taking the 21st century seriously: potential futures for education, youth and new technologies

7/31/2019 Taking the 21st Century Seriously: Potential Futures for Education, Youth and New Technologies

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Taking the 21st century seriously: recognising young people as agents in

socio-technical change

Keri Facer

Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

Cite as: Keri Facer (2012): Taking the 21st century seriously: young people, education

and socio-technical futures, Oxford Review of Education, 38:1, 97-113

Address for Correspondence

Keri Facer

Graduate School of Education

University of Bristol

35 Berkeley Square

Bristol

BS8 1JA

[email protected]


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Notes on Contributors

The Beyond Current Horizons Programme was a Futurelab project funded by theDepartment for Children, Schools and Families. Richard Sandford, Senior Learning

Researcher at Futurelab helped enormously with the design and conduct of the

programme. Mary Ulicsak and Dan Sutch played important roles in running the public

engagement elements of the programme. Professors Sarah Harper, Rob Wilson, Helen

Haste and Carey Jewitt led the commissioning of research within the 4 challenges and

the production of synoptic reports within each challenge. A much larger number of

people from both the DCSF and Futurelab contributed to the programme over the two

years from 2007-2009. Details of everyone involved can be found at

http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/background/people/ Any errors or

omissions in this paper and the interpretation of the implications of the programme foryouth voice and agency, however, are my own.
http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/background/people/http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/background/people/


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Taking the 21st century seriously: recognising young people as agents in socio-

technical change

Abstract

Young peoples rhetorical ownership of future socio-technical change is a familiar part

of much educational and political discourse; this does not, however, translate in practice

into a meaningful dialogue with young people about the sorts of futures they might wish

to see emerge. When we look at the sorts of socio-technical developments currently

being envisaged by researchers, developers, industry and politicians, there is an ethical

responsibility to engage young people seriously in a debate about the futures that are

being imagined, the futures they are being prepared for and the futures that they might

want. This paper makes visible some of the questions raised by socio-technical trends in

the areas of personal augmentation, economic development and intergenerational

relationships. It makes the case that schools have the potential to act as powerful local

public spaces able to support young people and their communities to debate, negotiate

and make informed decisions about these issues, and to explore the sorts of socio-

technical changes they wish to realise in their own lives and communities.


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Taking the 21st century seriously:recognising young people as agents in socio-

technical change

Introduction

Since the 1990s it has become commonplace to see young people and their interactions

with digital technologies as windows onto the future. Young people are, we have been

informed, Digital Natives spearheading the transition to a new digitally mediated

world.

Such generalising statements have been subject to sustained theoretical critique and

empirical challenge for over a decade now (e.g. Buckingham, 2000) and the diversity of

childhoods and childrens experiences of digital technologies is now more commonly

acknowledged. Despite this, however, when seeking for an easy image to represent the

socio-technical change of the coming decades, the image of the child at a computer,

using a social network or playing a computer game comes readily to hand for politicians

and, indeed, many educators. The practices, dispositions and pleasures of young people,

it is implied, will become the practices which we all take for granted in future.

Such narratives of childrens natural relationship with new technologies might be

thought to offer young people increased agency and voice in shaping future socio-

technical change. However, when we examine the points at which young peoples

reportedly intuitive occupation of the digital landscape is represented in popular and

educational futures discourse, this is not the case. Instead, young peoples abilities with

digital technologies tend to be mobilised not as a basis for youth voice and recognition

but as a basis for ensuring adult adaptation to socio-technical change. Youth expertise is

given public visibility primarily in order to enjoin adults to keep up and catch up with

socio-technical change (Facer et al, 2003).

In contrast, when young people themselves are the subjects of educational futures

discourse, they tend to find themselves facing a predetermined future in which others

have determined the goals and the rules by which they should play. They find

themselves captured within what Castells calls the mythical future time of the powerful

the projected time of the futurologists of the corporate world. the ultimate form of

conquering time. (Castells, 2009: 51)in which they are enjoined to develop 21st century

skills and prepare for a future of lifelong learning to ensure personal and national

survival. Take for example, the instrumental relationship between young peoples

education and the future that underpins Obamas recent pronouncements on education:

So make no mistake. Our future is on the line. The nation that out-educates us today is

going to out-compete us tomorrow. To continue to cede our leadership in education is to

cede our position in the world. Thats not acceptable to me and I know its not acceptable

to any of you. And thats why my administration has set a clear goal: to move from the

middle to the top of the pack in science and math education over the next decade (Obama,

2010i)


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If young people really are the natives of the future world we are all moving towards,

these sorts of discourses of the future see them as natives who should be subject to a

form of chronological imperialism.

