Schools should be protected educational sites because of the inclusion, equity and individual and collective well-being they support – and also reimagined to better promote the transformation of the world towards more just, equitable and sustainable futures.
To enable pedagogies of cooperation and solidarity and strengthen relationships with the knowledge commons, it is crucial to have times and spaces dedicated to these purposes. Schools, with all their potential and promise, defects and limitations, remain among the most essential educational settings. Schools represent societies’ commitment to education as a public human activity. Yet, how schools are designed is not neutral and reflects assumptions about learning, success, achievement, and relationships.
The built environment and regimes of time present in schools crystallize what is possible, what is prohibited, who is welcomed, and who is excluded. Teachers, as the master convenors of educational encounters, need to spend considerable time working with these organizational contours and the kinds of interactions and learning they enable. Will a school environment be conducive to collaboration, exploration, and experimentation? Will it be highly judgmental or encouraging of learning and reflection through trial and error? Will it facilitate a range of encounters, not only within a grade or age cohort, but across ages and stages of life? And what kinds of mentorships, friendships, and mindsets will these encounters build? Will a school environment centre on individual achievement above all else, or will it consider individual and peer development to be mutually supportive?
This chapter begins with a brief examination of the emergence of schools as vital social institutions that play important roles in virtually every culture and tradition. They not only represent unique times and spaces for primary and secondary education, but many have also become centres of society in their own right, bringing together a range of social goods and services that support the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Nonetheless, schools have been limited in their accomplishments, in part due to narrow definitions of the spaces and time structures of learning. The chapter then discusses possible transformations. Expanding the purview of learning beyond the classroom; reconsidering lesson times and structures to facilitate deeper engagements;
and reflecting on the potential of digital technology to support what occurs within schools are all elements to consider when translating the making of a new social contract for education into the transformation of the school.
Strong schools are vital if education is to help us build liveable collective futures that can adapt to crises, and the unknown and uncertain.
It concludes with 2050 guiding principles for dialogue and action, of interest to students, teachers and educators, governments and civil society partners, which include: protecting and redesigning schools as collaborative space; leveraging digital technologies positively; and modelling sustainability and human rights.
The irreplaceable role of schools
If the school did not exist, we would need to invent it. Schools are a central component of larger educational ecosystems. Their vitality is an expression of a society’s commitment to education as a common good. Schools provide children and youth with unique environments to participate in the knowledge commons. They are places to take risks, be confronted with challenges and experiment with possibilities. Schools ensure that everyone has available to them the experiences, abilities, knowledge, ethics, and values that will sustain our shared futures. Looking to 2050, schools will need to nurture an ethic of solidarity and reciprocity through
intergenerational, intercultural and pluralistic encounters.
Essential educational work takes place in many times and spaces, but the public time and space of school are unique. The space of the school fosters social relationships. Education and learning stimulate human interactions, dialogue and exchange,
and schools should be purpose-built to nurture this. Schools are forms of collective living that bring people together to learn from and with others at different ages and life stages. Distance or remote learning provisions can support the work of schools but cannot fully replace their relational character.
Increasing disruptions – such as the global COVID-19 pandemic and Ebola epidemics in West Africa, violent conflicts, and climate emergences – have made the unique role of schools even more evident. These instances reminded us of the importance of schools for learning, but also as centres of social well-being. Schools are one of the few institutions intended to protect and provide opportunity for the poorest and most vulnerable. As centres of community life, schools can offer powerful support for self-reliance and for cultivating sustainable relationships within local communities and with the natural world. For example, in the face of sudden and unprecedented widescale school closures in 2020 and 2021, millions of children and adolescents around the world were deprived of access to their schools, classmates and teachers. This sustained lack of in-person education had profound impacts on the social, intellectual, and mental well-being of millions of children and adolescents which will be felt throughout their lifetimes.
Whatever the ages of their students, schools should foster curiosity and a desire for knowledge.
