Taking the 21st century seriously: recognising young people as agents in socio-technical change

Keri Facer Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

Cite as: Keri Facer (2012): Taking the 21st century seriously: young people, education and socio-technical futures, Oxford Review of Education, 38:1, 97-113

Address for Correspondence Keri Facer Graduate School of Education University of Bristol 35 Berkeley Square Bristol BS8 1JA Keri.facer@bristol.ac.uk

Notes on Contributors The Beyond Current Horizons Programme was a Futurelab project funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Richard Sandford, Senior Learning Researcher at Futurelab helped enormously with the design and conduct of the programme. Mary Ulicsak and Dan Sutch played important roles in running the public engagement elements of the programme. Professors Sarah Harper, Rob Wilson, Helen Haste and Carey Jewitt led the commissioning of research within the 4 challenges and the production of synoptic reports within each challenge. A much larger number of people from both the DCSF and Futurelab contributed to the programme over the two years from 2007-2009. Details of everyone involved can be found at http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/background/people/ Any errors or omissions in this paper and the interpretation of the implications of the programme for youth voice and agency, however, are my own.

Taking the 21st century seriously: recognising young people as agents in sociotechnical change

Abstract Young peoples rhetorical ownership of future socio-technical change is a familiar part of much educational and political discourse; this does not, however, translate in practice into a meaningful dialogue with young people about the sorts of futures they might wish to see emerge. When we look at the sorts of socio-technical developments currently being envisaged by researchers, developers, industry and politicians, there is an ethical responsibility to engage young people seriously in a debate about the futures that are being imagined, the futures they are being prepared for and the futures that they might want. This paper makes visible some of the questions raised by socio-technical trends in the areas of personal augmentation, economic development and intergenerational relationships. It makes the case that schools have the potential to act as powerful local public spaces able to support young people and their communities to debate, negotiate and make informed decisions about these issues, and to explore the sorts of sociotechnical changes they wish to realise in their own lives and communities.

Taking the 21st century seriously: recognising young people as agents in sociotechnical change Introduction Since the 1990s it has become commonplace to see young people and their interactions with digital technologies as windows onto the future. Young people are, we have been informed, Digital Natives spearheading the transition to a new digitally mediated world. Such generalising statements have been subject to sustained theoretical critique and empirical challenge for over a decade now (e.g. Buckingham, 2000) and the diversity of childhoods and childrens experiences of digital technologies is now more commonly acknowledged. Despite this, however, when seeking for an easy image to represent the socio-technical change of the coming decades, the image of the child at a computer, using a social network or playing a computer game comes readily to hand for politicians and, indeed, many educators. The practices, dispositions and pleasures of young people, it is implied, will become the practices which we all take for granted in future. Such narratives of childrens natural relationship with new technologies might be thought to offer young people increased agency and voice in shaping future sociotechnical change. However, when we examine the points at which young peoples reportedly intuitive occupation of the digital landscape is represented in popular and educational futures discourse, this is not the case. Instead, young peoples abilities with digital technologies tend to be mobilised not as a basis for youth voice and recognition but as a basis for ensuring adult adaptation to socio-technical change. Youth expertise is given public visibility primarily in order to enjoin adults to keep up and catch up with socio-technical change (Facer et al, 2003). In contrast, when young people themselves are the subjects of educational futures discourse, they tend to find themselves facing a predetermined future in which others have determined the goals and the rules by which they should play. They find themselves captured within what Castells calls the mythical future time of the powerful the projected time of the futurologists of the corporate world. the ultimate form of conquering time. (Castells, 2009: 51) in which they are enjoined to develop 21st century skills and prepare for a future of lifelong learning to ensure personal and national survival. Take for example, the instrumental relationship between young peoples education and the future that underpins Obamas recent pronouncements on education: So make no mistake. Our future is on the line. The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow. To continue to cede our leadership in education is to cede our position in the world. Thats not acceptable to me and I know its not acceptable to any of you. And thats why my administration has set a clear goal: to move from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math education over the next decade (Obama, 2010i)

