Human Reality and the Ubiquity of Change

Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and numerous other well-known books on the future, stated that everyone is a futurist. We all think about the future, imagining and evaluating possibilities, setting goals, making plans, and implementing strategies for realizing our preferable or desirable futures. Educators deliberate and debate the future of education, both regarding where we see things heading, based on observable trends, as well as where we think education should be heading, based on our educational values and ideals.

Instead of focusing upon some particular technology, strategy, or pedagogical system and its potential impact, for better or worse, on the future of education, I am going to outline a general philosophy for the future of education, one that includes technology but places it within a more expansive and holistic framework. This philosophy identifies a preferable future direction for education, but realistically anchors itself to certain fundamental features of contemporary affairs, human psychology, and more broadly, the human condition.

In a nutshell, our central ideal for the future of education should be to facilitate the development of technologically empowered wisdom-wisdom being synonymous with what I call "heightened future consciousness"--thus enabling our students to flourish and realize a good future within the evolutionary, accelerative flow of human reality. 

To explain in more detail and depth this proposal, I'll begin with the reality of the human condition. We live in a world of pervasive and accelerative change: All the major dimensions of human reality, from the scientific and technological to the environmental, social, economic, and psychological are in transformation, and based on various long term historical and scientific studies, the rate of change appears to be accelerating. As some argue, evolution is accelerating. 

Though many of us may feel overpowered, confused, and stressed out by the pace of change in our modern world, and may fight against it, longing for the "good old days" when things did not move so fast, our scientific understanding indicates that evolution and change are fundamental to the universe, and human reality is a natural expression of this overall dynamic trajectory of things; in fact, we are the cutting-edge architects of the multi-faceted wave of global transformation. 

We may view global accelerative change as something happening around us--as an external phenomenon that we have to contend with--yet the life stream of individual consciousness is itself transformative: Each of us moves through developmental stages, grows through learning and self-reflection, and even undergoes periodic shifts in self-identity, both professional and personal, as we progress through life. The depth, span, and complexity of growth and change within the individual conscious human mind seems to be evolving through human history.

We are the architects of global evolution and change because we are intrinsically conscious agents of evolution and change; it is built into our psychology. 

There would be no need to think about the future, if today were basically the same as yesterday. But if we can predict with some level of certainty anything about the future, it is that it will be different from the past, and surprisingly so. And it is the change that inevitably comes that pushes us into considering the future, for if we don't, we will find ourselves with skills and mindsets that are irrelevant, if not counter-productive, to the challenges and issues that come at us.

Being realistic about the future, it is better to thoughtfully guide the multi-dimensional processes of evolution and change, including those within ourselves, than to resist or deny them. And for a variety of psychological reasons, it is better to be informed and proactive agents guiding change, than to be passive adapters reacting to change. We should take this to heart, as educators, when we consider not only how we will guide the future of education but what capacities we should strive to strengthen in our students as well.