Students should be exposed to ideas and experiences they would not ordinarily encounter at home or in their immediate communities. Intentional pedagogical encounters make schools irreplaceable. Unique among the multitude of other educational sites, schools are places of learning and teaching. Human beings learn and are also capable of teaching and being taught. This beautiful dynamic connects us to the knowledge commons across space and time, across generations and ways of knowing, and to each other. There are no schools without teachers. Teachers foster the pedagogical mission of making knowledge available to all, of building collective purposes and capacities, and of promoting emancipatory intellectual pursuits. Likewise, teachers depend on healthy functioning of the space and time of schools to reinforce and support their work.
If the school did not
exist, we would need
to invent it.
Common historical commitments
Dedicated spaces and times for developing knowledge, skills, values, and understanding have been present in most cultures whose knowledge practices achieved a level of complexity that could not be learned merely through observation, imitation or storytelling. In many instances early schooling arose with the development of writing. Interestingly, the English word ‘school’ comes from the Greek skholè, meaning free or leisure time. And, though the Greek institution was a central model for the development of education in Europe, many cultures have developed institutions of schooling, for example the yeshiva, madrasah, and calmécac. As schools have developed and spread globally over the past two centuries, they have assumed a role as one of the central public infrastructures for organizing intergenerational conversations on how to live in the world, make worlds, and care for them. Schools enable us to become acquainted with cultural heritage as well as to re-create and expand it.
Schools have become one of the key space-times for the deliberate organization of encounters with the knowledge commons. Schools have had the power to promote epistemic practices by inducting students into the rich traditions of reasoning, study, research, and inquiry. School activities and exercises can serve to promote a particular ethos and relationship to knowledge. Historically more weight has been given to the transmission of established truth-claims (an assertion that the belief system holds true). However, important shifts in the past several decades have challenged the direct instruction methods found in many schools. Through more participatory schooling practices and schooling cultures, there has been an increased focus on nurturing understanding of the generation and consequences of truth-claims. The dilemmas and challenges we currently face can be productively addressed by ensuring that a range of epistemic practices flourish in schools and that we form constructive, wider alliances between epistemologies and ecologies of knowledge.
Throughout this shift from spaces of knowledge transmission towards greater participation and exploration in schools, school learning remains essential. Yet, to avoid rigidity and remain responsive to the challenges of the world, it requires an understanding of what multiple ways of knowing can be encoded into times and spaces of learning, in order to nurture rather than impoverish human experiences. Much more work remains to be done to create spaces and times of schooling that can facilitate the public activity of intergenerational learning.
The necessary transformation of schools
Schools need to become places where everyone is able to form and realize their aspirations for transformation, change, and well-being. Above all, schools must allow us, individually and collectively, to realize unforeseen possibilities. In many parts of the world, increased access to schooling has provided transformative opportunities for individuals and entire communities to raise consciousness, develop new skills and understanding, and envision new trajectories of learning and development. Too often, however, today’s schools serve to entrench inequalities and widen disparities that need to be unlearned and corrected.
To bring about profound change, the future school’s organizing principles should centre on inclusion and collaboration. Excellence, achievement, quality, measurement, and progress are also valuable commitments that can be realigned in ways that
include rather than marginalize.
We can imagine these new school environments as a large library where some students study alone, connected to the internet or not, and others present their work to classmates and teachers. Others are outside the library in contact with people and worlds outside the school, possibly in far-flung places. The
library supports an immense diversity of situations and space times. It is a new environment quite different from the usual structure of the school and the classroom. This library can be taken both as a metaphor and literally. It reminds us that school times and spaces need to serve as portals connecting learners with the knowledge commons.
Schools as platforms for cooperation, care and change
In becoming inclusive and collaborative learning environments, schools must also be safe spaces free from violence and bullying, that welcome learners in their difference and diversity. Learning collectively and collaboratively does not imply uniformity. Effective collaborative learning leverages the differences (of capacity, ability, cognition, interest, and aptitude) of students and teachers. From one vantage point, learning is an individual journey, which belongs to each one of us. Collaborative learning must be inclusive and equitable, without compromising the individuality of its learners.
