Education 2050: (Comparative) Educational Research for a Finite Future

• In Event: Education 2Q50: artificial intelligence (AI), catastrophic climate change, or wonderland?

Proposal

A child born today will reach adulthood in a world very different from the one we currently inhabit. Let us name our hypothetical child Friedrich, or simply Fred for short, in honour of one patriarch of the family who dared to think forward in cultural terms. When Fred reaches full adulthood between 2050 – 2060, the world population will be approaching 11 billion, an increase of some 7 billion people since the mid-1970s. Although Fred might well drive an electric car, the wide global energy mix in 2050 is projected to still require coal in the short-to-medium term to replace a precipitous decline in oil and gas occurring around 2030. Yet, this prolonged reliance on fossil fuels, particularly coal, will push up greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 60% by 2050. This will greatly accelerate global warming, which will have long ago exceeded the +1.5C threshold (Year 2030, Age 11) and already eclipsed the ‘point-of-no-return’ mark of +2.0C (Year 2047, Age 28). This ‘new’ World will thus be far more crowded, resource deplete, and scorching than our already precarious present; one filled with daily reminders of “overshoot”. And what of Fred’s education? With college tuition costs far outpacing inflation since 1985, Fred’s education might well cost him the equivalent of 5-7 years of future annual earnings. His coursework will thus focus more on more economically ‘relevant’ subjects, affording him little time to contemplate the increasing finite-ness of the future, let alone the cultural formations on which they are founded. His tutors, assuming they are like the CIES mainstream, will celebrate his education as a “success” so long as his ‘right to education’ is unmolested, he scores highly on STEM subjects, secures employment, and all the AIEd-led teaching was carried out in a ‘learner centered’ way.

Our paper opens by thinking forward, foregrounding the ‘future of the World’ and the ‘future of the student’ in an attempt to bring a new concern before the field of comparative education: How should an understanding of the future inform the way we view education today?

Our primary aim is to open up a new project, one we tentatively call the Finite Future paradigm. In contrast to existing research which continues to operate within a kosmos of infinite horizons, we suggest that Finite Future research seeks a project of deep cultural transformation, not merely ‘lessening impact’ of the existing formation or even moderate cultural reconstruction (i.e., new materials, same basic blueprints). Indeed, nearly every major scientific work on the interwoven issues of resources, climate, and population has concluded with the inevitability of cultural change (e.g., White, 1967; Catton 1982). Yet, all have failed to discuss the role of education, let alone sketch anything concrete to date. Returning to Jasper’s (1949) notion of “fundamental categories”, the new paradigm we gesture to here is predicated on the idea that these basic building blocks must be relativized then altered. The move is to return Logos to mythos through (comparative) educational research; make visible alternatives and elaborate the practical implications.

Author

• Jeremy Rappleye, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Education