Futures against futurisms

The Futures of Education Ideas LAB space is designed to highlight original scholarship and opinion pieces that bear on issues being examined within UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative. The ideas expressed here are those of the authors; they are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.

When UNESCO launched the Futures of Education project, none of us imagined that the theme was going to have such an immediate and urgent relevance. The tsunami that we are experiencing will have unprecedented consequences in the field of education. It is necessary to prepare ourselves, with intelligence, with the strength of cooperation, with the open sharing of knowledge.

In his novel Ignorance, Milan Kundera wrote:

“Everyone is wrong about the future. We can only be certain about the present. But a person with no knowledge of the future cannot understand the meaning of the present.”

This is the reason for the Futures of Education initiative - trying to look to the future to understand the present and understand all that we have to do to overcome inequalities in education, inequalities that deepen other inequalities that make the world more fragile.

The Futures of Education initiative is not a futuristic exercise, like so many others that, in recent years, have been extraordinarily popular. Futurism has three major venerations: the digital, the artificial intelligence and the brain. No one should disregard the importance of these three topics. But we must look at them with caution, as a starting point and not, as so often happens, as a solution or, even worse, as the solution.

These futurisms are linked by a common denominator: they all announce the disintegration of the school, establishing a more individualized, a more private relationship with education.

The digital announces the possibility of an education made from home or other private locations.

Artificial intelligence announces, to quote the words of Laurent Alexandre, “a transhumanist school where it will be normal to modify the brains of students using the whole panoply of nano, bio, information and cognitive science (NBIC) technologies." 

It is worth remembering a text by Edgar Morin about the Earth system which I am adapting it to the Education system:

“When a system is unable to deal with its vital problems, it degrades, disintegrates, or else it is capable of creating a process of metamorphosis. The probable is disintegration. The improbable but possible is metamorphosis.”

For me, the future relies on the metamorphosis of the school. We need a deep change in the organization of the school and in curriculum. In the organization of the school space. In the organization of the school. In our conception of curriculum, pedagogy and learning. Metamorphosis is our way out, not disintegration.

Contrary to what happened throughout the 20th century, there will not be a single model of school. Therefore, it is worth talking about futures, diverse, plural, based on experiences and projects that, fortunately, already exist all over the world. It is in the strength of these experiences, in their capacity for sharing, for mutual inspiration, that the future of education will be.

And we can never forget that education needs to be a factor to fight inequalities, and not to create even more inequalities.

Instead of following the path of consumerism, we should remember Maxine Greene’s wise words, in her Presidential Address at the AERA meeting, in 1982:

For its part, neuroscience proposes, first, to personalize learning and, then, to optimize bio-electronically the brain.

In one way or another all these futurisms aim at the confinement of education within private spheres. 

As a consequence, as David Labaree argues, education tends to be re-established through a consumerist approach that undermines the role of schooling, a consumerist approach that constitutes the greatest danger for the future of schooling.

The current situation with the coronavirus crisis does nothing more than accentuate this trend. This must be a matter of great concern to us all.

“I cannot imagine a coherent sense of purpose in education if something common does not arise in a public space”.

The phrase is brilliant and calls attention to the concepts of common and public space. Perhaps we could add – a global common good.

What I am trying to say, to conclude, is that the future that interests me involves strengthening education as a global common good that arises in a public space. This common does not mean “uniformity”, but it refers to what enables “diverse human beings to act in common and to be recognized for what they do” (Maxine Greene).

The withdrawal of education in private spheres is not a solution. The two words that interest me are diversity and cooperation: the diversity of futures and the cooperation that allows us to act in common.

Schools must experiment with new ways of organizing space and time, the work of teachers and students. The curriculum must be centered on a planetary consciousness, a curriculum of the world’s intelligence.

We are all part of the same humanity, and only a global citizenship, a global responsibility for education will allow us to find the paths of the future. In diversity, in cooperation, we strengthen education as a global common good.

António Nóvoa is Ambassador of Portugal to UNESCO, professor and former rector of the University of Lisbon, as well as a member of the International Commission on the Futures of Education.