Building futures we cannot yet imagine

Education is teaching yesterday to children who will live in tomorrow. While medicine rewrites genomes and technology engineers intelligence, schools remain firmly anchored to the past. Literature courses rehearse the canon but overlook the future of storytelling in podcasts, interactive fiction, and virtual worlds. Mathematics still prizes manual techniques while sidelining climate modeling, data science, and artificial intelligence. Innovation elsewhere races ahead; education drags its feet.

This backwardness is intentional. Schools are designed to be conservative institutions. They valorize stability, continuity, and predictability, precisely the qualities that industries outside of education now abandon in order to survive. In technology, companies fold, pivot, or reinvent themselves in the span of a few years. In medicine, therapies are trialed, refined, and deployed on timescales once unimaginable. Agriculture reorganizes its entire supply chains in response to climate disruption. Education, in contrast, insists on shielding itself from change, preferring curricula written decades ago and practices that promise control rather than creativity.

Meanwhile, the ground beneath us is shifting faster than schools can look back. We face futures most of us cannot yet imagine, shaped by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum computing, climate disruption, and upheavals still unnamed. These forces are not waiting for the approval of ministries or accreditation bodies. They are reshaping work, culture, politics, and knowledge production in real time.

Artificial intelligence generates texts, images, and scientific hypotheses at scales unimaginable even five years ago. Biotechnologies enable us to edit genomes, manufacture organs, and alter ecosystems. Quantum computing promises to crack problems in chemistry, finance, and logistics that overwhelm today’s machines. These breakthroughs bring possibilities of flourishing and risks of collapse. They open doors to techno-utopias and nightmares alike.

Preparing students for this world requires more than transmitting established knowledge. It requires cultivating foresight, adaptability, ethical judgment, and the courage to invent what does not yet exist. A graduate fluent only in past knowledge is not simply underprepared; they are disarmed in a century defined by uncertainty. Schools cannot remain passive. They must train learners to read emerging patterns, improvise solutions, and co-create futures that are inclusive, just, and worth living in.

From Manifesto 25:

“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed” (William Gibson in Gladstone, 1998). The field of education lags behind other industries because it focuses on the past rather than the future. We teach the history of literature but ignore the future of storytelling. We emphasize traditional mathematical concepts but neglect the creation of new mathematics to shape tomorrow. What is labeled as “revolutionary” in education has already occurred in fragmented, localized ways. To realize meaningful change, we must learn from these scattered efforts, share experiences, and take the necessary risks to embrace a forward-looking approach in our practice.

The uneven distribution of the future extends beyond innovation in teaching and learning. It reflects profound inequities in educational opportunity itself. Students from historically marginalized backgrounds frequently lack access to emerging technologies and future-focused curricula, limiting their ability to meaningfully engage with (or shape) the futures we seek.

This gap limits their capacity to engage with emerging ideas, and also to participate actively in creating and defining them. Consequently, the future risks being shaped disproportionately by a privileged few, perpetuating existing inequities.

To ensure a future that is accessible and inclusive for all, educational institutions need to prioritize equitable distribution of future-oriented learning opportunities. Schools and policymakers should deliberately provide learners with access to advanced technology, digital platforms, experiences, and mindware (software of the mind) that encourage imaginative thinking and original solutions. Actively addressing this uneven distribution means enabling students from all backgrounds to envision and influence future scenarios, ensuring the diverse voices and perspectives necessary for genuinely inclusive progress. This also includes instilling a mindset within students and educators that, yes, they do have a role to play in designing our futures.

Breaking innovations from isolation

A backward-looking educational approach results in viewing innovations from a distance, separating learners from changes around them. Institutions are more content isolating risks of new changes rather than the adoption or development of new innovations. Yet, around the globe, educators and institutions are cautiously experimenting with advanced methods: students are learning storytelling through augmented and virtual reality platforms, exploring mathematical concepts using computational modeling software, and participating in interdisciplinary projects designed around current global challenges such as sustainability, public health, and digital citizenship. However, these innovations rarely move beyond localized efforts due to limited systemic support and fragmented sharing of successful practices.

If you’re constantly looking toward the past, change is always harder than changing.

Despite widespread availability of digital tools and innovative technologies, education often employs these resources primarily to replicate traditional methods. Interactive platforms and virtual reality frequently re-enact historical events or familiar literary narratives, overlooking opportunities to pioneer new forms of storytelling and original content creation. Similarly, computational modeling and AI are frequently used only to reinforce existing mathematical concepts, rather than enabling students to discover new insights or tackle unsolved challenges. As a result, these technological advancements often fail to produce transformative learning experiences, leaving untapped students’ potential for innovation.

