Education’s Futures and Futures in Education

This chapter explores the history of Futures Studies’ relationship with education, tracing key debates and aspirations of the field over the last sixty years. It examines how educators and futurists have attempted to create space for Futures in schools and in turn sought to influence the debate over the futures of education. The chapter argues that the field of educational futures is changing as data technologies are being deployed to identify commercial opportunities and reframe education as a sector from which wealth and data can be extracted. The chapter then identifies two key choices facing those of us interested in the relationship between Futures Studies and education. First, the choice between a disciplinary and a craft-based approach to teaching Futures; second, the increasingly urgent question of whether futures techniques are to be deployed in service of technocracy or democracy. We make the case that Futures should be understood as a craft and futures pedagogy as a resource that can help teachers across the curriculum meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, our role is in service and solidarity not competition in the curriculum. We argue that futurists as a community have a profound ethical responsibility to challenge the corporate deployment of futures methods that conceptualise education as a marketplace, and instead, need to make common cause with those educators, activists and policy makers seeking to protect education as a site that is and should always be autonomous from the future, as it is only in that autonomy that new and unforeseen futures can emerge.