Education for the Twenty-First Century

Hedley Beare, Richard Slaughter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000532647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

First published in 1993, Education for the Twenty-First Century grew out of a common and deep-seated concern about the way young people think of their own future, and about some of the relatively simplistic education reforms advocated, often by people with scant comprehension of modern educational practices. Schools as institutions, schooling patterns, the curriculum and teachers themselves have come under heavy criticism, but it has to be recognized that the problems in education have no lasting or satisfactory solutions while schools continue to operate out of the framework which has determined their raison d'être for the past two hundred years. The authors argue that schools do not need fine tuning, or more of the same; rather some of the fundamental assumptions about schooling have to be revised. They argue that learning about the future must become very much a part of the present, and they set out in the book some of the thinking and several techniques which permit us to confront the future and make it a more friendly place. The book will be of interest to students, teachers and policymakers.

Chapter 1 The dimensions of change

DOI: 10.4324/9781003260240-2

Over the course of this century, the relationship between the human world and the planet that sustains it has undergone a profound change.

When the century began, neither the human numbers nor technology had the power radically to alter planetary systems. As the century closes, not only do vastly increased human numbers and their activities have that power, but major unintended changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils, in waters, among plants and animals, and in the relationships between these. The rate of change is outstripping the ability of scientific disciplines and our current capabilities to assess and advise. It is frustrating the attempts of political and economic institutions, which evolved in a different, more fragmented world, to adapt and cope.

G. Brundtland etal., Our Common Future, 1987

Most of the writing, planning and public debate about education assumes a fairly static world-picture. Schools, students, the curriculum, classrooms, teachers, and the policies and functions of educational systems are treated as though these have been, are, and will continue to be enduring features of education, wherever we are in the world. Yet the universe is anything but static and its dynamism poses quite powerful challenges to educators. Moreover, the fundamental assumptions which govern our thinking about educational systems are themselves derived from a set of dominant, but often unexamined, assumptions about the nature of the world. They concern such things as growth, economic rationality and the separation of people from nature. They are based, in fact, on a world-view from before the Industrial Revolution.

But in many key respects that world-view is being exploded by quantum physics, by technology, and by planetary pollution as well as by social innovations such as the ‘theology of ecology’, the ‘green movement’ and ideas like the ‘re-enchantment of the world’. What have been called ‘structural discontinuities’ (that is, breaks in the social fabric based on the ‘cultural programming’ of an earlier time) certainly complicate the work of teachers and schools. If schools are to operate confidently in the twenty-first century, these issues need to be understood now, especially by teachers and parents.

This book tries to show how educators and people associated with schools can respond to these challenges. The response implies a journey which goes far beyond the present familiar landscape of schooling, and beyond the easy acceptance of what we now take for granted about education. In fact, it is that very taken-for-granted-ness which is the fundamental problem. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, we therefore draw attention to major world changes occurring before our eyes and, more importantly, to the shifts in world-view which are driving them.

The central importance of changes in values, in ways of knowing, in assumptions about meanings - in short, the implication of paradigm shifts - has too often been overlooked in educational discourse. However, understanding these deep-seated changes opens up many new options. While it is impossible to predict the future accurately (and especially the future of social systems), we attempt here what may be the next best thing: a specifically forward-looking educational perspective which can help us to re-conceptualise what education for the twenty-first century could be. Using what we presently know, accepting some of the more obvious trendlines, and without slipping into the predictive mode, we can already consider a number of things which will occur in the next decade or century.

CHANGES THAT ARE LIKELY TO OCCUR

The first thing to note is that the changes of the next one hundred years are likely to exceed those of the last one thousand years in terms of impact, speed, scope and importance. For example, within the next century we are likely to see some or most of these events:

• A doubling of the human life span. Think of the consequences such a development will have on social structures, on family life, on promotion in one’s employment, on the meaning of work and of retirement.
• The successful completion of the human genome project and a blurring of the boundaries between human beings and machines. Ethical dilemmas are already occurring in relation to genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, transplantation of human organs and organ banks. Such developments will continue to require the rewriting of laws, the reframing of ethical concepts and a redefinition of life and consciousness.
• The loss of most of the world’s remaining tropical forests. This one development will greatly deplete the planet’s evolutionary gene pool and will hasten climatic changes across the globe.
• An exacerbation of the greenhouse effect coupled with further ozone depletion. Thus skin cancer will become more prevalent and there will be a range of other impacts on plants, animals and environments.
• The development of nanotechnology: tiny machines or ‘replicating assemblers’ working at the molecular level to fabricate sophisticated materials and construct devices of enormous power at very low cost. If this technology lives up to its promise it will overturn economic systems, transform the natural and built environments, revolutionize health care, defence and space travel.
• Conventional and nuclear terrorism may well worsen. In consequence, our present notions about security, mass travel, and national borders are likely to change. The spread of the AIDS pandemic will exacerbate these concerns.
• The sovereign nation-state may decline in power. What we now take for granted about world politics, about nations and government, about who makes decisions for our collective good will all have to be rethought.

