Alternative Possible Education Futures

The democratisation of access and opportunity via new technologies has reshaped the role of education and the knowledge & skill objectives that drive our curriculum. It is the year 2050 and here at Future.School we believe a broad education and the ability to navigate, understand and synthesise multiple areas of knowledge has never been more important. However we believe it is most fruitful and enables our students to most generously contribute to the world, when it is paired with a deep skill, intense interest, passion or purpose in one particular field. Furthermore, with the increasing advances of AI and the rapid development of semantic language intelligence systems which are both linear and non-linear in nature, we believe the real opportunity for our students to contribute in their future.work lies in the spaces between. And so at Future.School we also focus on the development of non-sequential thinking skills and nurture the ability / curiosity students need to make unexpected connections.

In the past when we talked about education and especially about education technologies, the conversation tended to focus on information delivery, not teaching itself. Too few people inside and outside the education sector talked about what makes a great teacher and what makes great teaching. When people talked about curriculum, they tended to focus on content or up-skilling, over subject matter expertise.

Two years after the Government passed the Education Innovation Reform Act in 2032, allowing each school to develop and teach through their own learning models - we opened our doors for the very first time. We had been developing the model for future school through the FutureSchoolDAO for many years with educators both here and overseas. We had been preparing for the possibility that one day, Governments might create the space for education itself to grow and learn and evolve, just as have been creating that same space for our students.

Historically education has positioned the school as having all the answers. But in today’s dynamic, we believe it’s about asking the right questions and taking the right posture, to create a scaffolded space for learning. We are unashamedly a work-in-progress school. As an education team we constantly ask ourselves - which parts of the education process should be tight and defined and more permanent, and which parts should be loose. In those areas where we believe change is not only necessary but inevitable, we are always in beta mode.

The accelerated cadence at which knowledge is created and disseminated; combined with the pace at which new subject areas, technologies and innovations are being developed has meant that the value of learning anything from traditional text books or by rote is diminishing by the decade. In 2045 , the Global Creative Education Alliance introduced the Living Domain Compendium Framework. This has been one of the most significant global education reforms of our lifetime.

The introduction of ‘Living Domain Compendiums’ was a step change in global education policy. Living Domain Compendiums are dynamic, breathing documents - richly coloured with informational frameworks, related mental models, communities of practice including experts and outliers, and full of inspirational springboards and provocative jump points to ignite the learning spark in students. The compendium framework has been greatly accelerated and its value amplified by the UN’s allocation of key knowledge developers in every member nation. A ‘Knowledge Development Team’ is tasked with connecting with critical knowledge communities within their nation, and safeguarding the global information architecture and taxonomy that is the backbone of these compendiums. The rigorous systematic categorisation and dynamic mapping of knowledge (greatly supported by complex AI systems) ensures that the content of these compendiums is both dynamic and geo-sensitive. It goes without saying that the Global Study on the Economic Impacts of excluded Neurodivergent Contributions commissioned by the WHO in 2041 has had significant impact on these Compendiums and has enabled educational staff all over the world to create specialist ‘Learning Playlists’ and more importantly, to teach students to curate their own playlists in the way they learn.

In 2045 the Global Creative Education Alliance recognised all forms of knowledge as dynamic, without certainty and ever evolving. They recognise that all learning and knowledge development as never-ending and all expertise as a work-in-progress.

They stated that learning teams act only as coaches and facilitators to navigate and support students' learning journey and that prescriptive teaching is neither effective nor useful.