So … to the future of schooling!

Mr Don Tinkler Melbourne, Australia

Technologies that previously stood out as separate items, such as telephones, facsimile machines, video and radio, are now becoming components of technological convergence that is likely to see a time when the telephone will perform as a computer, a  video and facsimile machine and provide access to a global knowledge network.
(Education and Technology Convergence, National Board of Employment, Education and Training, Commissioned Report No. 43, January 1996, forecast, p.5)

The prediction for telephone capability referred to above was made in 1995, not long after the emergence of the world wide web, at a time when to communicate between computers without a connecting cable was thought to be technically unworkable - there would not be sufficient bandwidth available on the spectrum, we were told.

In 10 years, technology has developed remarkably and some of the forecast capabilities of telephony have become a reality. Today, as well as becoming miniaturised, third generation mobile phones have most of the predicted capacities … and the capacities of a movie and still camera. Many of the associated technological developments have already influenced what is happening in school education.

I had the difficulties of projecting into the future brought home to me recently. Back in 1994, a colleague and I had been given the task, on behalf of the national Broadband Services Expert Group, of estimating the broadband needs of the Australian education community for the years 1999, 2004, and 2009. It’s not important what our predictions were, even though they were based on the latest data available. What is important is that our estimates proved to be very wide of the mark, even for the first projection period of five years. With the rapid escalation in broadband technology, our estimates for each five-year period were well exceeded and yet there are still three years to run to reach the final year of the estimating periods.

At a national education conference workshop in 1985, I had been directing attention to the impact of Alvin Toffler’s Future shock - nothing seems permanent any more - and an audience member surprised with the following comment: ‘While I think you are right, Don, about the rapidity of change over the last 20 years, surely we have been through enough change now and we can look forward to much more stability in future’.

His comment seemed to ignore the fact that I had already drawn attention to a statement from Professor Van Fleet, of Tennessee, who, in reviewing the Club of Rome’s 1979 ‘No Limits to Learning’ wrote:

‘Schooling seems to be perpetually caught in a tangle between past, present and future. Educators have been asked to assume a strange, twisted posture – standing backward, but looking forward’.

Thinking over this incident some time later, I decided on the slogan:

‘The way to the future is from an understanding of the past and an awareness of the present’.

The emphasis was to be on ‘being aware of what is’.

What the member of that 1985 audience might say now of the passing of a further 20 years, where the only thing constant has proven to be change itself, I can only imagine.

Futures

No one can know the future. At the first international futurology symposium in 1979, participants accepted that there were three aspects of futures that futurists need to take into account. There are the ‘possible futures’ – anything can be considered possible; there are ‘probable futures’ that can be derived from the possible futures, taking into account the probability that certain things will happen or not happen, (an application of mathematics can help in determining projections); and there are ‘preferred futures’, which can be distilled from probable futures.

Not much was made of preferred futures at the symposium and yet, subsequent to 1979, it is these futures that have emerged as perhaps the most important aspect in a study of the future. For it is in this zone where social choice becomes so significant. A ‘preferred futures’ approach provides an opportunity for all stakeholders in education to contribute. With reference to schools, the stakeholders include all who are involved in education: the child, the school staff, school administrators, parents, health professionals, subject specialists, subject associations, unions, education academics and theorists, parent groups and political decision-makers.

This is quite an extensive list of individuals and groups. All would claim to be interested ‘for the sake of the children’ and yet each may see the future differently, operating as they do from differing perspectives.   

This second ACEL-Microsoft online conference is an opportunity for all stakeholders to contribute. A glance down the lead questions indicates that we can look forward to some interesting verbal exchanges.

Social influences

A discussion topic such as ‘The Future of School’ or ‘A Future School’ requires consideration of a wide range of inter-related influences. While technological change in recent years has been a major driver, other influences that need to be taken into account include sociological, political, economic, demographic and environmental changes. Today the reasonably recent threat of global warming and its consequences is yet another issue for consideration.

Education has changed and been changed by the movements that have overtaken society. Thirty years ago, the nuclear family was dominant, as was the one male parent bread-winner. There was only minimal discretionary spending and credit was not easily obtained for more than essentials. Apprenticeships were encouraged and secondary schooling was the expectation, but generally not tertiary studies. Parents took on, or were responsible for, a full range of extra family activities out of school time.

Within one generation, global consumerism and the impact of new forms of media have accelerated the changes. The nuclear family is no longer the dominant model in society; two income families seem to be the norm. Heavy discretionary spending is the result of the ready availability of money. The economy thrives on the ready access to credit. Australia has become victim to the spread of American cultural imperialism, which has spread across the globe. Tertiary education is the expectation; schools have taken on many new social responsibilities. The teacher workforce undergoes extended periods of preservice training and professional development and has largely become feminised.  

Politics influences change

Future shock – nothing seems permanent any more – is indeed true of education. It is 30 years ago now since the Australian Schools Commission installed education as a national concern. Twenty years ago, the Victorian Government ‘white paper’ brought in administrative restructuring of education that swept the whole nation. The Teachers Tribunal was replaced; the teacher inspection system disappeared; the regionalisation of the State was strengthened; individual schools gained increased autonomy; curriculum became school-based; and teacher workloads were considerably increased. Ten years ago, the Australian Education Council delivered the National Standards and Profiles, releasing to the nation the Key Learning Areas and learning outcomes, bringing about an outcomes domination of schooling and its measurement. Adding to the turbulence, each state jurisdiction is looking into the notion of ‘essential learnings’ while the federal ministry is supporting a move towards a standardised national curriculum.