But from another vantage point, equally valid, learning is a collective journey, which takes shape in relationships with others.
Self-education is important as part of a much bigger picture, as the individual and collective functions of education mutually propel and reinforce one another. While we cannot learn for someone else, we can all learn more together. What we know depends reciprocally on what others know. It is in our relationships and interdependencies that education occurs. Effective collective learning is already occurring in many inspiring schools around the world. However, schools everywhere need to become better oriented around these relationships and interdependencies.
Schools and teachers do indispensable work supporting learners. Many people can point to a teacher or school experience that changed their lives positively. At the same time, schools too often exclude, marginalize, and reproduce inequality. About half of the world’s students finish their secondary studies without reaching even minimum levels of proficiency in basic competencies – an unacceptable outcome, and a failure of schools to their students and their societies. Dynamic change of schools that is adaptive and transformative must be enabled and is entirely possible as countless examples from around the world show us.
The school has everything to gain from a closer articulation to other educational spaces. There is a clear consensus among the million people who have engaged with the Futures of Education initiative that the design of schools (in terms of built design, curricula, classroom organization and
Schools must allow
us, individually and
collectively, to realize
unforeseen possibilities.
learning activities) needs to change. Artwork, inspired by visions of education in 2050, foresees a departure from rows of tables and lines of desks. Several panels with educational innovators addressed ways schools can transform once we properly recognize the ways that learning happens in multiple times and spaces, for example by softening the walls between classrooms and the outside world and reconceptualizing lessons as journeys. In sum, schools need to look and feel different to future generations by becoming more inclusive, more inviting, more engaging and relevant.
They need to become places where students learn to live sustainably and bring those messages to their homes and communities. There is tremendous potential to ‘green’ schools and bring education to carbon-neutrality. Students can lead the way in this work, developing knowledge and skills that will help them build the green economies our world desperately needs.
To achieve what we need them to achieve, schools must break with the rigid, uniform organizational models that have characterized a large part of their history over the past two centuries. Renewal is vital. The impressive nineteenth and twentiethcentury efforts that informed the conventional school models we know today are a source of insight for the future. Throughout the past hundred and fifty years, architects, public health experts, philosophers, civil servants, educators, communities, and families have built on educational insights from humanity’s long history to expand possibilities for education. Over time, this has given shape in material form – for example, through school buildings and classrooms – to the extraordinary social institutions of mass public education. The same imagination, determination, and collaboration is needed today to give material form to new schools, oriented towards more just and equitable shared futures.
From classrooms to communities of learners
Around the world, classrooms have become the primary educational venues of teaching and learning in schools. In imagining new venues for inclusion and collaboration it may be the case that the ‘room’ can more often be left behind. But the value of being part of a dedicated and diverse community of fellow learners should not be abandoned.
Conventional school models have devoted great energy to classifying students according to age, achievement, ability, or gender. In contrast, teachers should be afforded flexibility to develop, experiment with, and adapt the groupings of students that occur within schools. At times these may best be smaller groups of learners, at other times larger. But the value of being part of a community of learners is a feature of the school to be reinforced. Students may no longer be limited to conventional classrooms in future schools, but they will continue to need sustained engagement with classmates, with all the joys and tears that shared learning brings.
Students may no longer
be limited to conventional
classrooms in future
schools, but they will
continue to need
sustained engagement
with classmates.
Classroom expectations around learning also need rethinking. In too many places around the world, children and youth sit through the day, passively absorbing large amounts of information.
This norm is embedded in school architecture, furniture design, and the objects and materials present in classrooms. A silent, obedient student has become synonymous with concentration and productivity. Too often, skilled teaching is equated with maintaining order and eliminating
‘unnecessary’ noise or movement. When immobility is seen as a requirement for learning, the school and its classrooms become tedious and unpleasant places. Deep, immersive, absorptive attentiveness can have tremendous educational value. But we need to ask whether our current classroom and school arrangements facilitate this in the right ways.