If young people really are the natives of the future world we are all moving towards, these sorts of discourses of the future see them as natives who should be subject to a form of chronological imperialism. The potential for young people to challenge, question or reshape the futures they are being offered is invisible in dominant contemporary discourses that link education with debates about future socio-technicalii change. Young peoples potential to act as inhabitants of the technological future, able to challenge and inform its development, as the rhetoric of the native might imply, is rarely acknowledged. More importantly, the reality that young people will have to live in the future with the real consequences of decisions taken today about socio-technical developments, is consistently overlooked. This paper argues that there are a number of future socio-technical developments being envisaged by researchers, developers, industry and policy-makers today that demand a new relationship to be constructed between young people and future socio-technical change. Rather than seeing young people merely as poster children for futures designed elsewhere, we need instead to recognise their rights to explore and challenge the decisions that are being taken today for the futures that they may inhabit. Schools, the paper will argue, are a critical site for building the capacity of young people to question the colonising discourses of the future that they are being offered, to examine alternatives and to participate with adults in decision-making about their own and societys socio-technical futures. Expectations of socio-technical change In this paper, I draw upon a programme of educational futures research that was commissioned in 2007 by the UKs Department for Children Schools and Families. The Beyond Current Horizons (BCH) programme sought to engage a diverse group of people academics, educators, parents, policy makers, students and children in a debate about educations futures in changing socio-technical contexts. It sought to explore these groups views of probable, possible and preferable futures for sociotechnical change and their implications for education (Bell, 1997). 84 literature reviews were commissioned from researchers in areas as diverse as neuroscience and genetics, demography and labour markets, childhood sociology and computer science. The review authors were tasked with identifying historic and emergent trends as well as critical uncertainties over the coming two decades. Consultations were held with over 130 organisations and individuals working in education and technology fields in order to understand contemporary expectations and aspirations for educational futures. Online surveys and public engagement workshops were held to elicit diverse views on the relationship between education and socio-technical change (for a full summary of activities see Facer, 2009, Facer & Ulicsak, 2011 and Facer 2011). On the basis of these literature reviews and consultation, the BCH programme identified a set of assumptions that might be made about key trends for socio-technical change over the next two decades. These are trends that are already in train or envisaged with a high degree of confidence by the participants in and contributors to the programme (see Facer and Sandford 2010). They can be summarised as follows:

The digital information landscape gets denser, deeper and more diverse - trends towards accountability and security, combined with increased capacity to gather data at scales from the molecular to the planetary, combined with the capacity to digital tag physical objects, lead to a massive increase in digital information Individuals manage a personal cloud of information and resources cloud computing combined with personal technologies, make it easier for people to wrap their information systems around themselves rather than accessing them via institutions and places Working and living alongside machines becomes increasingly taken for granted automation of increasingly complex tasks, the integration of social and technical systems, and the decrease in size of powerful computing devices means that collaboration with digital technologies becomes an increasingly familiar part of day to day activities. Distance matters less but geography still counts improved experiences of remote presence combined with a need to reduce transport costs, as well as growing familiarity with the social practices and etiquette of remote interaction, makes remote working more commonplace. Technical, legislative and regulatory infrastructure however, means that geographical location still shapes the quality of online participation Digital natives grow up but will need to keep learning ageing populations and continuing rapid technological development will place pressure on adults to keep learning and working later in life, and to keep developing new skills. Expertise in todays socio-technical practices will not guarantee expertise in tomorrows. Institutional boundaries weaken and institutional functions are disaggregated changing demographics, the disaggregation of information access from location, and the enhanced capacity to collaborate at a distance, along with disruptions to traditional public service models, provokes a re-organisation of institutions and working practices around networked practices. The knowledge economy declines as a utopian future the working practices of global corporations create growing gaps between global creative elite and a large body of low paid workers, with increased positional competition between the middle classes. The cost of environmental degradation becomes increasingly burdensome. Biosciences do not provide silver bullets to educational problems - biosciences will not provide simple answers to long-standing problems, instead, they will play a role alongside social sciences in producing accounts of learning and development. They may also give rise to new myths of learning and development.