In the United Kingdom, change has also become a ‘constant’. Four years ago, its Education Secretary outlined to Parliament the spending of many billions of pounds to fund sweeping changes to the teaching profession. Changes were to include the dismantling of the comprehensive system of schooling, with much of the money being used to re-model the role of teachers along the lines of the medical profession, with nurse-like assistants allowing the ‘consultants’ to concentrate on pupils by relieving them of mundane tasks. Another result of the spending was to be that the role of the headteacher would resemble that of chief executive. The Education Secretary issued a warning that there would be ‘no scope for weak or uncommitted leadership in secondary schools’.

Changes of a philosophical kind

Changes of a philosophical nature that occur need to be considered as an additional factor in education. ‘Behaviorism’, long the established theory in Australia, gave way in the 60’s and 70’s to the ideas of Piaget, which had replaced the dominant practices in the USA inspired by John Dewey. In mathematics, there was the influence of Cuisenaire and Gategno. In social education there were the contributions of Jerome Bruner and the learning theory of David Ausubel. In recent years, educators have become been attracted to ‘whole brain’ teaching and the multiple intelligences theory of Howard Gardner. Constructivism, the theory that has emerged over the last two decades and the theory that shifts focus more directly from ‘teaching’ to ‘learning’, offers an approach that could fundamentally affect education across all levels into the future, as it deals with the way humans perceive their worlds and the way they respond to events around them.

The Chair, Australian Council of Deans of Education, told a national meeting of professional educators held in 2002, in Canberra, that the ‘new knowledge economy presages a complex mix of teachers and paraprofessionals’. The implications of viewing education as contributing to the new knowledge economy were first spelled out in Report No. 43, commissioned in 1996 by the Employment and Skills Council of the National Board of Employment Education and Training (NBEET). Supporting the need for change, the Executive Director of the Australian Council of Educational Research suggested that teachers will require pedagogical content knowledge, that is, an understanding of how students typically learn within a subject and of the kinds of misconceptions they commonly hold. Ultimately, resources need to be centred on the broader task of rethinking the future role of educators and the pedagogical ramifications of that new role.

Professor Alan Luke is leading a new research centre – the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice – committed to improving pedagogy and curriculum in schools, stressing new knowledge forms and particular ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘ways of teaching’ that are fitted to particular fields of knowledge.

All of this seems to fit well with the global initiatives for transformation of schooling taken by iNet, the International Network for Educational Transformation. The following is a direct quote from the NBEET report No. 43, Canberra, January 1996:

Learning Products and Services for the Knowledge Economy

‘Research across the education sectors indicates that there are eight defining principles that education services and products will have to meet in order to satisfy market demand in the knowledge economy, with its convergent technology infrastructure. These principles are:

• Lifelong Learning - no longer front-end school learning but continuous across the life cycle to facilitate flexible career paths and enhanced personal development
• Learner Directed Learning - the learner takes increasing control of the learning process, with the teacher becoming the facilitator of learning and the therapist and diagnostician to achieve optimum learning outcomes;
• Learning to Learn - developing the capability in individuals and groups to understand and more effectively plan and realise their own learning
• Contextualised Learning - locates theoretical learning and competencies in different contexts through real life learning environments and simulations, including action learning
• Customised Learning - products and services are designed to meet different learning preferences or cultural situations and can be appropriately modified by the learner to meet the particular needs of individuals and groups
• Transformative Learning - enables learners to challenge and change belief systems and behavioral patterns to meet new needs and opportunities, and to overcome disabilities and disadvantage
• Collaborative/Cooperative Learning - enables groups, as well as individuals, to learn interactively across time and space
• Just-in-Time Learning - learning opportunities are available from the global learning 'supermarket' when and where learners need them to meet their learning needs.’
  (Education and Technology Convergence, 1996: xiv)

The1996 NBEET report itself was to suffer the negative effects of political influence. Published in January under one government, it seemed almost to vanish without trace when, within two months, the government of one political persuasion in Canberra was superseded. (The full report is available on Google simply by typing in the title)

From a futures perspective, it should be added that education should not only be participatory; it should also be anticipatory. Anticipatory learning results when teachers think ahead in time to the needs for learning that are likely to emerge, or be thinking ahead to what the events of the present might mean into the future. By taking an anticipatory perspective, schooling could contribute more fully to education as a futures enterprise.

Wildcards

Predictions and forecasts can be made about the future, whether by analysing trends, using an approach such as cross-matrix analysis or by examining the futures derived from exercising social choice. The difficulty referred to earlier is in selecting an appropriate time frame for a forecast. Fifty years forward in time is less likely to produce a valid predictable future than setting a time frame of, say, five or 10 years. As no one can know the future with any certainty, the best that can be done is to consider the aspects of ‘possible’, ‘probable’ and ‘preferred’ futures, focusing more on the preferred futures of social choice.

Irrespective of which strategy is adopted in making a prediction or forecast, there are influences that go beyond prediction. These are the events that ‘just happen’ without prior warning. Known as ‘wildcards’, an example would be the economic crash of 1987, the energy crises or the events in New York involving the World Trade Centre in 2001. In schooling terms, such an event might be a change of government, the sudden illness or resignation of a key figure, or the adoption of a policy at school department or administration level that prevents a planned strategy for change from being implemented.