YET—sparks of possibility do exist. Around the world, educators and students are experimenting with new methods of learning that challenge the boundaries of traditional schooling. These efforts demonstrate that alternatives are not only imaginable but already underway. Yet they remain fragile. Most depend on the passion of a few teachers, the tolerance of a sympathetic administrator, or the short-term lifeline of a grant. Without systemic support, they flare briefly and then fade.

The lesson is clear: innovation cannot remain a hobby or a maverick side project. When schools treat future-oriented practices as peripheral, they ensure those practices will wither in isolation. To matter, innovation must be understood as the very purpose of education, central to its mission, resourced, shared, and scaled deliberately.

To meaningfully reshape education, schools and policymakers should actively identify, evaluate, and scale these innovations. Teachers need structured opportunities to collaborate and share insights from their experimental efforts. Creating environments that encourage educators to take risks, experiment with new methods, and openly exchange ideas will be crucial. Professional development and school cultures must explicitly value innovation and forward-thinking. Educational policy must  support this environment explicitly by allocating resources toward experimentation and recognize innovation as central to teacher and school evaluations.

More than gadgets and tests

So what would it mean to take the future as seriously as the past? Not another gadget in the classroom, not another standardized test, but practices that build the capacities every learner will need in a century of uncertainty.

One starting point is the practice of futures literacy, helping learners explore alternative scenarios and recognize the drivers that shape change. In such settings, students map what could happen and ask what futures they might prefer. The exercise focuses on preparation over prediction: developing the foresight and agility to improvise in conditions of uncertainty.

Equally important are opportunities for students to tackle complex, cross-disciplinary challenges. Instead of working within subject silos, they engage real-world challenges (e.g., climate change, cybersecurity, migration) where no single perspective provides sufficient solutions. These projects cultivate the ability to integrate diverse knowledge systems, weigh ethical considerations, and collaborate across boundaries. They remind us that the most urgent problems of the century will not come neatly labeled as “math” or “literature,” but will demand hybrid and creative forms of problem-solving.

Hands-on engagement with emerging technologies is another pathway. Robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and biotechnology are not just tools for industry; they are terrains where values and futures are contested. Giving learners the chance to experiment directly with these technologies builds both technical confidence and ethical awareness. It positions them not as passive consumers of innovation, but as potential creators, critics, and shapers of its trajectory.

Finally, education must cultivate the entrepreneurial imagination: the capacity to see possibilities where others see limits. This is not about training every student to launch a start-up, but about fostering resilience, initiative, and the courage to turn ideas into action. Paired with opportunities for global collaboration (e.g., through digital exchanges or transnational projects) students can learn to negotiate across cultures, time zones, and worldviews. In doing so, they begin to grasp that shaping the future is a collective enterprise, larger than any one nation or tradition.

A future-oriented curriculum would intentionally align knowledge and skills to meet both anticipated and unforeseen societal and technological shifts. Instead of focusing solely on traditional subjects, students would be encouraged to master digital literacy, interactive media platforms, emerging scientific disciplines like biotechnology and digital citizenship, and applied mathematics designed to address real-world challenges. Practical experiences, interdisciplinary projects, and continuous exposure to emerging technologies would become central, preparing students to navigate a changing world and proactively contribute to its development.

The futures we face

We stand at a threshold. Education can continue embalming the past, producing graduates fluent in obsolete knowledge, and watch as the future is designed without them. Or it can claim its true role: preparing people not only to survive the future but to shape it.

The tools, knowledge, and imagination to do this are already in our hands. Every moment of delay is a theft of possibility from those who will inherit the balance of this century. The choice is stark: complicity in the reproduction of a dead world, or participation in building futures we cannot yet imagine.

If we refuse to act, we condemn another generation to study a world already gone. If we act, we open the future to everyone. Education must stop rehearsing yesterday and start building tomorrow.

Read and sign Manifesto 25 at https://manifesto25.org

References and recommended readings

Gladstone, B. (Producer). (1998, November 30). The science in science fiction [Radio broadcast episode]. In Talk of the Nation. Washington, DC: National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/1067220/the-science-in-science-fiction

Miller, R. (2015). Learning, the future, and complexity: An essay on the emergence of futures literacy. European Journal of Education, 50(4), 513–523. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12157

UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. Paris, France: UNESCO Publishing. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379707