These trends envisaged for the next two decades raise a range of questions about the socio-technical futures that young people may inhabit. For educators and education institutions wishing to, as the rhetoric would have it, equip young people for the 21st century there are three issues in particular that emerge from the intersection of these trends that we might identify as being of particular importance. The first relates to the nature of the individual that we might imagine at the heart of the educational enterprise and who acts as the basis for building personal futures. The second, relates to the nature of the economic landscape that we might expect young people to move into over the next two decades and for which education is, according to instrumentalist accounts, seeking to prepare them. The third relates to the nature of the conversation that society has about its future, and the role of different generations in shaping and living with the consequences of that debate in aging societies. The remainder of the paper explores some of the uncertainties and trajectories outlined in the BCH programme relating to socio-technical development and its implications for young people and education in these three areas. In so doing, it argues that the uncertainties and developments envisaged by researchers, policy makers and others in these three areas require schools to create spaces that will better equip young people to participate in a meaningful conversation about socio-technical change and their own and societys futures. Enhancing individuals? Contemporary youth in western societies is often observed to be developing symbiotic relationships with the mobile telecommunications devices that they carry with them, relationships that blur the boundaries between self and artefact. As Gitte Stald, in her study of mobile technology use amongst young people observes: the mobile user is becoming a kind of cyborg. The young users in our research [] experience a kind of symbiosis with their mobiles, in which the physical devices come to be understood as a representation of personal meanings and identities. (Stald, 2009) According to the BCH programme, the technological developments of the next decade have the potential to significantly expand the functionality and reach of such augmentations of the self with the development of intelligent prosthetics, cosmetic pharmacology, ubiquitous computing and sensor technology. We are already familiar with the use of digital technologies that breach the boundary of the body. Pacemakers are a banal fact for many in later life. Cochlear implants are a more politically contested merging of biology with microphone and electrodes (Haste, 2009). Brain implants are now being used by medics to manage Parkinsons disease. Courtesy of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are also significant leaps in the creation of bodily prosthetics and enhancements. Such augmentations begin to offer the possibility of overcoming significant physical disabilities and, in some accounts, disabled groups are being seen as early innovators, able to model in advance the sorts of

adaptations that may later be adapted by the mainstream (Cliff et al, 2008). As with many medical developments, what was designed initially for corrective purposes is open to appropriation for other, more pleasurable, purposes (Viagra anyone?) and the digital augmentation of the body is likely to be no exception (Harper et al, 2008). Digital body jewellery, intelligent contact lenses, context sensitive digital prosthetics are all already in development. Over the next two decades it is reasonable to assume that individuals will have the capacity to augment themselves with ever more powerful and ever more intimately embedded computing devices. When combined with the development of ubiquitous computing systems that allow the individual to draw upon massive computational and informational resources on demand, such augmentation begins to change our understanding of the boundaries of the individual. Augmentation may also take less visible formsiii. Researchers in the BCH programme reported that cognitive enhancement drugs are becoming a familiar part of many university campuses (Turney, 2009), and there are others who argue (generating data on this remains problematic) that drugs such as Provagil and Ritalin are being used to attain competitive advantage in the high-tech, highly competitive environment of Silicon Valley, and if there, perhaps elsewhere too (Ciscio, 2009). As such drugs become more effective and if cognitive enhancement begin to be seen as an important competitive advantage in education, questions of young peoples right to refuse such enhancements may become as much a concern as their currently illicit use. A study by Nature in 2008 highlighted the potential for competitive educational environments to encourage uptake of cognition-enhancing drugs:
When asked whether healthy children under the age of 16 should be restricted from taking these drugs, unsurprisingly, most respondents (86%) said that they should. But one-third of respondents said they would feel pressure to give cognition-enhancing drugs to their children if other children at school were taking them. (Maher, 2008)

