Education at the Cross Roads: 
the Futures of Schooling

Marcus Bussey 

Six years ago I sat with a group of parents and teachers in the class room of a small urban community school.  We were engaged in a scenario building workshop in which we sought to reflect on our shared values in education and work towards a consensual vision for the future of the school.  This was no easy task as there was a wide range in values and visions for the school.  Through the day we culled our shared value base and eventually arrived at a mutually acceptable vision.  In the years since this day the school has worked towards this vision and now provides industrious children with a dynamic learning environment set in an edible garden. 

The tools of scenario planning, common to many work places today, in conjunction with consensual values exploration which strive to elicit moral (heterodox and dissenting) as opposed to predictive (hegemonic) futures, premised on the recognition that alternative futures require foresight and creative engagement in which vertical analysis replaces a horizontal descriptive approach, helped us all to move towards a commonly desired future in which everyone felt ownership and some degree of confidence. 

Futures as Transformation

These tools - scenario development, transformatory futures, anticipatory action learning, layered analysis and moral engagement - are drawn from a range of analytic and synthetic processes offered by Futures Studies to learning institutions like schools.  This combination resists the bureaucratic tendency to reductionism.  It offers ways to think about, and creatively engage with, the future as opposed to offering linear approaches that amount to little more than the strategic clarification of alternatives.  

Foresight methodology as developed by Richard Slaughter is premised on the recognition that all humans have the capacity to look to the future and anticipate and thus plan for possible developments.  Institutions too, as a working product of many consciousnesses, have the capacity to develop foresight in order to best cater to future needs - be they economic, social or personal. This view also holds that human consciousness itself is a main player in future trends. Thus, as futurist Sohail Inayatullah points out, it is through the interaction of self, other and environment that innovation 'from the edge' can occur.

Such an interpretation, linking consciousness and reality,  makes the future eminently more complex as we are faced with variables which often seem to be hidden, antagonistic, erratic or simply unforeseeable at present.  Complexity means that short term analysis must give way to longer term processes - an historical vision and a sensitivity to narrative - that requires patience, timing and insight.

Five Drivers of Change 

Schools seeking to avail themselves of such tools need to bring them to bear on the pre-eminent drivers of change within our culture today.  There are five main drivers of change today that will have far reaching implications for us all and our descendants. 

•           globalism and the multicultural response,

•           an increasingly close association of knowledge and capital,

•           greater environmental/ecological pressures and awareness,

•           technological developments shaping human organisation and      generating new metaphors, 

•           spiritual resurgence as consciousness deepens.

These forces provide the drivers for change and set the agenda for current discourse within the educational system.  They are very broad and all require both long and short term perspectives in order to be comprehensible to a futures oriented dialogue that is rich in positive and engaging images of the future.  This is important as they take the discourse away from the knee jerk reactions so frequently thrust upon schools today. 

Binary Opposition

  Each driver presents sets of binary opposites that make them fertile and creative forces within our lives.  Basically this binary principal reflects the tension summed up by the physicist Neils Bohrs when he quipped that the opposite of a great Truth is another great Truth.  All drivers are vehicles of change.  Change is commonly characterised as either advantageous or inimical to the human condition, but generally turns out to be something of a compromise between the two.  Each driver provides a number of such binary positions which can be best understood as possible narrative strands possessing their own logic and compelling Truth. 

  Examining these is a good place to start when seeking to explore the futures field.

  Globalism provides us with the opportunity to explore our humanity through a shared dialogue with others.  It is often characterised as the 'melting pot' that can develop a deeply multicultural and pluralist voice rich in tolerance and a multitude of creative expressions.  Or if we takes its binary opposite, a non-western voice will quite rightly point out its potential to silence the many and privilege an aggressive, hegemonic (capitalist western) culture over others. 

  The growing links between knowledge and capital can lead to either the development of an interactive and fluid society in which knowledge becomes a central part of human transactions and the money based economy of today fades in importance, thus unleashing an explosion of creative human energy.  Or, knowledge could be shackled to capital as a subservient instrument in the process of its accumulation. 

Environmental concerns are also well stated in their binary association of future paradise in which humanity lives in harmony in a new Eden or in human voraciousness which becomes the ultimate source of planetary degradation and the decline of our species. 