To such a list could be added new forms of ‘learning’ via chemical or electronic implants, inter-species communication, genetic counselling and many other shifts, social innovations and new types of technology (including nuclear fusion, expert systems and space manufacturing). The combined effects of such changes are powerful, bewildering, and essentially unpredictable. For as far ahead as we can see, there will be turbulence and deep-seated, structural change. While we may yearn for more settled times, they are not likely to reappear, at least for a very long time (in human terms). So what are the consequences for schooling and for what children now in school should learn?

No picture of the future can possibly be complete. These things will not all happen in ways we might expect. There will be many surprises! But some of them are very likely to occur simply because their precursors (or early warning signs) are already here. So without looking far into the future and without having to try very hard, we can see major changes happening right before our eyes. Taken together, they are altering some of the most basic assumptions about, and conditions of, life on planet Earth. Of all the institutions in society, of course, schools must be among the first to address these issues, if only because the students now in school will live amongst these changes. What is more, to educate young people as though the present patterns of thinking and living, or past ones for that matter, provide a sound basis for confronting the future is quite plainly dangerous. No curriculum can afford to overlook this prospect.

We are, in other words, at a major historical divide. Many writers and commentators have been making this point for several decades. This transition away from what we have taken for granted affects the viability of all institutions and the life of every individual. Yet, curiously, there is little evidence that those who are running schools and school systems are aware of the implications of these rapid, fundamental, and structural changes. In fact, the futures-related tools and techniques which have been developed and applied in other contexts for more than forty years are simply not part of the standard equipment of teachers or of school administration, of educational policy-making or of parent participation in their children’s education. With a little effort, they could be.

This book is therefore an attempt to put some of these materials in a form which can be used by educators, and to help people to come to terms with the necessary changes to the framework out of which we interpret education, and indeed our world. If educators in particular could supersede the industrial worldview, if they could be encouraged to take an active and sustained interest in the broad span of futures now confronting us, and if this awareness were considered a necessary part of the professional knowledge of educators, then our society, its institutions, and especially its schools would begin to look and function very differently.

THE ‘DEFAULT FUTURE’

So where do we start? Where better than with our common, default notion of the future? It is clear that ‘the future’ is generally regarded as a background abstraction which serves only to frame our plans and intentions over the next few hours, days, weeks or years. In other words, it acts as a kind of blank screen upon which to project our hopes and fears. Viewed from within an industrial framework it lacks substance and reality. Even these minimal uses tend to be informal and short-term. However, some people, including a number of large organisations, have found it necessary to take a longer view in order to improve their planning, or because there are long lead-times involved in major projects. This provides a clue to the real importance of the futures dimension.

Even so, the collective investment in futures study and futures research is pretty minimal. Is this because we know that we will not be around to see the results? If so, what about our children? Is it not rather odd that on the one hand we are collectively causing and then maintaining powerful and revolutionary waves of change which extend far into the future while, on the other hand, we restrict our attention to our known past or the short-term present?

The common practice of minimising any consideration of futures-related concerns has been called ‘future discounting’. It leads us to underestimate the importance of alternatives, choices or consequences. Various metaphors have been used to describe future discounting. For example, our society has been likened to a vehicle powered by the forward motion of time and equipped with many comforts and diversions, but lacking either a navigator or maps. To extend the metaphor in the way McLuhan did, we are so used to driving with our eyes fixed on the rear-vision mirror that we overlook where we are going, or why we have undertaken the journey.

So what can we say about where the planet and all the creatures on it are going? This is a crucial question to confront, for it affects everything the education process stands for. A balanced reading of contemporary evidence across a number of fields suggests that we are accumulating a wide range of very serious problems which will certainly restrict the choices available to later generations. Naive optimists argue that human ingenuity and continuing technological innovation will keep us ahead of any calamity, but it is abundantly clear that the very success of our species has brought it to the point where it has put its own survival in question.