The potential for young people to challenge, question or reshape the futures they are

being offered is invisible in dominant contemporary discourses that link education with

debates about future socio-technicalii change. Young peoples potential to act as

inhabitants of the technological future, able to challenge and inform its development, as

the rhetoric of the native might imply, is rarely acknowledged. More importantly, the

reality that young people will have to live in the future with the real consequences of

decisions taken today about socio-technical developments, is consistently overlooked.

This paper argues that there are a number of future socio-technical developments being

envisaged by researchers, developers, industry and policy-makers today that demand a

new relationship to be constructed between young people and future socio-technical

change. Rather than seeing young people merely as poster children for futures designed

elsewhere, we need instead to recognise their rights to explore and challenge the

decisions that are being taken today for the futures that they may inhabit. Schools, the

paper will argue, are a critical site for building the capacity of young people to question

the colonising discourses of the future that they are being offered, to examine

alternatives and to participate with adults in decision-making about their own and

societys socio-technical futures.

Expectations of socio-technical change

In this paper, I draw upon a programme of educational futures research that was

commissioned in 2007 by the UKs Department for Children Schools and Families. The

Beyond Current Horizons (BCH) programme sought to engage a diverse group of

people academics, educators, parents, policy makers, students and children in a

debate about educations futures in changing socio-technical contexts. It sought to

explore these groups views of probable, possible and preferable futures for socio-

technical change and their implications for education (Bell, 1997). 84 literature reviews

were commissioned from researchers in areas as diverse as neuroscience and genetics,

demography and labour markets, childhood sociology and computer science. The review

authors were tasked with identifying historic and emergent trends as well as critical

uncertainties over the coming two decades. Consultations were held with over 130

organisations and individuals working in education and technology fields in order to

understand contemporary expectations and aspirations for educational futures. Online

surveys and public engagement workshops were held to elicit diverse views on the

relationship between education and socio-technical change (for a full summary of

activities see Facer, 2009, Facer & Ulicsak, 2011 and Facer 2011).

On the basis of these literature reviews and consultation, the BCH programme identified

a set of assumptions that might be made about key trends for socio-technical change

over the next two decades. These are trends that are already in train or envisaged with a

high degree of confidence by the participants in and contributors to the programme (see

Facer and Sandford 2010). They can be summarised as follows:


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The digital information landscape gets denser, deeper and more diverse - trendstowards accountability and security, combined with increased capacity to gather

data at scales from the molecular to the planetary, combined with the capacity to

digital tag physical objects, lead to a massive increase in digital information

Individuals manage a personal cloud of information and resources cloudcomputing combined with personal technologies, make it easier for people to wrap

their information systems around themselves rather than accessing them via

institutions and places

Working and living alongside machines becomes increasingly taken for grantedautomation of increasingly complex tasks, the integration of social and technical

systems, and the decrease in size of powerful computing devices means that

collaboration with digital technologies becomes an increasingly familiar part of

day to day activities.

Distance matters less but geography still counts improved experiences ofremote presence combined with a need to reduce transport costs, as well as

growing familiarity with the social practices and etiquette of remote interaction,

makes remote working more commonplace. Technical, legislative and regulatory

infrastructure however, means that geographical location still shapes the quality

of online participation

Digital natives grow up but will need to keep learning ageing populations andcontinuing rapid technological development will place pressure on adults to keep

learning and working later in life, and to keep developing new skills. Expertise in

todays socio-technical practices will not guarantee expertise in tomorrows.

Institutional boundaries weaken and institutional functions are disaggregated changing demographics, the disaggregation of information access from location,

and the enhanced capacity to collaborate at a distance, along with disruptions to

traditional public service models, provokes a re-organisation of institutions and

working practices around networked practices.