From one perspective, such augmentation of the individual is nothing new. Humans have always and will always develop, adapt to and reconfigure themselves to use the tools and resources that they create (Wertsch, 1991). Notwithstanding this general observation, it is clear that a commonplace acceptance of personal augmentation that brings constant connectivity with people, information and intelligent computing systems raises questions, for example, about young peoples privacy and about how to ensure equity for differently augmented individuals. The individual management of personal data, the degree to which it is owned and shared with others, the costs and benefits of making such information widely available will become a pressing question for the individual and the institutions they are part of. The diverse patterns of appropriation of augmentation technologies will bring not only the familiar questions of equity what will count as the benchmark for participation in technologically enhanced comunities? - but of compatability who will be able to work together as different patterns of augmentation arise? The appropriation and use of digital or pharmacological enhancement, moreover, is unlikely to be either uniform or inevitable. Indeed, there are a number of signs that, as with other socio-technical developments there are groups who may actively resist such appropriation on religious,

ethical or health grounds. In some Asian universities, for example, there are alternative methods of cognitive enhancement being promoted through methods such as meditation (Inayatullah, 2008). At a time when parenting is presented as a sign of social success and an opportunity for material display (Douglas & Michaels, 2004), it is not clear that parents should be the sole gatekeepers for decisions about which sorts of enhancements young people might take up or resist. Similarly, if schooling is produced as means of achieving individual competitive advantage, and if schools are judged and funded upon their results in examinations, there are few reasons to think that schools and teachers will automatically act as a check upon the uptake and use of such enhancements. Indeed, the school could become a space that encourages an arms race to use such digital and pharmacological technologies to promote individual attainment. The critical question here, then, is not how do we prepare young people for a future of inevitable cognitive or digital augmentation or how do we ensure young people develop 21st century skills to use a given set of future technologies? Instead, we need to ask how we will create ethical education institutions that enable young people to reflect critically and carefully upon the sorts of digital, pharmacological and other resources that they might use to enhance or augment their capacities and the sorts of personal and social futures these might offer. We need young people to be able to take informed decisions about when, in what circumstances and for what purposes they may choose to appropriate a particular drug or digital augmentation, what the costs and risks might be, what the benefits, and what systems this will mean the person becomes connected with as a consequence. Just as medicine is increasingly moving towards a principle of no decision without me, so too education may need to create new practices that intimately involve young people in the decisions about the processes, technologies and treatments that may become part of the educational process. To do so, however, would require us to challenge the longstanding assumption that education is concerned with rational autonomous individuals (Biesta, 2006). Instead we may need to reconceive education as concerned with interdependent individuals, interdependent with their unique social and technological networks and resources. Rather than clinging on to the fantasy of a baseline of uniform equality within the school, then, we may need to create spaces for young people to make visible and make careful decisions about the diverse socio-technical resources that they bring into and develop through the educational encounter, and the sorts of futures that such decisions may bring. Contested economic futures As I have already discussed, the dominant economic narrative of the future today is that socio-technical change will lead inevitably towards a new knowledge economy. In this narrative of the new service- and technology-driven future economy, individual and national economic competitiveness are assumed to be ensured by investment in skills and education. It is on this basis that youth is asked to spend ever longer in further and higher education and, increasingly, to take on a significant burden of debt to fund that

