The Future of Education

There is an urgent, global and existential issue with regard to the “future of education”.  Our educational values and philosophies, strategies, practices and indeed, the very definitions of education are necessarily transformed in the economic and social context of the projected “jobless society”. And the particularly complex and pressing question that needs to be addressed is: “How do we educate for a jobless society?”  Projections of a near future “jobless society” have become a dominant and compelling narrative of emerging realities of a technologically-driven society of economic restructuring, labour redistributions, and profound social transformations.  In economic trends with regard to the ongoing decoupling of job volumes and wages from the metrics of economic productivity and progress, educational purpose, strategy and direction have become ever more contested and critical.
What is commonly referred to as “the digital turn” is a turn of epochal magnitude, with an unfolding present tense of vast digital architectures and accelerated, coordinated, and proliferating global practices and infrastructures, from organizational forms of digital economies to new forms of everyday sociality. The future may be an AI/robotic-driven, Big Data-driven, comprehensively automated society of ongoing massive technological shifts, labour redistribution, broad social and cultural transformation, and recalibrated metrics to gauge economic advancement. In all, it is especially consequential to consider the most critical preparatory and anticipatory portal we have for the achievement of social cohesion and social advancement in the velocities and disruptions of societal change—education.
There are critical questions for strategic educational futures. What do we understand as knowledge in an AI-driven, Big Data-driven society? Can we challenge the absolute faith in “datafication”? Can we resolve the ever-worsening instabilities of “facts” and “truth” in the debasement of political discourse and the erosion of democratic values? Can we teach the skills to curate algorithmic bias and activate against data abuse? Can we disrupt, re-imagine, and re-design educational principles and practices to actually make the educational futures we need? This paper proposes that disruptions in education constitute significant and enduring interventions toward the actualities of societal futures.  Education is the custodian of societal progress, and it is the foundation and for facing and acting upon the speculations and prospects of the “jobless society”.

Keywords: education for a jobless society; educational disruption; AI and Big Data-driven society;