The knowledge economy declines as a utopian future the working practices ofglobal corporations create growing gaps between global creative elite and a large

body of low paid workers, with increased positional competition between the

middle classes. The cost of environmental degradation becomes increasingly

burdensome.

Biosciences do not provide silver bullets to educational problems - bioscienceswill not provide simple answers to long-standing problems, instead, they will play a

role alongside social sciences in producing accounts of learning and development.

They may also give rise to new myths of learning and development.


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These trends envisaged for the next two decades raise a range of questions about the

socio-technical futures that young people may inhabit.

For educators and education institutions wishing to, as the rhetoric would have it, equip

young people for the 21st century there are three issues in particular that emerge from

the intersection of these trends that we might identify as being of particular importance.

The first relates to the nature ofthe individualthat we might imagine at the heart of the

educational enterprise and who acts as the basis for building personal futures. The

second, relates to the nature of the economic landscape that we might expect young

people to move into over the next two decades and for which education is, according to

instrumentalist accounts, seeking to prepare them. The third relates to the nature of the

conversation that society has about its future, and the role of different generations in

shaping and living with the consequences of that debate in aging societies.

The remainder of the paper explores some of the uncertainties and trajectories outlined

in the BCH programme relating to socio-technical development and its implications for

young people and education in these three areas. In so doing, it argues that the

uncertainties and developments envisaged by researchers, policy makers and others in

these three areas require schools to create spaces that will better equip young people to

participate in a meaningful conversation about socio-technical change and their own

and societys futures.

Enhancing individuals?

Contemporary youth in western societies is often observed to be developing symbiotic

relationships with the mobile telecommunications devices that they carry with them,

relationships that blur the boundaries between self and artefact. As Gitte Stald, in her

study of mobile technology use amongst young people observes:

the mobile user is becoming a kind of cyborg. The young users in our research []

experience a kind of symbiosis with their mobiles, in which the physical devices come

to be understood as a representation of personal meanings and identities. (Stald,

2009)

According to the BCH programme, the technological developments of the next decade

have the potential to significantly expand the functionality and reach of suchaugmentations of the self with the development of intelligent prosthetics, cosmetic

pharmacology, ubiquitous computing and sensor technology.

We are already familiar with the use of digital technologies that breach the boundary of

the body. Pacemakers are a banal fact for many in later life. Cochlear implants are a

more politically contested merging of biology with microphone and electrodes (Haste,

2009). Brain implants are now being used by medics to manage Parkinsons disease.

Courtesy of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are also significant leaps in the

creation of bodily prosthetics and enhancements. Such augmentations begin to offer the

possibility of overcoming significant physical disabilities and, in some accounts, disabledgroups are being seen as early innovators, able to model in advance the sorts of


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adaptations that may later be adapted by the mainstream (Cliff et al, 2008). As with

many medical developments, what was designed initially for corrective purposes is

open to appropriation for other, more pleasurable, purposes (Viagra anyone?) and the

digital augmentation of the body is likely to be no exception (Harper et al, 2008). Digital

body jewellery, intelligent contact lenses, context sensitive digital prosthetics are all

already in development. Over the next two decades it is reasonable to assume that

individuals will have the capacity to augment themselves with ever more powerful and

ever more intimately embedded computing devices. When combined with the

development of ubiquitous computing systems that allow the individual to draw upon

massive computational and informational resources on demand, such augmentation

begins to change our understanding of the boundaries of the individual.

Augmentation may also take less visible formsiii. Researchers in the BCH programme

reported that cognitive enhancement drugs are becoming a familiar part of many

university campuses (Turney, 2009), and there are others who argue (generating data

on this remains problematic) that drugs such as Provagil and Ritalin are being used to

attain competitive advantage in the high-tech, highly competitive environment of Silicon

Valley, and if there, perhaps elsewhere too (Ciscio, 2009). As such drugs become more

effective and if cognitive enhancement begin to be seen as an important competitive

advantage in education, questions of young peoples right to refuse such enhancements

may become as much a concern as their currently illicit use. A study by Nature in 2008

highlighted the potential for competitive educational environments to encourage uptake

of cognition-enhancing drugs:

When asked whether healthy children under the age of 16 should be restricted from

taking these drugs, unsurprisingly, most respondents (86%) said that they should. Butone-third of respondents said they would feel pressure to give cognition-enhancingdrugs to their children if other children at school were taking them. (Maher, 2008)

From one perspective, such augmentation of the individual is nothing new. Humans

have always and will always develop, adapt to and reconfigure themselves to use the

tools and resources that they create (Wertsch, 1991). Notwithstanding this general

observation, it is clear that a commonplace acceptance of personal augmentation that

brings constant connectivity with people, information and intelligent computing

systems raises questions, for example, about young peoples privacy and about how to

ensure equity for differently augmented individuals.

