Everything and everyone connected everywhere. The Internet of Everything becomes a ginormous pulsating organism? social structure? ecosystem? Whatever its nomenclature, it will be a system of non-linearity increasingly obvious in a world where most humans prefer their explanations in simpler linear predictability.

Some posit that this ubiquitous interconnectedness will be evident in 10 years. In traditional education terms, that’s equal to 4 years at college, 4 years of high school and two years surviving junior high. So we can think of those 6th-graders, 12 years and straining to reach the anticipated glories of adulthood. By the time that they finish with another decade of formal education, we can easily imagine them as facile participants in this digitally-connected world. Guessing the number and power of connected computers that will be part of their lives is about as difficult as determining the number of gum balls in a pickle jar. The iPhone5 has the processing power of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Your car already has upwards of 50 computers and millions of lines of code. My refrigerator has a usb port.

How can we ensure that our imaginary 6th-grader will reach 2025 with the abilities of a system thinker? How often will simulations and modeling be part of that decade of education? When will visualization and other transformations of data become as requisite as writing? When will our student learn to code and explore the properties of feedback loops?

Preparing humans for successfully living in a dynamically interconnected world won’t be accomplished by adhering to a machine-age mental model of education that continues to treat learning as a collection of isolated and linear events. Making sense of the continual dynamics emerging from the Internet of Everything will require thinking more holistically than most people now do. Transitioning from the now to the expected should have started yesterday.