This is why the big picture is so important and also why we need a better appreciation of what might be meant by ‘the future’. Some things may make perfect sense when they are considered at close range and in isolation, but when they are reconnected to the broad processes of social, economic, technical and environmental change, we can see the human race steadily painting itself into a dangerous comer. Industrialised cultures have gone for short-term exploitation and profit, leaving future generations to foot the bill. However, important as these issues are, it is a mistake to focus exclusively upon the external manifestations of the threat. Repeatedly discussing ‘world problems’ and ‘solutions’ out of a non-critical framework, although well-intended, can miss the essential point.

LIMITATIONS OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD-VIEW

So what is the essential point which we appear to be overlooking? Perhaps the key proposition of this book is this: it is impossible to confront the great global or educational issues of our time without also considering the frameworks of meaning and value which brought them into being in the first place.

This proposition can be clarified through the architectural metaphor given in Figure 1.1. Here the artist has drawn a parallel between physical architecture and social architecture. The former has a superstructure comprising all the familiar elements (like buildings, streets, signs), an underlying framework (foundations), and a site upon which the whole complex rests. Similarly, the social structure (comprising elements like language, symbols, customs, laws) rests upon a hidden structure of norms, assumptions, ethical and moral commitments which themselves stand or fall on the epistemological foundations of a world-view or paradigm. This set of analogies makes it abundantly clear why superficial analyses often fail; they only consider the structures sitting on the surface.

Figure 1.1 The architectural metaphor

Copyright: Richard Mochelle, Integrative Services, Melbourne, Australia.

A profound change seems to be occurring in the way we perceive ourselves and the earth we inhabit; indeed, the change reached flood proportions during the late 1980s. A spate of books and writings which appeared during that decade, when taken together, steadily revealed the outlines of a renewed world-view. Many of them drew upon the ground-breaking work of Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn showed how the work of scientists was structured by a shared set of assumptions about how reality is defined and organised. A disciplinary paradigm, as he called it, supplied a context within which people worked, often unaware of its shaping influence upon their perceptions and work. For much of the time people engaged in routine puzzle solving - that is until problems accumulated that could not be resolved in the current paradigm. There then followed a period of radical uncertainty, or revolutionary science when the whole structure was laid open for change. The wider appeal of these ideas is obvious and the attempt to construct a new cultural paradigm has proceeded apace.

One person who helped to popularise the transformation was Marilyn Ferguson. As a journalist and author researching materials for her writings during the 1970s, she became aware of several major intellectual shifts which seemed to be occurring across a range of disciplines, and which she tried to document in her book The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980). In the fields of medicine, education, the social sciences, economics, government, psychology, religion and politics, she was struck by the fact that there seemed to be a high degree of consistency in what was evolving simultaneously. She called it ‘the whole-earth conspiracy’, a ‘starding worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought’ (Ferguson, 1980: 23).

She became convinced that a paradigm shift was taking place, producing a context within which people ‘found themselves re-thinking everything’ (ibid.: 24). The Catholic scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin was a constant source of insight, she found, and was being often quoted; it was he who said that ‘the future … is in the hands of those who can give tomorrow’s generations valid reasons to live and hope’ (ibid.: 43). Though his reputation has waxed and waned, it was also Teilhard who coined the term ‘cosmogenesis’ to indicate that new ideas were being generated about how the world was formed. Teilhard tried to synthesise both the religious and the scientific myths about the creation of this planet and the galaxies. He suggested that human beings, as one of the species on planet Earth, were capable of ‘continuous transformation and transcendence’ (ibid.: 29). The new perspective, Ferguson observed, was about ‘the ecology of everything’, about connectedness, about what has been termed the ‘everything-hangs-together’ philosophy.

Viewed now, more than a decade later, Ferguson’s book appears incomplete, flawed, in places naive and tentative, and often unsatisfying in that it stops short at the edge of darkness, not venturing into the void. Exploratory books tend to be like that. There are of course dimensions to physics and cosmology, astronomy, math...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• Foreword Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Introduction: how this book came to be
• 1 The dimensions of change
• 2 Industrialism and its consequences
• 3 Global consciousness: the one-world view
• 4 Beyond scientific materialism: accepting other categories of knowing
• 5 What will become of schools?
• 6 The shift from past to future
• 7 What can I do? Some bridging strategies
• Conclusion: the promise of the twenty-first century
• References
• Index