Education and the Future: Four Orientations

ABSTRACT Education is inherently entangled with the future. This argumentative review examines this entanglement and proposes a framework differentiating between four educational orientations towards the future. The orientation ‘Futures of education’ examines how education changes in the future: From rhetorical to visionary, these futures are concerned with issues such as educational technology. ‘Education to adapt to the future’ is concerned with how education prepares young people to face projected or unknown conditions and focuses on issues such as future jobs. ‘Education to change the future’ sees learners as having influence on the future and relates to issues such as sustainability and agency. ‘Education about futures’ involves bringing the potential and unpredictability of future into classrooms and is concerned with students' futures literacy. Focusing on questions of educational aims, critical perspectives and technology, literature around these orientations is examined to support more conscious discourse on the relationship between education and the future.