Where futures thinking gets it wrong

PART 1: Rediscovering Now

When am I ever going to use __________ (insert relevant subject here) in the future?

It’s a dreaded question. One often asked by the student in the back of the classroom looking to get a rise out of the teacher. We bumble through an answer about critical thinking skills or the real-world application of mathematics, hoping the lesson might be able to move on. “You need to be able to read so that you don’t sign a contract that comes back to bite you.”

Statements like this are tried and true deflectors for a seemingly impertinent question. However, what these questions reveal about our education system is telling and they may be more important now than ever.

Questions about the practical application of learning, essentially WHY we need to learn certain things, come about because we’ve designed a system that encourages them. We’ve told students that learning is about preparing them for the future. Think about school. So much of the narrative around schooling is preoccupied with preparing kids. Preparing them for the future, for the next grade level, for university, for life. “You need to be ready for the end-of-year exam, so that you do well and can go on to the next level.” We’ve over-indexed on learning ‘for the future’— a painful prerequisite students have to undergo if they are going to make it in the world. What future?

Generative AI is throwing old notions about what is ‘necessary’ out the window. A recent comment from Benjamin Freud, Ph.D. about accusations of AI generated thought pieces has me questioning the role AI plays in our the future narrative. There’s no question it’s forcing us to ask questions like, “Do we really need to be able to write?” Well it really depends on what you view the purpose of writing to be.

When learning is a function, as opposed to process, then it’s easy to see AI making core competencies such as reading, writing and mathematics redundant. But reading and writing aren’t redundant. Just because I don’t ‘need’ to read and write, it doesn’t mean they aren’t of value. And here’s the rub: our preoccupation with learning as preparation for the future leads down a pathway of viewing learning as a necessity. So purpose matters. If the purpose of writing is to generate content across our platforms, then we’ve got it all wrong. I’m suspicious at the oversaturation of ‘content’ as it reveals what drives us—recognition. I may have even cynically described the landscape as “noise-making tools using noise-making tools to sate the algorithm”. What if we define the purpose as the process?

I enjoy the process of writing, synthesizing and thinking about how and what we learn, finding that when I use AI for it takes away some of the pleasure I get from artfully constructing a powerful sentence. When I write, I experience Flow—not the AI tool, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept describing a state of deep immersion, where you're so engaged in an activity that everything else fades away. The experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Our increasing reliance on AI, fueled by a constant drive to produce and by our fixation on future outcomes, poses a risk to our humanness. It threatens our ability to be fully present and engage deeply.

So how do we reframe?

Drives to move us away from AI are often driven by fears around plagiarism and assessment measures. Teachers are advocating for pen and paper examinations and oral testing. What if instead of picking up pen and paper solely to ensure authenticity, we did so because it's fundamentally human? What might our world look like if we taught young people to enjoy the process of learning.

In Part 2 of this post, I'll explore how our current approach to summative assessment might be preventing students from embracing learning as a process. I'll share some ideas for how we can effectively measure students where they are and how to build growth focused assessment practices.

So, yes I wrote this myself. No I didn't get AI to write it for me and while it wasn’t necessarily the easiest pathway, I'm committed to choosing experience over expedience and process over productivity. 

Reference:

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row.