- Educational systems more and more must deal with the fact that it is not just the learners who change and grow; the earth they inherit is somewhat different from that of their educators, from changing labour markets to questions around technology and sustainability
- The concept of ‘the future’ has both vague and rhetorical, and specific and practical, meanings. These uses may differ in their instructiveness.
- There is a need to more systematically examine how education and the future entangle. This is the impetus for this paper, which examines four ways to ‘proactively articulate’ the future in education. The primary purpose of this paper is to approach this question at a panoramic level, to provide a rough geography of the ‘rallying point’ and to stimulate related discussion.
- Consider now any of the following: When is each of these futures in Gilbert's sentence? Whose future is it? Who knows about it or advocates for it? Can anything be said about the truth or likelihood of that future? This is the complexity inherent to speaking about the future in a nutshell.
- For example, according to Biesta (2009), education has three purposes: qualification, socialisation and subjectification.
- More recently, in a UNESCO programme paper, Facer (2021) has produced a framework consisting of five future orientations in education. These are ‘Educational futures’ (e.g., futures of educational systems), ‘Education as preparation for the future’ (young people's future-readiness and agency), ‘Education about futures’ (e.g., futures literacy), ‘Liberating education from the future’ (e.g., critical and posthumanist perspectives) and ‘Reparative futures’ (issues such as decolonisation).
- The framework presented here differentiates between ‘Education in the future’, ‘Education to adapt to the future’, ‘Education to change the future’ and ‘Education about the future’.
- Education in the future
- The quintessential education in the future discourse positions educational policy and practice as the object of these transformative forces. Education either develops through or attempts to adapt to new conditions. The future is a challenge: As Gilbert (2016, 191) phrases it, ‘schools are portrayed as having failed to respond to these trends, as being inert, outdated, obsolete and no longer “fit for purpose”’.
- For example, ‘education that aims to adapt humans to a specific future also helps to realise (and create a path dependency of) that specific imagined future’
- Overall, education in the future draws from projections, trends and visions. Various futures are drawn up and, in turn, criticised.
- Of course, teachers and students can also discuss educational futures (see, e.g., Varpanen et al. 2022), even if it remains unclear how well their voices are heard. In fact, the role of learners is relatively evasive in this orientation
- Education to adapt to the future
- The second category in the taxonomy, education to adapt to the future, draws from similar larger trends and projections as education in the future. However, the focus is on the content and goals of education rather than policy and practice.
- A quintessential example comes from the concept of 21st century skills. One of the main points of the concept of 21st century skills is that capacities such as critical thinking and creativity are essential for the workforce in the knowledge economy
- The futures of the young are mapped onto the perceived systemic trends that lie outside their control—this is at the very core of education to adapt to the future.
- Lister (2006, 1), for example, criticises the ‘construction of children as “becomings” rather than “beings”; the paidwork-focused and future-oriented model of citizenship’. Education to adapt to the future makes schooling merely a means to an end, or ‘reactionary institutions that cannot and should not have active agency in imagining futures’
- Others, such as Davidson (2017, 10), claim that ‘anyone who claims to know which specific skills will protect students in the future is misinformed’
- Subjecting young people to top-down projections of the future has been called ‘colonization of the future’ and ‘chronological imperialism’ (see Facer 2012, 2016); it imbues the future with the expectations of the present rather than seeing the future as a possibility for newness (Facer 2016).
- Education to change the future
- If education to adapt to the future is constructed around the future impacting the student, education to change the future is the perspective that students and education impact the future.
- in fact, it may be implied that the world will not change unless education brings about the desired change
- Sustainability education thus links knowledge, attitudes and agency (see Jensen 2002; Tolppanen, Kang, and Riuttanen 2022). The focus has shifted towards the learners—and towards subjectification in ‘Biesta space’. Nevertheless, critics will point out that education and learners are still placed as an ‘instrument for attaining some specifed objective’ (Holfelder 2019, 944; see also Webb 2010, for related notes on Freirean pedagogy).
- Even when the future is seen as malleable, it is relevant to question if education in fact reproduces structures such as class (see, e.g., Giroux 1983). Education about change may, for example, enforce specific ideas about who creates change, how change happens and what can change; subjectification is also a type of socialisation. At the same time, it can be argued that emancipation requires education (see Biesta 2007). These paradoxes with authority, direction and utopianism (see Webb 2010) are strongly related to this orientation.
- Further illustrating the blurry boundaries between changing and adapting to the future, we see that both orientations share goals like fostering AI literacy. AI literacy involves both qualifying (competence-related, future-adapting) and subjectifying (critical, future-changing) elements (see Ng et al. 2021; UNESCO 2024).
- Eduction about futures
- Finally, education about the future is concerned with explicitly discussing futures as an educational activity. This is the core idea of futures education
- A central concept is futures literacy, the capacity to imagine, assess and use futures in one's thinking (Miller 2018).
- Education about the future seeks to invoke and hone students' capacities in thinking about the future, touching on issues such as views of scientific-technological change (Rasa 2023; Rasa and Laherto 2022), history-future connections (Ortega-Sánchez et al. 2024), and hope (Ojala 2017).
- Education about the future can indeed lean much towards subjectification: it aligns well with the goal of re-politicising dominant narratives and decision-making (Ahlqvist and Rhisiart 2015). Still, futures literacy is a kind of qualification in itself (see Kazemier et al. 2021);
- As a specific weakness, the framework does not differentiate between individual and social dimensions. This is especially relevant for education to change the future, since education can be seen as influencing the future through (subjectifying) individuals or through (qualifying-socialising) the population at large.
- To press the point, this paper is not attempting to argue that the four orientations are opposing or incompatible. Much of future related educational discourse engages with multiple orientations at the same time; it is quite easy to hold a thought that covers all four. AI and sustainability, for example, are not tied to some single orientation. We may agree that using AI in education (in the future) can create a learning environment that prepares for a further AI-driven professional life (adapting to the future). If so, it would be contrived for AI education discourse to constantly separate these functions. Similarly, sustainability education can hardly impact the future without at least sometimes explicitly talking about it. The overlaps are more of a rule than an exception, but separating the four simplistic orientations should help make sense of them.
- We can no longer treat “the future” as a rhetorical flourish in education. It matters what we mean when we invoke it, it has effects upon the world and upon students when we claim its authority
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(Rasa, 2025)