The individual management of personal data, the degree to which it is owned and

shared with others, the costs and benefits of making such information widely available

will become a pressing question for the individual and the institutions they are part of.

The diverse patterns of appropriation of augmentation technologies will bring not only

the familiar questions of equity what will count as the benchmark for participation in

technologically enhanced comunities? - but of compatability who will be able to work

together as different patterns of augmentation arise? The appropriation and use of

digital or pharmacological enhancement, moreover, is unlikely to be either uniform or

inevitable. Indeed, there are a number of signs that, as with other socio-technicaldevelopments there are groups who may actively resist such appropriation on religious,


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ethical or health grounds. In some Asian universities, for example, there are alternative

methods of cognitive enhancement being promoted through methods such as

meditation (Inayatullah, 2008).

At a time when parenting is presented as a sign of social success and an opportunity for

material display (Douglas & Michaels, 2004), it is not clear that parents should be the

sole gatekeepers for decisions about which sorts of enhancements young people might

take up or resist. Similarly, if schooling is produced as means of achieving individual

competitive advantage, and if schools are judged and funded upon their results in

examinations, there are few reasons to think that schools and teachers will

automatically act as a check upon the uptake and use of such enhancements. Indeed, the

school could become a space that encourages an arms race to use such digital and

pharmacological technologies to promote individual attainment.

The critical question here, then, is not how do we prepare young people for a future of

inevitable cognitive or digital augmentation or how do we ensure young people

develop 21stcentury skills to use a given set of future technologies? Instead, we need

to ask how we will create ethical education institutions that enable young people to

reflect critically and carefully upon the sorts of digital, pharmacological and other

resources that they mightuse to enhance or augment their capacities and the sorts of

personal and social futures these might offer. We need young people to be able to take

informed decisions about when, in what circumstances and for what purposes they may

choose to appropriate a particular drug or digital augmentation, what the costs and risks

might be, what the benefits, and what systems this will mean the person becomes

connected with as a consequence. Just as medicine is increasingly moving towards a

principle of no decision without me, so too education may need to create new practices

that intimately involve young people in the decisions about the processes, technologies

and treatments that may become part of the educational process.

To do so, however, would require us to challenge the longstanding assumption that

education is concerned with rational autonomous individuals (Biesta, 2006). Instead we

may need to reconceive education as concerned with interdependent individuals,

interdependent with their unique social and technological networks and resources.

Rather than clinging on to the fantasy of a baseline of uniform equality within the school,

then, we may need to create spaces for young people to make visible and make careful

decisions about the diverse socio-technical resources that they bring into and develop

through the educational encounter, and the sorts of futures that such decisions may

bring.

Contested economic futures

As I have already discussed, the dominant economic narrative of the future today is that

socio-technical change will lead inevitably towards a new knowledge economy. In this

narrative of the new service- and technology-driven future economy, individual and

national economic competitiveness are assumed to be ensured by investment in skills

and education. It is on this basis that youth is asked to spend ever longer in further and

higher education and, increasingly, to take on a significant burden of debt to fund that


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investment. Such educational investment, this story of the future implies, will provide

access to secure economic futures both for the individual and for society.

The BCH study, however, provides insights into alternative accounts of possible

economic futures which unsettle the assumptions upon which young people are being

asked to invest ever greater time and resource in formal education.

First, the idea that the knowledge economy will produce increasing demand for

democratic and creative working practices commensurate with degree level

qualifications is contested by some studies that surface contradictory trends in the

working practices of major multi-national corporations. These studies suggest that,

rather than devolving demands for creativity, contemporary technologically mediated

working practices tend instead to centralise and specialise creativity and autonomy to

an ever smaller elite at the heart of the organisation (Lauder et al, 2009). Brown,

Ashton and Lauder describe this as the emergence of a form of digital taylorism, in

which the narratives of democratic creative work are replaced by scripts, scrunity and

control for the majority (Brown et al, 2010).