Similarly we are all familiar with the tensions that surround technological development.  Here the play between techno-salvation and techno-hell is almost a cultural norm having been co-opted by Hollywood and science fiction.  The fact is however that the binary principal does describe the highly creative tension between these two points. We need to constantly reflect on the implications of this tension if we are to engage effectively in anticipatory actions that promote the possible futures we would hope for. 

Finally the deepening spirituality so often associated today with the New Age is also a vehicle for change and can be better understood by examining the binary tensions within it.  Here for example we have at one end of the scale an emergent Neo-humanist consciousness that is arguing for a spiritual empiricism to balance the materialism that has so deeply wounded our psyches and world.  At the other extreme we have spirituality itself commodified in crystal shops, slick books and Californian 'gurus' claiming to provide the guidance for our every step through the day. 

Scenario Building 

These drivers and the dialogue generated by the interplay of binary positions within them provides educationalists with the discourse for analysis, planning and anticipatory action that will enable teachers, policy writers and administrators to develop a futures orientation within their professional environments.

  School communities, if they desire to free themselves from knee jerk responses thrust upon them by governments and business,  need to engage collectively and individually  with the questions and issues raised by thoughtful reflection upon these five drivers of change. 

A school seeking to open up an anticipatory learning cycle could begin by asking questions raised through the exploration of possible scenarios.   Scenarios are narrative strands that we can develop in response to explorations of themes we discern in our environment.  They are interesting in that they suggest ways we can respond now in order to proactively and interactively participate in our future.

  No scenario is likely to be the future but they help us immensely when it comes to formulating questions about current practice because they can highlight extreme outcomes arrived at from apparently innocuous developments in the present.  It is important not to let our own incredulity blunt scenario generation.  Spin lots in order to free the mind from its own innate conservatism.  Think about the issues and let them cross pollinate in order to generate richer more possible futures.  Allow hopes and fears to come into play.  Let your values out to 'flex their muscles'. 

Here are six scenarios for schools in 2025.

  Scenario 1 

Globalism providing a new Metaphor

  Globalism is certainly providing us with new metaphors.  Schools  become a multicultural microcosmic reflection of the whole society.  Teacher recruitment will be conducted globally through the internet.  English will be the 'universal' language but there will be at least ten languages also spoken regularly on campus.  To effectively reflect the breadth of the community, school numbers will increase to about 2000.  Hours will be more flexible with schooling and work becoming more fluid.  Student ages will also increase up to 21 years.

  Curriculum focus will shift from concerns with the traditional three R's to a real commitment to developing the social literacies of Respect, Reconciliation and Relationship.  The outstanding new metaphor for this scenario is One Universal Family. 

Scenario 2 

Virtual School

  Schools decentralise through the use of advanced technology which allows students to work from home and talk to teachers via the net.  Traditional schools become irrelevant as they hang on to the architecture of the liberal education project - classical subjects.  Learning materials are immediate and can keep pace with student needs and abilities.  Discipline problems become a thing of the past.  Teachers may never meet their students in the 'flesh' but the learning relationship is not compromised. 

School's curriculum  driven by demands of business with learning being work-place oriented.  Students and their families decide on initial careers around the age of ten.  Stratification and stagnation in each individual's life avoided because career changes occur at least three times in an adult's working life.

  Scenario 3 

The Greening of schools

Schools become the driving force in a new ecological revolution.  Young people discover their own power to implement change.  Teachers also redefine themselves moving from transmitters of knowledge to generators of meaning.  Learning is much more active with students working in groups to maintain green belts and generating green businesses.  Schools become sites of economic enterprise in which students and small industry work hand in hand.  Mentoring becomes central and teachers work within the community to facilitate routes for students to take to best express themselves. 

Ecological metaphor drives this process - dynamic whole in which every one is connected to everyone else - so personal responsibility for the health of the whole is unavoidable.  Schools structure becomes fluid and boundaries between adult and child disappear and work/job/career becomes simply one's path through life. 