investment. Such educational investment, this story of the future implies, will provide access to secure economic futures both for the individual and for society. The BCH study, however, provides insights into alternative accounts of possible economic futures which unsettle the assumptions upon which young people are being asked to invest ever greater time and resource in formal education. First, the idea that the knowledge economy will produce increasing demand for democratic and creative working practices commensurate with degree level qualifications is contested by some studies that surface contradictory trends in the working practices of major multi-national corporations. These studies suggest that, rather than devolving demands for creativity, contemporary technologically mediated working practices tend instead to centralise and specialise creativity and autonomy to an ever smaller elite at the heart of the organisation (Lauder et al, 2009). Brown, Ashton and Lauder describe this as the emergence of a form of digital taylorism, in which the narratives of democratic creative work are replaced by scripts, scrunity and control for the majority (Brown et al, 2010). Increased international investment in higher education combined with the capacity to use digital technologies to disaggregate the workplace also brings changes to the shape of typical middle class employment. Not only is there increased international competition for professional roles and the emergence of communications technologies that allow them to be conducted remotely, but there are changes in organisational structures that increasingly casualise and outsource employment. In the creative and media industries often held up as source of high value creative work in the knowledge economy, for example, freelance and casualised work is increasing (Ross, 2009; Terranova, 2004). In previously high status employment such as research and development, major companies are now holding crowdsourcing competitions, posting critical challenges online and allowing individuals and research groups around the world to compete for the prizes offered for solving the problems (Brabham, 2008). Such competition brings intense positional competition amongst the middle classes, disaggregates traditional hierarchical institutions and engenders pressure on individuals to build personal brands that will allow them to navigate a much more complex employment market. At the same time, an ageing population and food scarcity caused by environmental degradation and energy restraint, may see an increase in demand for so called ordinary work in caring and agricultural jobs (Spratt et al 2009). Such jobs are currently seen as low paid and low value and frequently outsourced to migrant labour and those with few educational qualifications (Wilson, 2009). These developments make visible the potential for highly polarised futures, in which a small global elite is wooed by global corporations, the middle classes are subject to intense positional competition, and a large body of people are confined to low paid work or unemployment (Brown et al 2010). These possible futures suggest that over the coming decades low paid work and unemployment may not be, as the narrative of educational opportunity tends to present it, a problem of aspiration. Instead, we may be

witnessing the development of a profound demand-side problem, in which global capital functions effectively and efficiently without demanding either full employment or creative and skilled input from its workers (Young, 2010). If this is the case, then increased personal investment in formal education may not bring the rewards and security that is promised. There is also a growing international concern about the dominant narrative of economic futures, not merely from those concerned with social and political justice, but from environmental activists and economists. These groups argue that not only does this trajectory offer an undesirable future for many, but it is profoundly unsustainable. A future of continued economic growth, for example, depends on the continued successful extraction of mineral and other natural resources (which are finite) and upon the continued enclosure of private goods of time, family relationships and indigenous knowledge (that are themselves both finite and important underpinning resources for economic activity) (Goodwin, 2004., Bollier, 2007 Hall, 2009). These critiques lead to very different ideas about economic futures. Some commentators offer forecasts of radical social and environmental breakdown. Others present new narratives of a great transition to a new set of economic models and practices, characterised by initiatives such as Transition Towns or the growth of mutual and co-operative enterprise practices, seeking to build sustainable economic futures (Spratt et al, 2009). These models seek to reintegrate the material world (whether the family, the ecosystem or the mineral resources that sustain global business and technology) into plans for the future. As young people are increasingly being asked to invest ever more time and financial resource in formal education there is therefore an ethical imperative to open up a space for an informed debate with them about these different possible economic trajectories, and to allow serious examination of the alternative futures that might be in development. Such a debate would necessarily need to explore whether the headlong rush for certification and qualification envisaged in many of the dominant accounts of the knowledge economy (see, for example, the Leitch review) continues to have validity or whether new measures of educational success might need to be negotiated between students, schools, and communities. Living in ageing societies If you can make it to 2025, you can make it long enough to live forever. Such is one possible future identified by research presented in the BCH project and which argued that the next two decades may see the birth of a new era of radical longevity. Rather than some final medical breakthrough that offers an end to all illness, there are commentators who propose that individuals who are able to hold on until the mid 2020s and who have sufficient resources will be able to sequentially surf waves of medical development to achieve radical longevity within the next century (see for example, Kurzweil & Grossman, 2005). Such claims provide an interesting challenge to our assumptions about life trajectories and, should they be realised even for a small fraction of the population, would promise to disrupt the relationship between generations. How would the experience of youth change if the average lifetime is considerably longer?