Increased international investment in higher education combined with the capacity to

use digital technologies to disaggregate the workplace also brings changes to the shape

of typical middle class employment. Not only is there increased international

competition for professional roles and the emergence of communications technologies

that allow them to be conducted remotely, but there are changes in organisational

structures that increasingly casualise and outsource employment. In the creative and

media industries often held up as source of high value creative work in the knowledge

economy, for example, freelance and casualised work is increasing (Ross, 2009;

Terranova, 2004). In previously high status employment such as research and

development, major companies are now holding crowdsourcing competitions, posting

critical challenges online and allowing individuals and research groups around the

world to compete for the prizes offered for solving the problems (Brabham, 2008). Such

competition brings intense positional competition amongst the middle classes,

disaggregates traditional hierarchical institutions and engenders pressure on

individuals to build personal brands that will allow them to navigate a much more

complex employment market.

At the same time, an ageing population and food scarcity caused by environmental

degradation and energy restraint, may see an increase in demand for so called ordinary

work in caring and agricultural jobs (Spratt et al 2009). Such jobs are currently seen as

low paid and low value and frequently outsourced to migrant labour and those with few

educational qualifications (Wilson, 2009).

These developments make visible the potential for highly polarised futures, in which a

small global elite is wooed by global corporations, the middle classes are subject to

intense positional competition, and a large body of people are confined to low paid work

or unemployment (Brown et al 2010). These possible futures suggest that over the

coming decades low paid work and unemployment may not be, as the narrative of

educational opportunity tends to present it, a problem of aspiration. Instead, we may be


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witnessing the development of a profound demand-side problem, in which global

capital functions effectively and efficiently without demanding either full employment

or creative and skilled input from its workers (Young, 2010). If this is the case, then

increased personal investment in formal education may not bring the rewards and

security that is promised.

There is also a growing international concern about the dominant narrative of economic

futures, not merely from those concerned with social and political justice, but from

environmental activists and economists. These groups argue that not only does this

trajectory offer an undesirable future for many, but it is profoundly unsustainable. A

future of continued economic growth, for example, depends on the continued successful

extraction of mineral and other natural resources (which are finite) and upon the

continued enclosure of private goods of time, family relationships and indigenous

knowledge (that are themselves both finite and important underpinning resources for

economic activity) (Goodwin, 2004., Bollier, 2007 Hall, 2009). These critiques lead to

very different ideas about economic futures. Some commentators offer forecasts of

radical social and environmental breakdown. Others present new narratives of a great

transition to a new set of economic models and practices, characterised by initiatives

such as Transition Towns or the growth of mutual and co-operative enterprise practices,

seeking to build sustainable economic futures (Spratt et al, 2009). These models seek to

reintegrate the material world (whether the family, the ecosystem or the mineral

resources that sustain global business and technology) into plans for the future.

As young people are increasingly being asked to invest ever more time and financial

resource in formal education there is therefore an ethical imperative to open up a space

for an informed debate with them about these different possible economic trajectories,

and to allow serious examination of the alternative futures that might be in

development. Such a debate would necessarily need to explore whether the headlong

rush for certification and qualification envisaged in many of the dominant accounts of

the knowledge economy (see, for example, the Leitch review) continues to have validity

or whether new measures of educational success might need to be negotiated between

students, schools, and communities.

Living in ageing societies

If you can make it to 2025, you can make it long enough to live forever. Such is one

possible future identified by research presented in the BCH project and which argued

that the next two decades may see the birth of a new era of radical longevity. Rather

than some final medical breakthrough that offers an end to all illness, there are

commentators who propose that individuals who are able to hold on until the mid 2020s

and who have sufficient resources will be able to sequentially surf waves of medical

development to achieve radical longevity within the next century (see for example,

Kurzweil & Grossman, 2005). Such claims provide an interesting challenge to our

assumptions about life trajectories and, should they be realised even for a small fraction

of the population, would promise to disrupt the relationship between generations. How

would the experience of youth change if the average lifetime is considerably longer?


