The Case for Foresight Education

The Historical Context

We live in a unique historical period, just as every period is unique in its own way. Our period is characterized by massive increases in the amount of information, in the speed of communication, and in the connectivity of people and issues across the globe. We are in the midst of an information revolution not unlike the invention of writing, the printing press, the telephone, and broadcast media, each of which disrupted the status quo and created a significantly different world. Information and ideas coming together from around the globe and from across time create innovation and challenge. The resulting changes are felt throughout society from individuals and families to the largest institutions. People wake up and find themselves in a different world. The only difference now is that those changes are occurring at unprecedented speed and frequency such that most people are likely to experience that disruption at least once in their lifetime.

But we have not always thought about change and the future as we do today. Throughout most of history, before the industrial revolution, social disruptions were rare, and social change was imperceptible. People lived and died in the same society they were born into. Their socialization and education prepared them for their life—whether in the city or the country, whether on the farm or in the shop, and whether in the upper class or the lower. Society was static; social change was, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. “God is in His heaven, and all’s right with the world” (Browning 1841: Part I, Line 221).

The industrial revolution changed that. For the first time in history, people perceived that their world was different from that of the previous generation. The idea of progress was born (Bury 1920) as well as long-term decline (Malthus 1798). Progress or decline, social change was now a reality—a linear change from one generation to the next stretching into the future.

Professionals appeared in the twentieth century to describe the future beyond the utopian and dystopian thinking of the eighteenth century and the science fiction of the nineteenth century. H. G. Wells (1902) wrote one of the first nonfiction descriptions of the future in Anticipations. Herbert Hoover’s The President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (1933) collected the first data describing trends. Trend extrapolation, econometrics, and systems dynamics provided the tools to describe the future. Strategic planning began with the Harvard Policy Model in the 1920s (Christensen et al. 1982).

All of these tools, however, shared a common assumption: change was incremental and continuous, and disruptions were rare—both of which were true for their time, but no more. That changed radically in the 1960s and 1970s and again, after a hiatus, in the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War, the appearance of the World Wide Web, the bursting of the tech bubble, 9/11, and the Great Recession, among others. The tools of the past were no longer adequate to deal with a world filled with complexity, uncertainty, and ever more frequent disruptions.

Today, few expect their lives to proceed without disruption—at work, at home, or in society at large. Yet our view of the future, the view we still get in school, does not include disruptions or even much attention to the future at all. That has to change if we are to build a way of life and a society in this new era. Believing that the future is singular and predictable the way it is in science class, or that it is an inevitable march of cause and effect as it seems to be in history class, or that we have the power to create any future we want if we just work hard enough, those are all misconceptions that may have been true once, but are clearly false today.

Today the future is multiple, not singular; it is contingent, not predetermined, and getting what we want requires a deft touch, not just charging headlong into the future. That is what we should be teaching our young people today, in foresight classes and indeed in all the major subjects.

Congratulations and thanks to those pioneering educators who started teaching this before the rest of us. This volume is dedicated to you.

This Edition

David Bengston, a futurist with the U.S. Forest Service, begins with ten principles that he believes every student should know. Just as we do not have to teach young people accounting for them to be financially literate, so we do not have to teach professional processes and tools for them to anticipate and influence the future as parents, workers, citizens, and so on. Rather we should focus on the principles about change and the future in every school and leave the processes to the professionals. David’s ten principles are an excellent start for what could be the heart of every foresight initiative in secondary schools and colleges.

Sam Miller puts those principles into practice in a course called Foresight in Business and Society in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame (http://foresight.nd.edu). That course is required of every junior in that college, almost 700 every year. As far as we know, it is the only required foresight course in the United States and Mendoza is the second ranked undergraduate business college in the country. Is anybody paying attention?

Jelena Bodinet takes foresight into the social studies in her courses on peace studies, environmental sustainability, and gender at San Diego City College. She uses a visioning workshop in those courses based on workshops conducted by Robert Jungk (Jungk and Müllert 1987), Elise Boulding (Boulding and Boulding 1995), and Warren Zeigler (1982). Her purpose is to help students “reframe the issues and reimagine their relationships to the problems at hand.”

Matti Minkkinen introduces students to causal layered analysis (CLA), a tool for the analysis of the roots of social stability and change. Minkkinen is a researcher at the Finland Futures Research Centre associated with the School of Economics at Turku University. CLA is a tool used widely by foresight professionals and now being brought to the classroom in Finland.

Art Shostak, a retired sociologist and futurist from Drexel University, raises the stakes by recommending that we introduce futures thinking not only to classes but also to entire schools. Based on his book, Anticipate the School You Want (Shostak 2008), his article is full of suggestions for bringing futures thinking to an entire school.

And finally, Ryota Ono brings foresight education full circle back to adults. Professor Ono teaches information technology at Aichi University in Gamagori, Japan. He also teaches a class to public sector employees about foresight in which they actually develop an action plan for improving their service.

These are the veteran teachers who are leading us to introduce foresight into the mainstream curriculum. We should all follow their example.