Future-Focused Education

‘Future-focused education’ is not an easily definable or coherent body of knowledge. It is best described as an emerging cluster of ideas, beliefs, theories, and practices drawn from many sources, within and outside education, that are mobilized in different ways to support different purposes. The unifying idea, if there is one, is the contention that major change is needed in education if it is to meet future needs. However, there is little consensus on what these needs are or how they are best met. Educationists started to talk about future-focused education thirty or forty years ago, but although we use many new words, our education systems have not changed very much. In today’s context, future-focused education work has several very different strands. In one influential strand, education’s links to work and the economy are foregrounded. This work emphasizes the skills people need to participate—and drive economic growth—in today’s knowledge-based, networked economies, and argues that education’s purpose is to develop them. These skills are many and varied. In some work they are called the “4Cs”: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. But references to a range of other ‘soft’ skills— for example, innovation, agility, entrepreneurship, digital literacy, and design thinking—are common. Learning is also emphasized: Education’s primary purpose is to foster ‘learning skills’ and the ‘disposition’ for independent, lifelong learning. Other strands of future-focused education work are strongly critical of the focus on work skills and learning. For some educationists, this focus is linked with, and driven by, the demands of global capitalism, not by educational considerations. Others say that it is based on impoverished views of both education and the future. Educational futurists argue that major change is needed to build the higher-order, more ‘evolved’ forms of thinking everyone needs to function well in a world characterized by uncertainty and complexity. In other strands, educationists explore how changes in the meaning and use of knowledge, increased cultural diversity, and the sustainability movement strongly challenge prevailing notions of curriculum. Others have worked on reorienting traditional curriculum content to be not an end in itself but a context for building “learning power” and the “C-skills” of creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, innovation, and so on. In policy contexts, future-focused education is rhetorically linked to many other concepts, including personalization, inclusion, school-community partnerships, sustainability, citizenship, enterprise, digital literacies, computational thinking, innovative learning environments, and competencies. For space reasons, not all of these concepts are covered here.