The problem with the “future of education”

Swedish Vittra School – no classes, no classrooms. Is this the future?

There’s been a lot of interest in the future of education in recent years. We see this in the “schools of the future”, “classrooms of the future”, funding opportunities to develop “Education for Tomorrow” and numerous foresight programs focusing on education and workforce preparation. Futuring is about anticipation; anticipating developments and issues before they become too problematic to be opportunities for positive change, or if that’s impossible, to prepare contingency plans. However, when we peel back the layers of rhetoric it turns out that few, if any, current initiatives that purport to focus on the “future of education” actually have anything to do with the future. Their focus is primarily on past and current issues; in many cases, issues that we have been dealing with for years. How do you construct an optimal future when your eyes are fixed firmly on the past?

Let’s look at an example. Last year, the Nordic Research Council, a major source of research funding for the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, with the recent addition of the Baltic States), launched a new program titled “Education for Tomorrow”. A call for proposals was issued for a budget of 75 million Norwegian Krona (~13 million US Dollars) and several projects selected for funding. Here are the descriptions for a couple of them (retrieved from http://www.nordforsk.org/files/Preseduftbriefs.pdf):

1. Skill acquisition, skill loss, and age: A comparative study of Cognitive Foundation Skills

“…
Research has shown [Cognitive Foundation Skills (CFS)] skills typically are weaker among older than among younger individuals. We want to study the association between age, CFS and the factors that promote skill acquisition and prevent depreciation of skills.
Our starting point is the OECD project PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies). Involving 25 countries, PIAAC is the most comprehensive international assessment of CFS ever conducted. For each country, a representative sample of at least 4000-5000 respondents is provided in 2011-12. In this project, we will substantially extend the already rich information in PIAAC through an opportunity that is only available in the Nordic countries: to combine the PIAAC data with data from official registers. The register data will include information on, e.g., the respondents educational career, history of employment/unemployment, and earnings.
…”

2. Learning Spaces for Inclusion and Social Justice: Success Stories from Immigrant Students and School Communities in Four Nordic Countries

“The main objective of the proposed four year project (January 2013 December 2016) “Learning spaces for inclusion and social justice: Success stories from immigrant students and school communities in four Nordic countries” is to draw lessons from success stories of individual immigrant students and whole school communities at different levels that have succeeded in developing learning contexts that are equitable and socially just. In the project, students´ success is defined as social as well as academic success.
…
The data collected and the findings from the proposed research will shed light on a myriad of good practices according to socially and academically successful immigrant students; as reported by teachers, principals and parents; and as observed by the researchers in school communities. Success stories and practices which have enabled immigrant student success and created learning spaces for inclusion and social justice in school communities and elsewhere will serve as strategies and new guidelines for teaching and school reform.
We see the project as being an important contribution to educational policy, school reform and teacher education, thus benefitting all participants in our research and contributing to inclusion and social justice. The interdisciplinary approach, mixed methods and different aspects included in the research project will provide a broad, innovative knowledge base on the implementation of social justice in diverse Nordic school contexts as well as providing comparison for the international context.”

These are great research projects – I have no qualms about their quality, relevance or significance. However, I fail to see how they relate to the future of education. That’s not to say that they couldn’t be made to do so, but these abstracts give no indication that they have been formulated to relate specifically to the future in any way. In fact, judging from these abstracts, these proposals could have been funded by a myriad of grant schemes that don’t specifically target the future of education. Why were they funded by this program?

Here’s another example. This is a particular pet peeve of mine – The Classroom of the Future! Pay special attention to the video running behind the folks talking. What do we see? A group of learners sitting at tables neatly lined up in rows facing a teacher who is standing at the front of the room – essentially the classroom as we have known it since about forever. But, there’s a slight difference. The students all have a piece of contemporary technology which you will likely find in almost any home in the developed world today. So, where’s the future? What about this image has anything to do with the future?

If we want to get serious about the future of education and make something of the momentum that has building up over the past few years, we have to keep the “future of education” focused on the future, i.e. that which is yet to come. We have to confront the big issues that arise when we seriously consider what education would, could, and should look like when the youth entering our school systems today get ready to enter the world of work, civic duty and meaningful maturization some 15-20 years from now. We have to be prepared for foreseeable technological developments that promise to radically change how people live, learn and work. For example, how many schools have plans or policies about how they will integrate immersive heads-up augmented reality technologies? Google is getting ready to take just such a technology to market either this year or the next. What will teachers do when their students start showing up in class with a pair of Google Glasses on their nose? Looking further ahead, what will teachers do when they can no longer tell whether the students in their classroom are the real students or virtual avatars? What will learners need to learn when manual tasks are routinely carried out by robots? How will educators and policy makers ensure that future technologies are equally distributed so that all learners are able to reap their benefits?

There are plenty of pressing issues over the medium- and long-term future that need to be explored. We don’t need to pretend to be thinking about the future of education when we really aren’t.