Scenarios for the future of education (post-election edition)

Our assignment this week is to look carefully at Facer and Sandford's 2010 article on the next 25 years in education.

Facer, K., & Sandford, R. (2010). The next 25 years?: Future scenarios and future directions for education and technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26, 74–93.

The authors present "three complex future worlds and, within each world, two alternative educational futures" (p. 82) and Kristin has asked us to choose one of the six scenarios that is "viable" and to create a couple of our own. I've done some of this scenarios work before and was excited for the chance to dive into our task. But I got dark pretty quickly.

I chose the following as my viable world:

World 3: only connectA world organized around a collective understanding of interdependence between people, between individuals and machines, between individuals and ecosystems, in which the concepts of ‘identity’, benefit and action are understood as profoundly social. (p. 83)

I didn't chose this world because it seems most likely. By far that goes to "World 1: trust yourself," in which "there is no support for collective responses to social problems" and which certainly seems like the safest bet from extrapolation of current conditions. No, I think World 3 it's the only one "viable" in the sense of "supportive of continued human flourishing." Within that world, I chose Scenario 1:

‘Integrated experience’ – an education system embedded indistinguishably in society, economy and community, in which learners learn through ongoing participation

This seems in many ways like the oldest form of learning: lifelong, lifewide, informal, as needed. And to the extent that school-based learning is reforming for the better, I believe it is taking on the shape of integrated learning through ongoing participation. This is certainly true in my own field of theological education, where experiments like the Ministry Resident Program and Wisdom Year are attempting to address some of the deficiencies of the schooling model.

As for my own scenarios, I thought I'd lay them out in a fourth world, basically a more drastic version of "World 2: loyalty points." I have altered the World 2 scenarios accordingly

World 4: what remains
The threat of environmental ruin and the consequences of a dismantled social safety net diminish the importance of the nation state and send most people scrambling for their material sustenance to the few institutions left standing, mostly wealthy multinational corporations and family foundations.

Scenario 1: 'Neo-meritocracy' – The early childhood education system is a series of trials determined to identify those who represent the best "bets" for the precious investment of continuing education, i.e., access to excess food, increased shelter and security, electricity, digital tutoring and eventually apprenticeship in the professions that keep what remains of society afloat. Everyone else learns on the job the skills they need for manual labor in the institutions' agricultural operations in exchange for a meager subsistence.

Scenario 2: 'Neo-feudalism' – Those born to the wealthy elite are the de facto recipients of the education efforts, with consequently diminished success.

OK, so maybe this is a more realistic scenario for 50 years out. ;) What can I say, it's a cautionary tale. Ask me again in four years and on a day when I haven't been reading both "The machine stops" (also assigned for the course) and Ready Player One.