Technolandy

Zero Hour (of 2025/26) schoolpunk future education/society thinking inspired by @willrich45 Will Richardson

 Video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOFZ3shkTUs/?igsh=cG96NGhwYmNnOG00

I admit that I am looking forward to the future. While I hear many other Gen Xers (and +/-) complain about ‘youths today’ the same as our parents did… and was originally written down by Socrates a couple thousand years ago… we always decry the younger element of society… but I see great things – including an appetite to do different(iated)… qn understanding that climate/environmental issues HAVE to be addressed… and the inherent system in which we live has a lot of unfairness within it… and it might be time to shift to a utopia (which often has a lot of similarities to dystopian – something I contemplated awhile back when someone suggested reading Brave New World with the mindset that the society did indeed create a utopia… fun mindset shift)

I have been saying more and more that with the shift in society where we are more reliant on technology and AI and similar tools (robotics, 3D printers, etc) we are getting closer to the utopia we have seen on screens via Star Trek (we all have personal communicators now – beaming for transportation is next?!?) and the Orville. Where ‘wealth’ and prestige are seen by value you bring to the broader community (yes – the good parts of communism and socialism!) because all of the ‘needs’ are taken care of (food, shelter, safety) and any ‘thing’ you need can be replicated/printed for use… don’t like that and want to be out farming? Sure! We need farmers – and we need human produced ‘craft goods’ of all kinds as well… but design and advancements are done because of the joy that happens, and the competition is more friendly than financial… trust me – even in my fantasy hockey pool, we are not competing with each other for any money – the teasing and bragging rights are more than enough! 

Will Richardson got my attention way too many years ago with his iconic book “Why School?” which mindfully questioned why are we sending kids to school when much of what they ‘need’ to learn, they can get via Minecraft. Because it leads to personalized areas of study – which have only magnified with the increased efficiencies of wikipedia and AI tools that can curate and quiz to see how much someone knows about a topic they are interested in because they are interested in it, not because some old people figured it was important to know about the Egyptian empire in grade 7 (fortunately BCs curriculum has shifted on this once-common-unit-of-study). And One Foot In The Future: https://bigquestions.institute/onefootebook/ which brought the fabulous term SchoolPunk! 

More recently his “12 BIG Questions Schools Must Answer to Avoid Going Back To Normal” was ignored by too many post-pandemic because we have rebounded/devolved back to a lot of thinking from decades back – more calls for banning personal screens rather than championing BYOD mindsets… but his work via futureserious.school has been tickling my brain a LOT – so I am going to join his fall workshop after a year of FOMO on Confronting Education in a time of Complexity, Chaos, and Collapse. Bringing thinkers to gather to confront our global predicament (I love AI to see how it amazingly helps personalize and differentiate education, but wow, does it ever use a LOT of energy and water…)  

In ‘Hospicing Modernity’, Vanessa Andreotti points out that part of us know we are in a huge mess.. but as I do equity scans on my own, I can’t help but agree that the education system has ben complicit in creating and adding to some of the key challenges currently being faced in the world… and even our little moves to ‘decolonize’ education in BC feels more like the metaphorical re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic… but I’m not ready to do what others have done and open up their own schools… I am still hoping to be the one within the system that is pointing out at the disruptions that are happening, and the reactions we are offering that are feeling more like how Blockbuster hoped to ignore Netflix… even the little thing with schools and educators ‘celebrating the return to blue test books’ are missing the reality that the more schools hold on to ‘what was’ (and didn’t work for everyone at anytime in the past anyways) the more ‘school’ is becoming an even greater artificial environment that has no connection to the ‘real lived world’. As if screens and AI are not embedded parts of almost every career and part-time job. In a recent discussion, a colleague and I generated a list of AI-proof careers to prepare our students for: live theatre and live sports. That’s the list – and even those will have significant competition from AI generated media and the continually growing e-sports environment… yes, it can be just as enjoyable to watch someone playing a video game as watching a bunch of adults playing children’s games on the weekend and evenings… 

So I am looking forward to this Fall having my thinking being further pushed via his series at https://futureserious.school and confronting education from within the system that I still believe has an amazing future… it just won’t look like it has in the majority of environments over the past century+… I’m teasing a January 2030 ‘restart’ (open to the revolution starting earlier though…!) 

But if you have an inking that perhaps the future of this system called education and this experiment called school maybe needs to look/be/act different(iated) from its previous incarnations… check out the options to explore more at Wills workspaces – Big Question Institute and FutureSeriousSchools – a fall session of synthesis is about to begin!