Scenario 4 

From Schools to School 

Children learn from home.  Schools become school - a single global knowledge base.  Courses taken in chunks.  Value of knowledge is judged by numbers of people entering courses. Metaphor here is school as knowledge stock market.   Teachers become technicians monitoring and maintaining globally prepared and packaged knowledge streams.  Home visits are organised at the local level to facilitate learning relationships with Mentoring becoming a big part of community services.  Knowledge increasingly becomes a unit of economic exchange with 'know-how', creativity, and time saving bearing high dividends.

  Scenario 5 

A New Spirituality 

Layered vision of knowledge promoted in spiritually values oriented learning communities.  A deep view of mind  as 'body-mind-spirit' is promoted and facilitated.  Emphasis shifts from content to process.  Valid knowledge seen in terms of its spiritual/individual, social and cultural worth.  Meditation part of research process.  Character becomes central to school curriculum.  Small groups and team learning that follows action learning principals becomes the mainstay of learning - shifting emphasis from individual as solitary to individual as connected member of a learning community.  Knowledge as personal and social quest that ultimately leads to welfare of all and augmentation of ones sense of spiritual self.  Thus learning becomes more visceral and at the same time more subtle - process of self making. 

Wild Card Scenario 

The Knowledge Gene 

As a result of the human genome project a gene is discovered that is responsible for the storing and processing of higher order information.  It has been found to appear in clusters that vary from individual to individual.  Three main variations are noticed called Sophia 1, 2 and 3.  Only 10% of the population appears to posses Sophia 3 which has a very high processing capacity.  35% of people have Sophia 2 and the rest of us have Sophia 1. 

 

Many schools begin screening and streaming to take 'advantage' of these new findings.  Some schools quickly aim at a niche market - the sophia 1s, 2s or 3s.  Others seek to balance curriculum to suit all three levels, focusing on values, in a bid to dilute the impact of the structural determinists.  There is great contestation of this 'genetic class system' with new schooling structures being offered based on different understandings of knowledge and intelligence - support from multiple intelligence theorists and others. 

Questions 

These scenarios raise many questions.  Where would your school fit? Which culture and whose future is being privileged?  How do the individual and collective values of a school community come to be reflected in the development of the school?  How far fetched is far fetched? What forms does inertia or outright sabotage take within a school?  How can we differentiate between authentic culture (Nandy) as opposed to pseudo-culture (Sarkar)? 

The list could of course go on and on.  The axis of the debate however does turn on the question of one dominant voice silencing others, with 'culture' being used broadly to signify legitimate human expression.  The questioning process should facilitate an ever deepening awareness  in which the issues portrayed in the scenarios cease to remain simply as descriptors for  unavoidable historical forces (the horizontal analytic approach) and take on  layered meaning in which the participants become increasingly aware of how these issues are played out in their own hearts and workplaces. 

It is important to bear in mind that questions do not require closure but need to become a basis for ongoing collective and individual self analysis with policy evolving from the dialogue they provide.  As consciousness deepens so actions will change.  Change cannot be legislated.  

Schools at the Cross Roads 

Schools have for too long been constrained by a simplistic reductionist identity as vectors of knowledge (or sites for mass child minding).  We are entering a post industrial world in which the needs of society and the forces that make meaning are moving rapidly away from those that gave form, meaning and purpose to schools.  Futures - drawing as it does on both critical theory and post modernism - problematises the whole question of what knowledge and meaning is and offers schools a much more expansive narrative as a vehicle for cultural transformation.  

Schools now have to make some hard decisions.  Some state run schools have opted to embrace the new technology in an effort to attract a larger share of students who might otherwise be enticed into the private system.  Other schools have simply kept to 'business as usual' ignoring - possibly hoping it might all go away - the signs of massive change that are sweeping our society today.  A few schools are actively engaging with the issues raised by futures studies and are looking to foster an environment that is sensitive to the individuals that constitute their futures. 

Such schools are at the cross roads as they have the power to become futures sensitive institutions that can critically engage with the issues that face us all today.  It is likely that curriculum a generation from now will look quite different from its counter part today.  This is not a daring assertion - it is a logical extrapolation based on current trends.  If that curriculum is to be practical,  ethically coherent and morally responsive to the broader needs of humanity then we need to begin working upon the range of issues raised by a creative and visionary engagement with our hopes for tomorrow.