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Would there continue to be a need for children? For educators, they pose other puzzles -

what would lifelong learning look like if were able to live for several hundred years?

Such expectations are at the margins of current thinking about both ageing and medical

technology. What is more widely accepted, however, is the broader shift towards an

ageing population around the world (this is not solely a US/Europe phenomenon as

some have suggested) caused by increased longevity and declining fertility. In Western

Europe, by 2035, the expectation is that 50% of the population will be aged over 50,

profoundly changing the demographic make-up of the population and potentially

redrawing the historic boundaries between education, working, caring and retirement

(Harper, 2009).

A commonplace account of the implications of this future for education is that

individuals will need to more fluidly manage these diverse roles across all stages of the

lifecourse and that institutions will need to adapt to enable individuals to occupy these

diverse roles at the same time. An increase in healthy ageing is also seen as a likely

driver of the emergence of more diverse family formations with an increase in multi-

generational families with older, more active grandparents taking an increasing role in

parenting; and increases in vertical relationships across generations (Leeson, 2009).

Less commonly discussed, however, is the fact that such a future trajectory has the

potential to bring with it highly visible conflicts of interest between generations. First, as

public finances weaken and populations age, participants in the BCH programme argued

that the next two decades would witness increasing pressures on resources previously

allocated to youth (Prout, 2008). Already today, we have seen demonstrations in

Germany by students in protest at allocation of public finances to pensions and cuts in

student budgets (Lammy, 2010). Some politicians are equally stoking up concerns about

the legacy of the baby boomers and its supposed cost for future generations as a cover

for radical economic restructuring (Willetts, 2010). In the areas of employment and

housing there are growing tensions, as younger people struggle to buy a house or get

out of temporary employmentwhile older people seemingly sit pretty on the wealth of

a property boom or in senior permanent positions. At the same time, the environmental

debate is beginning to be recast as a generational conflict, as older generations are seen

as responsible for failing to take the necessary decisions today that will prevent climate

warming tomorrow. An ageing population therefore presents highly uncertain futures

for youth, they unsettle the familiar narratives of easy progression into security through

adulthood and offer a radical uncertainty about longer term ageing and wellbeing.

As in the familiar narrative of the digital natives, however, this account of the future as

shaped by generational change also has the potential to obscure other forms of injustice

produced by income, gender and ethnicity. A debate about the relative merits of

different generations to stake a claim to diminishing public finances or to jobs or

housing, for example, risks overshadowing more fundamental questions about equity

within generations or the way in which vulnerability at different life stages is likely to be

shaped by factors other than the ageing process.


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Radically divergent futures are offered by changing demographics: futures of profound

intergenerational conflict or new relationships of intergenerational solidarity; futures in

which the risks of ageing populations are born by the weakest and poorest or in which

new strategies are found to socialise such risks more fairly; futures in which the costs of

ageing populations are outsourced to developing countries as we import youth and

expertise to tackle our immediate concerns, or in which global aging becomes subject to

new relationships between countries.

In seeking to prepare young people for an ageing society, therefore, we need to do more

than simply present them with the unquestioned demand that they will need to become

lifelong learners. Instead, we need to create the opportunity for young people to

consider the different sorts of personal and social futures that an ageing population

might offer and the different political, economic and personal choices that it will bring

with it. Learning to flourish in an ageing society will involve more therefore, than the

development of a passion for learning. Instead, it will require the creation of the

capacities and structures needed to engage in a meaningful public debate through which

the wider personal and social conflicts and inequities of an aging population can be

negotiated. Such capacities are not merely cognitive or attitudinal, they are intimately

concerned with building new democratic structures and public spaces.

Current trajectories for citizenship and public engagement in debate, however, suggest

that there may be divides emerging here too between different generations in their

engagement with political debate. Bennett (2008), for example, argues that we are

seeing the emergence of two different tribes of citizens. He argues that one group

(usually younger people) might be described as actualising citizens, concerned less

with the traditional features of politics and government and more motivated by making

a difference through participation in online and offline activism. In contrast, he

describes as dutiful citizens, those (often older people) who continue to adhere to

traditional political processes, voting and government as a means of effecting change.

