by Paul Doolan
I continually hear teacher colleagues of mine repeating the mantras that good teachers are “teaching for the future” and preparing students “for the 21st century”, (which by and by, started nearly a decade ago). I am amazed at the confidence that my colleagues project when they speak about the future. I was under the impression that a characteristic of the future is, and always will be, that its nature is hidden from us mortals. A future that is known is located already in the present, in the mind of the knower, and, paradoxically therefore, cannot be the future. Educating for the future, it seems to me, would mean educating for the unknown.
But instead, I find my future driven colleagues, those who are already preparing students for the rigors and challenges of the 21st century, to be supremely confident regarding what the future will look like. And it looks suspiciously like the present, just a lot more of it – more sexy technology, more electronic instant communication, more miniaturization, more multitasking, more mobility. But this type of future oriented thinking simply betrays an obsession with the present – what I call “presentism”. I doubt very much if the future will be the present writ large.
The past record would indicate that futures generally spring one or two surprises, some of them benign and some of them nasty. Futurologists of the 2nd century AD might have shared a concern for the increasing costs of defending the frontiers of the mighty Roman Empire, but none could have predicted that within a century a small Jewish sect called Christians will have taken over the empire from within; a century ago no one was predicting the collapse of the Chinese, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, or Russian Empires and the birth of fascist and communist states, yet this all happened within a decade. And more recently, as a friend of mine pointed out, it was investments - or misadventures - in "futures" that led to the recent Credit Crunch.
So let us quit this nonsense that we are equipping students with the skills that they will need for the 21st century. We have no idea what they will need. Perhaps a dexterous thumb for using their iPhone while they scan reams of electronic text is what will be needed. Or perhaps the ability to build a raft and use an AK-47? We don’t know, and we should stop pretending that we do.
3 comments:
I saw an excellent video a while back - snapshots of statistics on "education". I wish I could remember the numbers but one of them was this: something like 70% of the tech-related jobs people hold now did not even exist when they were in high school. Just how in the hell do you prepare high-schoolers for jobs that don't even exist?
You teach them to teach themselves. You listen to people whose job it is to manufacture the future.
I am sorry. This post is an extremely limited in its scope. It assumes one idea and then builds upon the assumption. Spend some time googling some of your 'unknowns'.
"You listen to people whose job it is to manufacture the future". Such hubris - that anyone still has the audacity to think that it is their job to "manafacture" the future. Interesting, almost industrial, choice of word - you can manafacture coca-cola, cluster bombs, christmas cards, but surely not the future. Seriously though, the idea that there are people who are attempting to manafacture the future is a totalitarian idea, worthy of Stalin.
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