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Would there continue to be a need for children? For educators, they pose other puzzles what would lifelong learning look like if were able to live for several hundred years? Such expectations are at the margins of current thinking about both ageing and medical technology. What is more widely accepted, however, is the broader shift towards an ageing population around the world (this is not solely a US/Europe phenomenon as some have suggested) caused by increased longevity and declining fertility. In Western Europe, by 2035, the expectation is that 50% of the population will be aged over 50, profoundly changing the demographic make-up of the population and potentially redrawing the historic boundaries between education, working, caring and retirement (Harper, 2009). A commonplace account of the implications of this future for education is that individuals will need to more fluidly manage these diverse roles across all stages of the lifecourse and that institutions will need to adapt to enable individuals to occupy these diverse roles at the same time. An increase in healthy ageing is also seen as a likely driver of the emergence of more diverse family formations with an increase in multigenerational families with older, more active grandparents taking an increasing role in parenting; and increases in vertical relationships across generations (Leeson, 2009). Less commonly discussed, however, is the fact that such a future trajectory has the potential to bring with it highly visible conflicts of interest between generations. First, as public finances weaken and populations age, participants in the BCH programme argued that the next two decades would witness increasing pressures on resources previously allocated to youth (Prout, 2008). Already today, we have seen demonstrations in Germany by students in protest at allocation of public finances to pensions and cuts in student budgets (Lammy, 2010). Some politicians are equally stoking up concerns about the legacy of the baby boomers and its supposed cost for future generations as a cover for radical economic restructuring (Willetts, 2010). In the areas of employment and housing there are growing tensions, as younger people struggle to buy a house or get out of temporary employment while older people seemingly sit pretty on the wealth of a property boom or in senior permanent positions. At the same time, the environmental debate is beginning to be recast as a generational conflict, as older generations are seen as responsible for failing to take the necessary decisions today that will prevent climate warming tomorrow. An ageing population therefore presents highly uncertain futures for youth, they unsettle the familiar narratives of easy progression into security through adulthood and offer a radical uncertainty about longer term ageing and wellbeing. As in the familiar narrative of the digital natives, however, this account of the future as shaped by generational change also has the potential to obscure other forms of injustice produced by income, gender and ethnicity. A debate about the relative merits of different generations to stake a claim to diminishing public finances or to jobs or housing, for example, risks overshadowing more fundamental questions about equity within generations or the way in which vulnerability at different life stages is likely to be shaped by factors other than the ageing process.

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Radically divergent futures are offered by changing demographics: futures of profound intergenerational conflict or new relationships of intergenerational solidarity; futures in which the risks of ageing populations are born by the weakest and poorest or in which new strategies are found to socialise such risks more fairly; futures in which the costs of ageing populations are outsourced to developing countries as we import youth and expertise to tackle our immediate concerns, or in which global aging becomes subject to new relationships between countries. In seeking to prepare young people for an ageing society, therefore, we need to do more than simply present them with the unquestioned demand that they will need to become lifelong learners. Instead, we need to create the opportunity for young people to consider the different sorts of personal and social futures that an ageing population might offer and the different political, economic and personal choices that it will bring with it. Learning to flourish in an ageing society will involve more therefore, than the development of a passion for learning. Instead, it will require the creation of the capacities and structures needed to engage in a meaningful public debate through which the wider personal and social conflicts and inequities of an aging population can be negotiated. Such capacities are not merely cognitive or attitudinal, they are intimately concerned with building new democratic structures and public spaces. Current trajectories for citizenship and public engagement in debate, however, suggest that there may be divides emerging here too between different generations in their engagement with political debate. Bennett (2008), for example, argues that we are seeing the emergence of two different tribes of citizens. He argues that one group (usually younger people) might be described as actualising citizens, concerned less with the traditional features of politics and government and more motivated by making a difference through participation in online and offline activism. In contrast, he describes as dutiful citizens, those (often older people) who continue to adhere to traditional political processes, voting and government as a means of effecting change. Such a trajectory of divergent citizenship practices would imply not only a future in which the interests of different generations are potentially in conflict, but also a future in which there are declining public spaces through which different generations can come together to negotiate and effect social change. An attention to the divergent futures offered by aging populations brings new urgency to the discussion at the heart of this paper about the ownership of debates about the future. It unsettles the assumption that long term decisions about the future whether in education or other public services can be taken by adults alone. Young peoples voices, rights and aspirations need, instead, to be structurally embedded in the debate if generational injustice is not to be perpetuated. And such a debate needs to be concerned not only with building the capacity to participate in traditional mechanisms of democracy, but with building the capacity for young people to participate in meaningful processes of socio-technical change and to support them to make a difference. It involves building the capacity for young people to stake a claim to being natives of the futures that they will inhabit, and as therefore having a role in working with others across the generations, to shape those futures.