Such a trajectory of divergent citizenship practices would imply not only a future in

which the interests of different generations are potentially in conflict, but also a future

in which there are declining public spaces through which different generations can

come together to negotiate and effect social change.

An attention to the divergent futures offered by aging populations brings new urgency

to the discussion at the heart of this paper about the ownership of debates about the

future. It unsettles the assumption that long term decisions about the future whether

in education or other public services can be taken by adults alone. Young peoples

voices, rights and aspirations need, instead, to be structurally embedded in the debate if

generational injustice is not to be perpetuated. And such a debate needs to be

concerned not only with building the capacity to participate in traditional mechanisms

of democracy, but with building the capacity for young people to participate in

meaningful processes of socio-technical change and to support them to make a

difference. It involves building the capacity for young people to stake a claim to being

natives of the futures that they will inhabit, and as therefore having a role in working

with others across the generations, to shape those futures.


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The school as resource for building capacity to shape socio-technical futures

The preceding discussion is not intended simply to present a set of new orthodox

futures to replace the one we were working with before. The trends I present here are

as subject to disruption and change as are the assumptions about the knowledge

economy. Instead, they are presented in order to question the way we present futuresocio-technical development to young people. In these three areas the futures of the

person, economic futures, and futures for ageing societies it is clear that there is an

ethical responsibility to present the instability of dominant accounts of the future to

young people and to invite them to see themselves as active agents in the creation of

socio-technical change, rather than merely as passive participants in socio-technical

societies designed for them elsewhere and by others.

This can seem like a daunting challenge, after all, socio-technical change is often seen as

happening elsewhere at national or global scales. Nominalisations such as

globalisation present socio-technical change as an inevitable force in which it isimpossible to intervene. Such change is often, however, experienced and shaped by the

lived realities of local communities and families. Changing economic and environmental

conditions find expression in changing patterns of employment; new technological

affordances find expression in changing patterns of family relationships and community

interactions. If socio-technical change is examined through the lens of the lived and the

local, therefore, it can become a subject of scrutiny and debate. Not only that, but it is at

the local level, through determination of budgets and the actions of local institutions and

public services that national and global policy is acted out, a scale at which democratic

engagement becomes not only possible but viable for young people and adults alike

(Levine, 2007).

In this context, the school has a potentially powerful role to play in building the capacity

of young people to reflect upon and participate in the conversations that they and their

communities are having about socio-technical change and possible futures. As one of the

last public institutions embedded within and connected with local communities, and as

one of the last universal public services, the school has the potential to act as a powerful

hub through which students, teachers, parents and communities can examine the

futures on offer and the futures they may wish to create (Anyon, 2005). And it is in this

light that researchers such as Michael Fielding and Peter Moss are making the case for

reimagining the school as a site for democratic engagement (Fielding & Moss, 2011).

Many debates about how education should adapt to uncertain futures, however, tend to

treat education as itself immune to socio-technical change. If we want to create a new

space for debate with young people and across generations, however, we also need to

recognise that education is also a site of socio-technical change that will affect the

capacity of educators and schools to engage young people in democratic debate and

action. Here too, the BCH programme identifies a number of contemporary trends of

significant interest:

First, we are witnessing the rise of a rich digital educational landscape outside theschool. In this landscape there are already, for example, numerous online educational


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resources being produced for sites such as YouTube that enable learners to access

everything from information on how to knit a sock to how to bleed a radiator to how to

play the piano. One step further than such online tutorials, the School of Everything is

an online brokering resource that allows would-be learners and teachers to find each

other outside formal educational institutions. This site begins to offer some of the

affordances of the peer matching first envisaged by Illich in the 1970s to de-

institutionalise learning from formal educational institutions (Illich, 1970). There is also

a growth of folk educators, building massive online resources including videos,

feedback and online supportiv.

Second, the prospect of an ageing population and changes in institutional working

practices opens up the potential for a new cohort of adults to play a role in education.

The golden gurus project in Australia, for example, provides one example of this sort of

initiative, in which the over 50s are seen as a new social resource to contribute to their

communityv. Similarly, if the numbers of people in self-employment, or in more

casual/freelance roles increases, they may have more opportunities as well as more

need to build reciprocal relationships as teachers and learners with educational

institutions. This raises the possibility of a new cohort of adults who might teach last or

teach during rather than teach first.

