Future facing vocations

I’ve been thinking about how the education system — formal and informal — needs to seriously rethink how to prepare young people for an increasingly uncertain future. It’s been clear for a long time that the Earth crisis should be a major driver for some essential shifts in education, training and vocational pathways. The view is starting to sharpen up.

The zoonotic pandemic, as a symptom of Earth crisis, has come as an incredibly disruptive driver this year, creating an opportunity to review our frames of normal. For example, if we can and must work from home why don’t we always? If the normal ways for people to earn a crust are interrupted shouldn’t we have a Universal Basic Income?

There are lots of opportunities to rethink coming up. Climate breakdown is like a monstrous tortoise compared to the tiny hare of Covid-19. On top of these two global chaos-catalysts, we in the UK are going through the uncertainties of Brexit.

Work will change. The unemployment rate has risen this year, with big losses in high street retail, hospitality and office services, all the things that rely on people going to work into centres. Brexit is likely to cause many 1000s of job losses on top of that. And then as impacts of climate breakdown unfold, there will be more economic challenges, physical limitations to travel, and workplaces may be damaged (e.g. by floods or storms).

But, also, there will always be work to do as long as the limits of the Earth aren’t so completely and utterly breached. Things, beings and places will need to be mended, preserved, fed, made, grown, exchanged and transported. And this is precisely where we need to apply our imagination. Articles about the future of work are full of the assumption that digital technologies and automation are the only drivers of change worth speculating on, but we need to widen the frame.

Some of the roles of the future will seem as quirky as some of these roles from 140 years ago. Certainly, Disinfector of Railways is coming back due to the pandemic. And Sampler of Drugs (being paid for drug trials) is fairly common. But some of the others, or at least their names, seem unimaginable.

So, what do I imagine? Projecting into the future has to include a cold extrapolation from the current crises as well as imagining alternative and more optimistic scenarios. Realistically, I don’t think the (UK) education, training and work system will transition smoothly and responsively. It’s more likely, given how the system is structured now, that it will continue to operate within its mindset that individual success contributing to economic growth is the goal of education. It will continue to react to the environmental shocks created by the breakdown of that very same system, without being able to change the overall system.

With optimistic glasses on, the most beneficial future roles will emerge by younger people themselves proactively responding to changing and chaotic situations, being aware of the need to stop the harm and change the big system from extractive to regenerative. This has to come with a caveat that the environment is already in such a critical state that the worst case scenarios are currently the most likely.

It is possible for education and employers to help the most beneficial future roles to emerge, if they can free up learners and workers to respond, and to encourage them to play active roles, to value care over productivity, to solve complex problems and learn as they go. The more this can be enabled, the more that young people will find their purpose and carve out identities for their future life paths. These identities may not be within fixed pathways such as business, medicine or science, but in combinations of them or alternative versions of them.

Educationalists and employers have a moral duty to enable this re-thinking and to open up new possible pathways for children who will grow up in the next decade or two. The futurist Alex Steffen accuses the fossil fuel lobby of “predatory delay”, stealing from future generations to delay climate action for their own short-term profit.

The young people who have a chance of thriving into maturity in a crisis-hit world will be those helped now to develop capacities such as:

• Systems thinking (problem solving in complexity, holistic thinking)
• Personal resilience (which I prefer to think of as bouncy rather than gritty)
• Positive deviancy (copying models of people trying unconventional. experimental ways to adapt and survive)
• Ecological understanding (knowledge gained through education and experience of biodiversity and Earth systems, but also a wider awareness of interconnectedness e.g. knowing that humans are nature)
• Empathy (including bio-empathy)
• Futures literacy (being anticipatory, deft at imagining scenarios)
• Spatial and Data intelligence (core skills needed for decision making and innovating with technology)

And underpinning and enabling all of these are Creativity — practising imagination, curiosity, experimentation, expression and collaboration.

The existential threat to future generations should drive all decision-making, and so young people should be involved in genuine ways and empowered to contribute to system change to sustain life on the planet. This means, at root, helping them to develop all these capacities to be adaptive system changers, and giving them agency to reject the status quo.

For more, see this piece on Eco-capacities on Reconnection

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