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The school as resource for building capacity to shape socio-technical futures The preceding discussion is not intended simply to present a set of new orthodox futures to replace the one we were working with before. The trends I present here are as subject to disruption and change as are the assumptions about the knowledge economy. Instead, they are presented in order to question the way we present future socio-technical development to young people. In these three areas the futures of the person, economic futures, and futures for ageing societies it is clear that there is an ethical responsibility to present the instability of dominant accounts of the future to young people and to invite them to see themselves as active agents in the creation of socio-technical change, rather than merely as passive participants in socio-technical societies designed for them elsewhere and by others. This can seem like a daunting challenge, after all, socio-technical change is often seen as happening elsewhere at national or global scales. Nominalisations such as globalisation present socio-technical change as an inevitable force in which it is impossible to intervene. Such change is often, however, experienced and shaped by the lived realities of local communities and families. Changing economic and environmental conditions find expression in changing patterns of employment; new technological affordances find expression in changing patterns of family relationships and community interactions. If socio-technical change is examined through the lens of the lived and the local, therefore, it can become a subject of scrutiny and debate. Not only that, but it is at the local level, through determination of budgets and the actions of local institutions and public services that national and global policy is acted out, a scale at which democratic engagement becomes not only possible but viable for young people and adults alike (Levine, 2007). In this context, the school has a potentially powerful role to play in building the capacity of young people to reflect upon and participate in the conversations that they and their communities are having about socio-technical change and possible futures. As one of the last public institutions embedded within and connected with local communities, and as one of the last universal public services, the school has the potential to act as a powerful hub through which students, teachers, parents and communities can examine the futures on offer and the futures they may wish to create (Anyon, 2005). And it is in this light that researchers such as Michael Fielding and Peter Moss are making the case for reimagining the school as a site for democratic engagement (Fielding & Moss, 2011). Many debates about how education should adapt to uncertain futures, however, tend to treat education as itself immune to socio-technical change. If we want to create a new space for debate with young people and across generations, however, we also need to recognise that education is also a site of socio-technical change that will affect the capacity of educators and schools to engage young people in democratic debate and action. Here too, the BCH programme identifies a number of contemporary trends of significant interest: First, we are witnessing the rise of a rich digital educational landscape outside the school. In this landscape there are already, for example, numerous online educational