As much as we must protect the social space of the school, it does not need to be enclosed within four walls. It can be open and flexible, drawing on a wide set of social, cultural, and environmental resources. Constraining education to one-size-fits-all classrooms restricts learning and narrows the range of possibilities and opportunities schools should create.
Structures to support diversified pedagogies
Lessons and timetables need reformulation. The lesson plays the important function of focusing a set of students on a shared endeavour and is an important mechanism for structuring educational encounters and carrying an intergenerational conversation forward. However, conventional lesson designs also have considerable limitations, especially when defined exclusively as a fixed block of time repeated daily or weekly.
The lesson must give way to pedagogies that value a diversity of methods and modalities of study and learning. There are many other ways to bring people together in common endeavours using diverse modalities of study and learning that leverage intergenerational and intercultural exchange and capitalize on the high-level abilities and knowledge of teachers. For example, problem-based and project-based educational approaches can be more participatory and collaborative than conventional lessons offer. Inquiry-based and action-research pedagogies can engage students in acquiring, applying, and generating knowledge simultaneously. Community-engaged pedagogies and service learning can imbue learning with a strong sense of purpose when undertaken in a humble posture of learning. A significant reworking of the organization of schooling is necessary to fully enable pedagogies like these to advance students’ abilities to undertake joint work and expand our capacities for collective deliberation and action in a spirit of solidarity.
The digital in support of the school
When digital communication technologies allow students to connect with others with similar interests and questions, they support the work of teachers and schools. Digital connectivity greatly enhances possibilities for teachers and students to access information, texts, and artforms from across the world. The collections of the world’s greatest libraries and museums can now be made available in all places at all times. Digital tools also enable students to produce videos, make mixed-media presentations, and code games and apps that take their creative ideas out into the world.
There is ground-breaking potential for digital devices to support innovative teaching and learning in schools. Digital tools have also become useful ways to promote effective communication between parents, teachers, and students, in turn assisting parents in supporting their children’s school learning.
The pandemic has proved that the school cannot be entirely displaced into virtual spaces. Even in areas of high internet connectivity and relatively equitable access to devices, the total or partial closure of school buildings in times of disruption shed new light on the importance of shared physical and social presence in schools. Virtual classrooms accessed from home are limited substitutes for what physical school spaces can provide.
The improvisations and experiments in times of challenge and disruption – from the COVID-19 pandemic to education in times of other emergencies – have shown the determination, commitment and resourcefulness of teachers and students. For example, as many school systems realized that personal needs and social welfare needed to be foremost, tests were postponed, the content-coverage requirements of curricula were suspended, and classroom interactions focused on authentic learning and well-being. During COVID, teachers’ work became more publicly visible, particularly to parents. The high levels of expert knowledge and pedagogical engagement required of teachers became simultaneously valued and scrutinized by many. Some students felt comfortable with online and distance education, and their positive experiences remind us that future schools need to be student-centred in ways that support the social, emotional, cognitive, and moral development of the whole person.
Nurturing the social dimension of learning also implies sustaining citizenship education in an increasingly interconnected world to enable individuals to care about each other, embrace other perspectives and experiences, and engage in responsible practices towards the environment and our shared natural resources. Digital means alone cannot achieve these ends. Participatory and engaged learning in school sites and beyond them is necessary.
Schools should be places where students are more closely tied to the possibilities of their futures than to the limitations of their pasts. The principle of equal opportunity aims to enable students, regardless of their backgrounds, to emancipate themselves from being confined by the expectations of others so that social origin is not social destiny and the future can be better than the past, for individuals as well as societies.
The key problem of most machine learning is that it can only create futures by looking to the past. Research shows that the same stereotyping, gender bias and racism that is present in human decision-making is further entrenched in digital platforms for the simple reason that machines are ‘trained’ on datasets that contain the same biases found in society today. This is true of the algorithms that underlie most technology-based personalized learning programmes as well. The student following such a course of study is known and defined only in relation to past performance:
how many problems were incorrect last time, the areas of weakness that have been exhibited. This