Education Futures

The Fundamental Condition of Human Existence

In "Being and Time," philosopher Martin Heidegger introduces the concept of Geworfenheit (often translated as "thrownness"), one of the central notions of his work. With this term, Heidegger describes the fundamental existential condition of the human being, which he calls Dasein or "being-there," as a being "thrown" into the world without having chosen it.

We do not choose to be born, nor can we decide the historical period, the family, the culture, or the initial circumstances into which we come into existence. We find ourselves already immersed in a world structured by meanings, practices, and possibilities that precede us and which we did not create.

This condition constitutes our starting point: the situated position from which we perceive the world and from which we begin to make our choices. Human existence is therefore always situated, rooted in a context that is given in advance. For Heidegger, our freedom is not limitless or abstract but embedded within a horizon of original constraints and conditions.

Nonetheless, precisely within this thrownness, Heidegger sees the possibility for the human being to project themselves toward the future. Despite the circumstances that shape us, we can orient ourselves, take responsibility for our choices, and build an authentic existence. It is within this tension between determination and openness that Heidegger locates the meaning of freedom.

We might summarize this perspective by saying that the future is open, but only to a certain extent: it is open in that it offers possibilities, but these are framed by the structural boundaries into which we are thrown. 

From Philosophical Concept to Future Vision

These boundaries are not only external or material; they also manifest within our minds, in the narratives we tell ourselves, and in the cultural representations we share. They profoundly influence our worldview and our understanding of what it means to be human. We all have an image of the future that is the result of conflicting forces and guides our decisions every day.

The "Futures Triangle" by Futurologist Sohail Inayatullah represents this dynamic. According to Inayatullah, our image of the future is influenced by three different types of pressures that operate simultaneously and with different intensity: the weight of the past, the pushes of the present, and the pull of the future. These three forces form the vertices of a metaphorical triangle within which all possible future scenarios we can imagine are located.

All the possible and plausible scenarios that we will devise will be included within this triangle, but they will be potentially infinite thanks to the dynamism of the system. Working on this triangle and learning how to generate new possibilities is the key to a responsible action toward a better future.

This work is crucial because no one realizes a future they can't imagine. If we want to act, we should train our ability to imagine and activate long-term futures.

Futures Literacy (FL): An Essential Competence

We all should understand which aspects of what is possible in the future can affect us, and which ones we can create ourselves. In other words: we should all learn to read and write futures. This competence is defined by UNESCO as "Futures Literacy" and is considered a key competence for the 21st century.

Why now? Because we are in the midst of a multi-crisis: a historical moment in which the intellectual technologies we use, along with the cultural evolutions they generate, are profoundly and transformatively reshaping our reality.

All the foundational pillars of society, as they were designed, adapted, and layered over time to respond to a world with specific resources, balances, and constraints, are now trembling. These structures are proving inadequate in responding effectively to the pulls of the future, the attractive forces that draw us toward new visions, new models, and new configurations.

On one hand, this creates a space of opportunity: the triangle of social and institutional structures, historically rigid, becomes potentially more mobile, more open to change. On the other hand, the system activates reactive feedback: forces from the past and present that resist transformative change.

This is not merely inertia, but the emergence of true countertendencies, preservation dynamics that oppose, sometimes subtly and sometimes forcefully, any attempt to deeply transform society.

The Limits of Our Imagination

This resistance is deeply rooted in our mindsets. In fact, when we think about the future, we activate the same areas of the brain involved in memory, in recalling images and experiences from the past.

Like LEGO bricks, these memories become building blocks we use to construct possible futures. Even if the combinations were endless, we still must work with the pieces we have. And in times of deep, transformative change, like the one we're living through now, it's as if the pieces we need are missing.

We search for a shape we've never seen and find ourselves disoriented. It's easy to feel discouraged when we lack reference points to imagine the future, when it appears so radically different from the world that we know that we are left without ideas, without language, without direction.

In such a context, knowing the past is no longer enough to build the future. Uncertainty, acceleration, and increasing complexity are rewriting the rules, and we must learn to imagine with tools we have not yet fully invented.

