Last week spent a couple of fascinating days in the company of some wonderfully stimulating people. We gathered under the auspice of FutureLab as the Expert Advisory Group for the Beyond Current Horizons programme, which aims to provide a ‘long term and challenging vision for education in the context of socio-technological change to 2025 and beyond’, and whose purpose is to:
‘explore how futures thinking tools can be used by the education system in order to ensure that it can more independently determine which ‘visions of the future’ should be used to determine education strategy and decision making.’
The programme is sponsored by the Technology Futures Unit in the Department for Children, Schools and Families. This enterprise is extremely exciting – it provides the opportunity to poke around in all kinds of future-gazing documents, looking more at their methodology than at the specific predictions. But the scope sweeps in the state, politics, society at large, religion, global/local, receding horizons, family, public/private, demographics and spiritual thinking. And that’s all before you’ve thought about knowledge, information, communication, learning and teaching.
One of the issues that grabbed my attention, though, was the extent to which British (English?) society communicates to its young people that they are a precious resource that is going to become more scarce as time passes. As the average lifespan gets longer, and the birth rate falls, more and more of us are going to depend on the vitality, creativity and public spiritedness of our young people. Are we bringing up a generation of young people who feel this valued? I don’t think so. Various indicators in futures documents signal that the age of consumerism may be coming to an end, basically, because we can’t afford it any more (financially, politically and environmentally). We will be pushed back to the quality of our relationships to satisfy our needs and wants at all levels – in the family, in the workplace, in our educational establishments, whatever they may look like in the future. All our children need to be brought into this thinking, rather than alienated from it by a generation terrified out of its wits by tabloid hysteria and mind-sapping reality television. Eh! Glad I got that out, Norm…
