The world in 2050
At the opening event of Preparing teachers to prepare young people for the world, we heard a series of short provocations informed from research and disciplinary positionings. The experts expect the future to be quite different to now, and our current ways of dealing and understanding the world will soon be inadequate.
We heard that:
- The world is increasingly complex and mistakes in understanding that complexity will be made, and will need to be tolerated. Minimal data literacy will be essential for us to understand the world
- That genetics and genomes are progressing and accelerating quicker than our consideration of how to respond. Therefore, understanding ethics and ethical positionings are essential for scientists and for an educated population
- As new (medical) problems emerge so old ones will resurface. This clashes with our trends of mobility, ageing and increasing urbanisation. So global perspectives, global governance and collaborations will be the scale of problem solving. We need to understand how to operate at that scale without losing our understanding of the local.
- Social, demographic, political and technological changes will increasingly put emphasis on the young to protect the old. How do we grow old while continuing to flourish, and at the same time enable the young to self-determine?
- Changes in data handling and how data will be used by benign forces will also mean that literacy education becomes central to all aspects of our lives. We will need to ask questions about every communication: sources, intentions and implications.
- Changing workplace needs and structures also render some traditional content disciplinary areas void. Study should be deep, concentrated and joyful. We should seek to be good humans -productivity will follow.
- What is our relationship to our home, to our planet? And how connected is our understanding our home and our local ecosystem to the global? This will become a key aspect of engaging with larger more complex issues.
- The processes of education itself will change. And so rethinking of the axioms of education will be necessary. What skills will we lose? And what will it matter? How will this change our understanding of human intelligence?
- Inequalities persist and these future trajectories appear to be more likely to make them worse rather than better. How does fostering an understanding of the nature of widening inequalities influence how we wish to operate in the world?