Education at the Centre of the Storm

In this context, education and training find themselves at the centre of a perfect storm, under pressure from every sector of society, each with its own demands.

Future-oriented skills for emerging jobs, mindsets capable of rethinking politics, sustainability, civic participation... everyone turns to schools and learning systems, invading the educational space with their own agendas and expectations.

Every society shapes the structures of learning, its methods, content, timing, and environments, as part of a broader process of imagining its present and future. This balance between tradition and innovation becomes increasingly fragile in a world that is complex, interconnected, and marked by rapid, discontinuous change.

Today's dominant education model, a linear progression from school to the labour market, with increasingly specialized and vertical pathways, is being disrupted by the uncertainties of the future, especially in light of the ongoing digital revolution.

If we try to represent this domain through the Futures Triangle, we quickly realize that despite all the talk about "the future of education," we remain trapped in a triangle skewed toward the past and the present. A triangle that fails to be pulled by future-oriented forces, because it does not recognize or understand them.

Working with tools like the Futures Triangle to give more space and voice to these emerging forces is not optional: it is urgent, if we are to address the issue meaningfully.

Rethinking the Educational Paradigm

Education is the future, it builds the future, and yet right now, it does so by replicating the past. Through transmission.

Marshall McLuhan, in "Education in the Electronic Age," warned us: in a world of abundant access to data and information, education must change its approach. It must shift from what we call instruction to what we might call discovery.

Instruction preserves the past. Discovery pushes boundaries, reinvents, and thrives in information abundance. And yet, we are still stuck in the old paradigm.

Rather than operating at the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy, synthesis, creation, critical reflection, we remain trapped in a system designed for a world where data, information, and knowledge were scarce, as if we were not offered radical abundance by digitality as we are now, probably for the first time in history.

And with that abundance comes the urgent need to completely rethink our educational model. Not only can we rethink our world completely, but we have the possibility and responsibility to do it, for us and for future generations.

Technology, Learning, and Society

The application of new technologies to learning processes at all ages invites us to reflect deeply on the kind of society we want to build, and on the goals we assign to education within that society.

It is essential to adopt a critical, human-centred approach, one that begins with people, communities, and the social role of learning, before focusing on the tools themselves.

Learning and sharing knowledge and skills is a natural human activity: we have always done it, every day, through a wide variety of methods and means. Scholars consider it a foundational skill that facilitated a crucial leap in human cognitive development (Tomasello, 2000). And yet, today, cultural learning is treated as a scarce commodity, governed by the reproductive priorities of society and the capitalist paradigm.

The result is that education and training have become functions of the economy, rather than expressions of the broader needs and values of society.

The current context gives us a historic opportunity to radically rethink the educational paradigm. To do so, we must face a set of key challenges:

• Reimagining educational and training institutions, integrating new technologies while keeping humans "in the loop", in systems where human agents actively supervise, control, or make decisions in collaboration with technology.
• Rethinking how we assess learning outcomes, moving beyond traditional evaluation models toward approaches that reflect the complexity, diversity, and evolving nature of learning.
• And perhaps most importantly: designing a system that guarantees accessibility and justice, both for individuals and for society as a whole

The Role of Artificial Intelligence

Before moving forward, it is essential to pause briefly and reflect on the role of artificial intelligence technologies in this context.

If culture and shared narratives are the material that fills the Futures Triangle, what we use to expand or reshape its boundaries, we must recognize that today, culture itself is increasingly mediated and filtered by these technologies.

We generate, produce, share, consume, and transmit culture through tools that now form part of our extended mind. These technologies actively participate in the shaping of our thoughts, much like Friedrich Nietzsche noted how the typewriter began to influence his prose (Carr, 2010).

As a result, cultural paradigms are shifting. We are entering a new epistemological model, a new relationship with truth, which we might call "AI dixit" (Pozzi, 2024): what the machine says becomes authoritative.