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resources being produced for sites such as YouTube that enable learners to access everything from information on how to knit a sock to how to bleed a radiator to how to play the piano. One step further than such online tutorials, the School of Everything is an online brokering resource that allows would-be learners and teachers to find each other outside formal educational institutions. This site begins to offer some of the affordances of the peer matching first envisaged by Illich in the 1970s to deinstitutionalise learning from formal educational institutions (Illich, 1970). There is also a growth of folk educators, building massive online resources including videos, feedback and online supportiv. Second, the prospect of an ageing population and changes in institutional working practices opens up the potential for a new cohort of adults to play a role in education. The golden gurus project in Australia, for example, provides one example of this sort of initiative, in which the over 50s are seen as a new social resource to contribute to their communityv. Similarly, if the numbers of people in self-employment, or in more casual/freelance roles increases, they may have more opportunities as well as more need to build reciprocal relationships as teachers and learners with educational institutions. This raises the possibility of a new cohort of adults who might teach last or teach during rather than teach first. Third, a source of great expectations for the emancipation and agency of youth over the coming two decades is the emergence of new networked publics (Boyd, 2009) that enable people to find common issues and areas of interest with other people, to learn together and to mobilise to achieve social change. The heady experience of the Obama election campaign has done little to dampen enthusiastic accounts of the potential for online networking to radically reshape youths engagement with the political and democratic landscape (Reich, 2009). These trends offer very different possible futures for education: the emergence of a casual teaching force alongside the technological resources to support online learning communities and connect would-be teachers with would-be learners has the potential to underpin the emergence of very new educational institutions. The beginnings of such institutions might be seen in the growing number of wholly online schools and commercial education providers offering individuals the chance to opt out of mainstream educationvi. Such a trajectory might radically undermine the capacity of public schooling to act as a democratic resource and public space. These developments also, however, have the potential to create new relationships between schools and the wider community through which young people might be better supported to take an active role in reflecting upon and shaping their own and their communitys response to socio-technical change. The emergence of a rich educational landscape of online resources and and a flourishing of folk educators who spend only some of their time in educational practice opens up the possibility for schools to erode the school walls, and to connect young people with the lived realities of their local communities, businesses and democratic institutions. The emergence of new networked publics opens up the potential for young people to learn and to act, alongside others, to influence and inform public debate at a local and national level. In this way, schools can

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act as mobilising institutions (Goldberg ADD) to support their students not merely to diligently achieve their qualifications in pursuit of success in one unchallenged future, but to participate in the sorts of debates and activities at local and international levels that will allow them to contest and shape the future societies they will inherit. If we wish to take seriously the potential of young people to act as natives of our sociotechnical futures, we need to begin to extend to them the citizenship rights that come with such an identity. We need to ensure that they are equipped not merely to develop the skills that adults today think are important, but to play a role in shaping the futures for themselves that they will inherit. Whether these are the personal futures that they choose as they decide what will shape their appropriation of intimate augmentations, or the economic futures that they choose as they decide how to build their personal and social wellbeing in challenging economic and environmental conditions. What is clear, however, is that we cannot continue to see childrens ownership of the future merely as a rhetorical device for demanding adult investment in change. Instead, we need to recognise the rights of young people to have a say in the futures we are imagining and building. To do so, will require us to rethink the relationships between schools, their communities and the future.

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Young, M (2010) Keynote Lecture Educational policies for a knowledge society: reflections from a sociology of knowledge perspective, June 29 2010, GOETE Kick off Meeting, Tubigen

i See the video of Obamas speech at http://www.educationfutures.com/2010/01/07/obama-education-is-nationalsecurity-issue/ ii I use the term socio-technical in order to foreground the social construction of technology both in its design and its use. new technologies do not have social agency independently of social actors. In so doing, I draw upon the field of Social Studies of Science and Technology (e.g. Woolgar, 2002) iii There is not space here to discuss the potentially radical implications of the emerging biosciences for intervention in the body. Such developments are expected in the 20 year horizon of this piece to have a major impact on treatment of specific conditions and to play a role in developing targetted pharmaceuticals. For a longer discussion of the potential impact of the biosciences in education, see Turney (2009) review for the BCH programme. iv (see, for example, the Kahn Academy, one mans passionate project offering 10,000 online resources in maths and science). v www.deewr.gov.au/Pages/ default.aspx vi Numbers of online schools etc add here

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