PES 2025 Conference

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Education and the Future of the Future

“The world is moving at a tremendous rate. No one knows where. We must prepare our children not for the world of the past, not for our world, but for their world, the world of the future.”

Many will be familiar with John Dewey’s passionate, albeit somewhat awkward, call for future-oriented education in the 1936 The March of Time episode, “New Schools for Old.” One can’t help but wonder what Dewey would say today, when “their world, the world of the future” has become a less hopeful prospect. Report after report forecasts a world with a greater spread and intensity of forest fires, floods, and other natural disasters; a dramatic rise in heat-related human deaths; and increasing food insecurity. These are just some of the effects of anthropogenic climate change and related transgressions of planetary boundaries, effects forecast not for the distant future, but for the near future of “their world,” the adulthood of those who are children today.

Some engage openly with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic visions of education, considering the relative value of resilience and adaptability. Others maintain radical, critical, mysterious, or other forms of hope. Yet others argue that education should not be understood as preparation for the future, but be focused on educational becoming in the present. In addition, some express concern that our desire to mitigate climate change is further instrumentalizing education as a policy tool, and students as agents of change.

Enduring a crisis of such a scale both forces and enables us to to rethink education itself, and can reveal characteristics that may have received less attention, or remained hidden altogether. Among the questions that will be asked are: What to make of education with such a gloomy vision of the future? Does “the future” still have a future as the idea that animates education? Should the future be the idea that animates education at all? And how to grapple educationally with the social inequalities and injustices that are not only persistent but, in many cases, exacerbated by the climate crisis and related ecological problems?