The Future Actually IS Our Responsibility
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s fictional “non-fiction” novel, The Ministry for the Future, the book begins with a brutal and beyond grim climate scenario: India is beset with a heat wave of epic proportions. While communities work to manage the heat through use of generators, parsing out water and supplies, moving to less exposed locations, even submerging themselves in a local lake, the heat only increases–and slowly and painfully millions of people die. As an opening chapter to a novel, it could be a show stopper– but Robinson’s novel suggests a new way of looking at the future.
The horrific event leads governments to take drastic measures. A world-wide organization launches, “The Ministry for the Future” –a group whose sole purpose is to actively anticipate and plan for a future world that creates mitigations and approaches to a very different future. The book’s many voices, scientific and financial interventions and somewhat drastic responses (drill into glaciers in order to vacuum out and refreeze arctic water leading to less glacial melt) ultimately leaves the reader with a modicum of hope for the future of our world—at least in terms of climate change.
The book’s thesis: When governments and individuals scientifically anticipate the future and intercede with deliberate and strong-minded mitigations, it’s possible to not only address the present day but also to dramatically improve and affect the lives of future generations.
In our current world, many thinkers are imagining how to address the long-view of the future. They suggest that we can and should be making decisions that will not only benefit today, but will—even more importantly—benefit future, unborn generations. William MacAskill, Oxford professor of philosophy and author of What We Owe the Future, argues for the concept of “longtermism”—which basically states that today’s peoples have a moral obligation to center the far-reaching future in every decision we make today. MacAskill presents three simple yet profound concepts:
Future People Matter (and there will be more of them than we imagine)
Humanity’s potential is enormous
Our actions can impact the long term future
MacAskill summarizes: “We can renounce the tyranny of the present over the future and act as trustees for all of humanity, helping to create a flourishing world for the generations to come.”
This is not fringe thinking–the more you look around, read and listen, the more there is to digest about this “long future.” Youth activist Greta Thunberg has been spreading the message of the urgent need to address the crisis of climate change of today and tomorrow through her movement of “Friday’s for the Future” since she was 15 years old. She is not alone in demanding attention to the future needs of our world.
These provocative thinkers urge us to plan beyond our short 100 year windows and use research, actions and policy to impact the world thousands ahead. Our future lens tends to be a few years or, at most, a few decades. Consider how recent most of our modern world was created: Shakespeare lived a bit more than 400 years ago; Industrialization occurred 150 years ago; World War II and the Holocaust, a mere 70 years ago; space travel, 60 years; technology boom and the internet, less than 30 years ago (check out this clip from the Today Show in 1995). What decisions did we make “then” that have already had an impact on today, positive and negative?
So what does all of this mean for educators and for our schools? What is the longest horizon schools typically consider? A Strategic Plan is maybe five to seven years. Accreditation is about the same. Average head of school tenure is perhaps seven years. Teachers who stay in the classroom may have the longest window in a school. And yet how much does the day-to-day curriculum advocate for thinking about, forecasting and planning for the long future of a school and for our grandchildren’s grandchildren?
What if we expanded our teaching lessons to carefully (and hopefully!) examine implications for the long-term future? Our students can and should consider possible pathways to address future challenges around population, migration, climate, bioethics, disease prevention, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. As educators we need to ask ourselves: what skills are needed to understand, digest and navigate the challenges of both near and far-future?
This is not natural or easy work for school leaders. As a former Head of School, I know all-too-well how the daily challenges of running and managing a school are centered on the needs of students, faculty and parents. It takes deliberate attention to really think about the future. By asking ourselves what we students actually need to know and do in the long term can be an effective tool to reshape what we teach now (such as moving from traditional teaching practices like the Advanced Placement program to more applied learning and real world skills). In my former school, we were able to proactively plan for a future campus that will extend beyond a basic building project by development of outdoor teaching, learning and wellness spaces, creation of sustainable landscape, and attention to sustainable energy and water usage.
Recycling, composting, school gardens, solar panels and examining transportation and carbon impact are all wonderfully relevant projects for schools to focus on today. These initiatives are tangible, student-centered and work to impact the present and near-future. Yet, it’s not enough if we want to hold the long arc of time with the same weight and consideration as the short arc of tomorrow. School leaders need to understand, embrace and proactively engage with “longtermism.”
One example is from Stanford’s d.school Futures Series which encourages us to time travel to the future to address what may be. One framework, “seeing in multiples allows us to get comfortable with plurality and ambiguity.” We cultivate intellectual and cognitive flexibility, resisting the urge to see things in just “one right way.” One prompt: “Consider potential futures in which people live 20 years longer. What versions of this future could lead to positive transformations in society? What versions might exacerbate conflicts? How would the perspectives of a 100-year-old and a 25-year-old differ in these futures?”
Another idea flows directly from Japan’s Future Design Movement where participants in planning projects take on the personas of people living 50 years in the future but at their current age. This kind of time travel and future thinking is easily plausible for students in our schools. Students love role plays. What roles and perspectives can our students take on as they explore the problems and solutions of the future?
Here at L+D we are deep into future thinking. In addition to our WTF (“What the Future!”) provocations about new ways to proactively look ahead, our team actively tracks and considers signals at work in our world. We believe boards, school leaders and teachers must go beyond the short-term view of the next decade to proactively take the long view, to be a “good ancestor” for the long-term viability for our school and for our young people.
Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” is a reminder that we can look ahead with prescient insights and lead change: “We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
