Future Proofing Education for Technological Change?

There is no “future proof.”

It’s like asserting the presence of impermeably secure communications systems. Nothing, if not a nice story…

…longer-term visions don’t play the same game in better ways. They rewrite the assumptions and axioms, they reinvent it. It is the unquestioned assumptions that generally hide in plain sight and everyday language.

For instance, the hype around autonomous cars has been almost spectacular enough to obfuscate their many and currently unsolved problems. So, a better car is always iterating and percolating to ascendancy but no one questions the normalising assumption that roads, commuting, contemporary cities are necessary in their current configuration and morphology. A logical error, essentially.

The TL;DR: I doubt very much whether education systems will remain unaltered by technological change. They are complex adaptive systems and will certainly continue to seek continuity, as will their variously transient inhabitants, but we all too easily accept the assumptions that underpin them.

I can hear wagons circling already, however – if the indefinitely-extensible sociotechnical acceleration currently underway tells us anything at all, it is that nothing can be taken for granted.