: learning appears to become less joyful as students grow older. The accompanying data shows a decline across grades in students reporting both that they love school and that they are learning a lot.

This is not simply a question of whether children “like” school. Curiosity, enjoyment and a sense of ownership can be closely connected to whether learners see themselves as active participants in their education.

And this is not confined to one country or one kind of school. A global survey conducted by the World Health Organisation  shows that school experiences tend to worsen with age, with adolescents reporting greater school pressure and lower school satisfaction and teacher support.

When Relevance Disappears

Perhaps the most revealing question is also the simplest:

How often does school teach what learners are excited about?

Research cited from the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup suggests that students are more engaged when teachers make topics interesting, connect them to the real world, or give them opportunities to learn through hands-on experiences.

This points towards a fundamental issue of relevance.

Young people do not arrive at school without interests, questions, identities or ambitions. Yet somewhere along the way, learning can become increasingly detached from the things they find meaningful. The result is a paradox: students may accumulate knowledge and credentials while simultaneously becoming less connected to the reasons for learning.

“Adulthood Deficit” is likely to be associated with learning disengagement and disconnection from curiosity, identity and purpose. If that is the problem, then simply adding another subject to enhance quality of life may not be enough. The question is whether the entire experience of learning allows young people to practise being adults.

The AI question changes the equation

The urgency is heightened by artificial intelligence.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, cited in the presentation, identifies analytical thinking, resilience and flexibility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, motivation and self-awareness, empathy and active listening, curiosity and lifelong learning among the core skills increasingly valued in the world of work. Seven of the top ten are described as non-technical or cognitive skills, with the top five centred on thinking and human capabilities.

At the same time, AI is moving beyond simple pattern recognition into areas such as mathematical reasoning, scientific discovery, prediction and physical action. This shift is aimed more towards moving from calculation to strategic reasoning, scientific discovery and autonomous problem-solving.

That changes what schools need to protect. If machines can increasingly calculate, generate, predict and solve, education cannot define its value primarily through the transmission of information. The distinctly human dimensions of learning become more, not less, important.

Purpose of Schools

So what should education systems rethink?

Four words offer a useful starting point: purpose, relevance, connection and identity.

The purpose of education, according to the framework presented, is to develop people who can continue learning, think independently, solve problems collaboratively and exercise judgement in a world where intelligence is increasingly abundant and values are continually being negotiated.

That requires a shift from asking, “What should students know?” to also asking:

What should they be able to do with what they know?Who are they becoming?Can they make sense of complexity?Can they work with people who think differently?Can they act with judgement when there is no single correct answer?

IB's emerging approaches include systems transformation, in which students connect traditionally isolated disciplines, explore interconnected challenges, work through sustained and collaborative inquiry, and ultimately turn knowledge into action.

That is a significant shift—from connected knowledge to collaborative action.

Preparing Humans, Not Just Students

Perhaps the most important educational outcome is not a certificate, a rank or even a particular body of knowledge. It is the ability to enter adulthood with enough curiosity to keep learning, enough self-awareness to know oneself, enough resilience to navigate uncertainty, and enough agency to act.

The question, then, is not whether schools are producing successful students. Many clearly are. The harder question is whether they are giving young people enough opportunities to become self-directed, purposeful adults who can flourish in school and in life.

In an AI-driven world, that distinction may become the defining challenge for education: not teaching young people how to compete with machines, but helping them develop the human capabilities that make their intelligence, relationships, choices and lives meaningful.

This article is based on a presentation by Dr. Nicole Bien at the TAISI Conference  2026