The Future of Education

The earth is currently in a phase of rapid transformation; climate change, globalization, digitalization to mention a few of the challenges. As a response, organizations such as OECD and United Nations have proposed a variety of visionary documents for ’21st century education’, which will be the topic of this paper. These documents focus primarily on the role of competences such as digital literacy and intercultural communication. This paper will investigate how education can be understood also from a holistic perspective based on the needs of humans and the earth. The paper is based on Frederic Laloux’s [1] organization model ‘evolutionary-teal’, which constructs a holistic approach to organizations and the humans in them based on Ken Wilber’s [2] integral perspective on human cognition. The paper benefits methodologically from a diffractive reading, based on Karen Barad [3] and the author’s previous work [4] where a variety of material are read through each other. The purpose is to push ideas forward in an affirmative manner, rather than only critiquing what is problematic. The analysis will show that even visionary documents lack the vision to think education outside an instrumental paradigm. However, the diffractive reading will provide a few openings for formulating the challenges of education as an opportunity to educate while still putting the earthly and human wellbeing first.

Keywords: 21st century education, evolutionary-teal, diffractive analysis;

References: 
[1] Laloux, F. (2014). Reinventing organizations: A guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage in human consciousness. Brussels: Nelson Parker.
[2] Wilber, K. (1996). A brief history of everything. Boulder, CO: Shambhala publications.
[3] Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[4] Ceder, S. (2019). Towards a posthuman theory of educational relationality. London & New York: Routledge.