Our capacity to imagine the future, and to creatively explore its potential evolutions, is now deeply influenced not only by these tools but also by the narratives surrounding them.

More than any other domain, learning - the central object of our analysis - is exposed to this filter in all its contexts:

• In formal education, where AI tools are being adopted rapidly, often without having been designed for educational purposes.
• In non-formal education, in workshops, training, and lifelong learning programs.
• And most pervasively in informal learning, through social media, family interactions, peer conversations, and leisure time.
  

This adds a further layer of complexity to our capacity to imagine and shape the future. AI systems are trained on past data. They are inherently biased toward the past and tend to reproduce dominant narratives. As a result, we risk compressing the very diversity and divergence that are essential for imagining radically new futures.

Take, for example, the issue of alignment in large language models. Recent studies have shown how the answers generated by these models are implicitly rooted in specific cultural frameworks and may fail to reflect the diversity of perspectives found in other regions or cultures where these tools are exported.

Futures Literacy, Hope, and Fraternity: Method, Energy, and Compass

This is why, in a world on the edge of profound transformation, and exposed to the risks of homogeneity, automation, and epistemic reduction, the development of FL becomes crucial.

We need it to understand the world we live in. To design our lives with maximum freedom, from within the Triangle, the "thrown" position we inhabit, to borrow Heidegger's language, and to rethink and reshape society, starting precisely from education and learning.

There are three key reasons to expand FL across all levels of education:

• It cultivates transversal skills and essential attitudes such as critical thinking, abstraction, creativity, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, analytical reasoning, and logical-deductive thinking.
• It helps us understand and orient our own sense of the future, making us aware of the ways we influence the present and shape collective trajectories.
• It fosters scenario thinking as a life skill, one that transcends disciplines and exists beyond the classroom, empowering people to become more responsible, active, and free citizens.

This brings us straight to a second point: Whenever we can imagine a different tomorrow, we unlock our freedom. But what is freedom, if it is not accompanied by hope?

Today, many people are disillusioned about the possibility of change. They lose hope. And there is nothing more dangerous than a hopeless society. We have a responsibility to nurture this vital energy.

We can do so through an educational model that encourages young people to experiment, to learn from mistakes, and above all, not to give up. Gamifying the learning process, rather than reducing it to grades, and adopting a challenge-based, creative approach should be integral parts of any learning journey.

Method and mindset on one side, propulsive energy on the other. Now we need a third ingredient: a compass.

Today's extreme individualism has led us toward a society increasingly unable to pursue common goals. Yet the most pressing challenges of our time are precisely those that transcend the individual and cannot be solved by solitary action.

We must learn to collaborate, to base our decisions on the awareness that our destinies are shared, with other humans, with other species, and across generations: past, present, and future.

Interdependence means recognizing that the collective good is also our personal good. This is what philosopher Edgar Morin calls fraternity.

Futures Literacy (the method), hope (the energy), and fraternity (the compass): These are the three essential forces we need to embark on the adventurous journey of building a new world, together.

Conclusion: From "Thrownness" to the Freedom to Create

Returning to the concept of Geworfenheit from which we started, we can now understand how our condition of being "thrown" into the world is not just a limitation, but also the horizon within which we can exercise our authentic freedom. FL represents precisely the tool that allows us to expand this horizon, to see beyond the apparent boundaries of our situation, and to imagine possibilities that incremental thinking alone could never achieve.

The development and exercise of this new kind of mindset may well be the answer we need to rise to the great challenges of our time. The tension between determination and openness that Heidegger places at the centre of human experience thus becomes the fertile ground from which a new vision of education can emerge and, with it, a more conscious and shared future.

Our imagination may inspire us to improve the world in ways that incremental thinking alone could never achieve, transforming our condition of "thrownness" into an opportunity for authentic collective creation.

This post is partly based on After, Il mondo che ci attende (DUSI, POZZI, Bompiani, 2022) and Pozzi C., (2022, February 17). 3 Skills You Need to Thrive in a Post-Pandemic World. Agenda, World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/02/futures-literary-skills-post-pandemic/