Third, a source of great expectations for the emancipation and agency of youth over the

coming two decades is the emergence of new networked publics (Boyd, 2009) that

enable people to find common issues and areas of interest with other people, to learn

together and to mobilise to achieve social change. The heady experience of the Obama

election campaign has done little to dampen enthusiastic accounts of the potential for

online networking to radically reshape youths engagement with the political anddemocratic landscape (Reich, 2009).

These trends offer very different possible futures for education: the emergence of a

casual teaching force alongside the technological resources to support online learning

communities and connect would-be teachers with would-be learners has the potential

to underpin the emergence of very new educational institutions. The beginnings of such

institutions might be seen in the growing number of wholly online schools and

commercial education providers offering individuals the chance to opt out of

mainstream educationvi. Such a trajectory might radically undermine the capacity of

public schooling to act as a democratic resource and public space.

These developments also, however, have the potential to create new relationships

between schools and the wider community through which young people might be better

supported to take an active role in reflecting upon and shaping their own and their

communitys response to socio-technical change. The emergence of a rich educational

landscape of online resources and and a flourishing of folk educators who spend only

some of their time in educational practice opens up the possibility for schools to erode

the school walls, and to connect young people with the lived realities of their local

communities, businesses and democratic institutions. The emergence of new networked

publics opens up the potential for young people to learn and to act, alongside others, to

influence and inform public debate at a local and national level. In this way, schools can


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act as mobilising institutions (Goldberg ADD) to support their students not merely to

diligently achieve their qualifications in pursuit of success in one unchallenged future,

but to participate in the sorts of debates and activities at local and international levels

that will allow them to contest and shape the future societies they will inherit.

If we wish to take seriously the potential of young people to act as natives of our socio-technical futures, we need to begin to extend to them the citizenship rights that come

with such an identity. We need to ensure that they are equipped not merely to develop

the skills that adults today think are important, but to play a role in shaping the futures

for themselves that they will inherit. Whether these are the personal futures that they

choose as they decide what will shape their appropriation of intimate augmentations, or

the economic futures that they choose as they decide how to build their personal and

social wellbeing in challenging economic and environmental conditions. What is clear,

however, is that we cannot continue to see childrens ownership of the future merely as

a rhetorical device for demanding adult investment in change. Instead, we need to

recognise the rights of young people to have a say in the futures we are imagining andbuilding. To do so, will require us to rethink the relationships between schools, their

communities and the future.


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Young, M (2010) Keynote Lecture Educational policies for a knowledge society:

reflections from a sociology of knowledge perspective, June 29 2010, GOETE Kick off

Meeting, Tubigen

i See the video of Obamas speech athttp://www.educationfutures.com/2010/01/07/obama-education-is-national-

security-issue/

ii I use the term socio-technical in order to foreground the social construction of technology both in its design and its

use. new technologies do not have social agency independently of social actors. In so doing, I draw upon the field of

Social Studies of Science and Technology (e.g. Woolgar, 2002) iii There is not space here to discuss the potentially radical implications of the emerging biosciences for intervention in

the body. Such developments are expected in the 20 year horizon of this piece to have a major impact on treatment of

specific conditions and to play a role in developing targetted pharmaceuticals. For a longer discussion of the potential

impact of the biosciences in education, see Turney (2009) review for the BCH programme.

iv (see, for example, the Kahn Academy, one mans passionate project offering 10,000 online resources in maths andscience).

v www.deewr.gov.au/Pages/ default.aspx

vi Numbers of online schools etc add here
http://www.educationfutures.com/2010/01/07/obama-education-is-national-security-issue/http://www.educationfutures.com/2010/01/07/obama-education-is-national-security-issue/http://www.educationfutures.com/2010/01/07/obama-education-is-national-security-issue/http://www.deewr.gov.au/Pages/%20default.aspxhttp://www.deewr.gov.au/Pages/%20default.aspxhttp://www.educationfutures.com/2010/01/07/obama-education-is-national-security-issue/http://www.educationfutures.com/2010/01/07/obama-education-is-national-security-issue/

taking the 21st century seriously: potential futures for education, youth and new technologies

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