Futures in Education: Principles, practices and potential, monograph No 5, the strategic foresight monograph series

摘要

The notion of teaching and learning explicitly about futures in education is not new. It is well over thirty years since the first school and college classes were held. Since then many hundreds of school based innovations have subjected these initial ideas and practices to a variety of iterations and tests. What they collectively tell us is that young people are passionately interested in their own futures, and that of the society in which they live. They universally ‘jump at the chance’ to study something with such intrinsic interest that also intersects with their own life interests in so many ways. Will I get a job? Will the environment collapse? Will machines overrun us? These are some of the starting questions that often arise and, moreover, they are reinforced and answered (not always in useful or accessible ways) in popular culture. A common result is that young people become discouraged from even considering such questions; they rapidly fall into the ‘too hard’ basket.