To Steer Well We Need to See Clearly : the Need for a Worldwide Futurocentric Education Initiative by Marc Séguin

Dear Marc,

We share the same goal and idea.

"If humanity is to successfully steer the future, its citizens will need to rise to the challenge and become future-literate. Let us bet that knowledge is a good thing, and that the more numerous are the citizens of the world who have a sound basic understanding of the way the world is and evolves, the more happy, prosperous and secure the future of humanity will be.

Let the Futurocentric Education Initiative begin. Educators of the world, the future is in your hands!"

I give you a full mark 10.

Best of luck,

Leo KoGuan

Marc,

Thanks for that rousing call to action! I also view free lifelong education as an entitlement and collective priority. I am reminded that when U.S. President Kennedy called for an all-out space effort, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon less than 10 years later. Would that we do the same for education.

Deserved high score from me.

All best,

Tom

P.S. -- in looking for the best introductory physics text, have you an opinion on Susskind/Hrabovsky, The Theoretical Minimum? I found it well done.

Marc,

Excellent essay! You make an important point that I believe many educators would agree with. In a world like ours with constantly growing complexity, it is important to teach a certain portfolio of skills that will allow everyone to make a realistic assessment of how her or his choices will affect the future. As you also point out, there are already encouraging initiatives in this direction (MOOCs, YouTube tutorials, etc.). It will be interesting to see how these will evolve in the next few years. The debate you are calling for would be extremely helpful to support and focus this development.

I was about to recommend David MacKay's and Richard Muller's books when I saw that you already mentioned them in one of your footnotes. Great choice!

Jens

Dear Marc,

I generally agree with your premise that "Big Government" has lost much authority, and that any action will have to be based on collective will and understanding of the citizens.

This does seem to imply the need for broader and more effective education. Although you focus on future-centric, I note that you have a degree in history, and I do believe that only history can provide the perspective we need for some understanding. But your point about current "deficit of meaning" in schools is well taken.

I hope you read my essay and comment. We agree in the central place of education, and the need for bottom-up government, not top-down.

My best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Marc,

Fantastic essay! You provided great arguments about the importance of future education, and your solution "the Futurocentric Education Initiative" is, I believe, applicable and important. I strongly agree with you.

There are some similarities between our essays. In my essay, I discussed the importance of raising the public understanding of science and improving education to accelerate the progress of science. I would be glad to receive your opinion.

Best regards,

Mohammed

Marc,

Finally got to your essay and was pleasantly surprised. I am in complete agreement with your statements that "citizens will need to rise", "knowledge is a good thing", and "people around the world have lost faith in figures of authority and Big Government".

Our biggest agreement is on any action must "lead to positive outcomes for the greatest number of humans".

I also totally agree with every item on your '"futurecentric" curriculum.

Where I think we may have a bit of difference (my essay is here) is that:

- While you have 13 "Topics" I am not restricting the curriculum in any way and saying everything we know in science should be shared, especially the result-cause relationships and, not necessarily the 'why of cause-effect relationships' to hedge risk.

- I am not sure who decides what to do (who is responsible for action) in your case. In my view, every citizen is independently responsible for improving their individual future.

Please read my essay and let me know if you agree, or not, with how close our thoughts really are.

-- Ajay

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am essentially unteachable; I must learn my own way. So I read your essay as a total outsider, and then I did what any sensible outsider would do in 2014: I googled "future oriented education". You probably know all about the following initiatives already, but just in case, and as an opportunity to comment on how they might fit in with your own, here are a few things I found worthy of note:

- Marc Prensky is currently creating a Global Future Education Foundation and Institution (and writing two books about it, including one proposing "a new, future world curriculum") with goals which look similar to yours.

- New Zealand wins the search engine placement battle, with entries like Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching - a New Zealand perspective and Shifting to 21st Century Thinking in education and learning. Apparently the New Zealand Council for Educational Research has been thinking about this for more than a decade.

- Marco Rieckmann has thought about Future-Oriented Higher Education: Which Key Competencies Should Be Fostered Through University Teaching and Learning?, and Derek Hodson about Science education for an alternative future.

- 2014 is the last year of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, proclaimed in December 2002 by the United Nations General Assembly. I had no idea. The issues emphasized by EDS seem to partially overlap with your curriculum, and UNESCO's International Implementation Scheme may contain some applicable wisdom. Or not. As I said, I had no idea...

Hello Marc,

Your essay is clearly written and makes a very good case for improving education by emphasizing critical, numerical, probabilistic and statistical thinking. I agree with most of your individual proposals, although I think you place too much faith in humans to execute your plan. After all, these options have been available to people for many decades, and people of generations past (at least in the U.S.) were probably better versed in these many areas than they are today. Education isn't the primary culprit; it is people's evolutionary baggage that makes them biased, or inattentive, or lazy, or distracted, or immersed in instant gratification, or more likely, all of the above.

To guide long-term decisions, your proposal places trust in current human priorities, and thus current levels of rationality. Substantial research by Kahneman and Tversky, Keith Stanovich, Tom Gilovich, Dan Ariely, and many others convince us that people are neither rational nor good forecasters, even when they are focused on the future.

People have great difficulties with large data sets and thinking about long-distance and long-term consequences of our actions, and as we and others in this competition (see Sabine Hossenfelder's essay) have pointed out, what limited understanding we have is prone to cognitive biases and statistical errors. We agree with you that a focus on the future is essential, but these intrinsic limits to our current thinking abilities present an impassable obstacle.

We think our proposal is the only truly efficient (albeit, long-term) approach and, while our proposed solution is not as specific as yours, we want people to engage in a serious conversation about the issues we raise and how to create better brains and other thinking machines - especially the best scientists and engineers who typically have little motivation to consider these issues because they are comfortable with their own intellects. The most rational and intelligent people only feel satisfied with their present mental status because human perceptions are selected to be relativistic about abilities, but the problems highlighted by both of our essays apply to everyone.

I hope your essay does well. I also hope that you read our essay and that we persuade you to some degree of the soundness of our proposal. Whatever the outcome, we wish you all the best,

Preston Estep (and Alex Hoekstra)

An educational initiative specifically--rather than incidentally--aimed at improving our long-run decision-making is a fantastic idea, Marc. I think you are right that important issues like these can be taught if put into context, even to students who have little interest in memorizing the order of the planets.

The development of such curriculum will not always go smoothly, as you say. In fact, I'm sure curriculum development would be very contentious. We still need to reach scientific consensus on many of these issues. And people whose fundamental beliefs are challenged by the science--or who have a stake in the path we're already on--will fight hard to shape the curriculum to their own liking. But as you say,just the conversation about the curriculum would be well worth having.

In my opinion, this is one of the best essays in the contest. I hope it does very well--it deserves to.

Best,

Robert

Marc,

Excellent points in your essay. With a rather varied background, including my education, I can testify to the need for a broad education and one that considers the long-term effects of our actions, not repeating the negative lessons of history. Your Futurocentric Education Initiative will help discount our world's fixation on short-term comfort and greed and toward a viable future we can reach and survive in.

My essay builds on the same concepts, but emphasizing the role of the human mind and scientific vision in steering toward a viable future. I would like to see your comments on my concepts as well.

Dear Marc

I really enjoyed your well written and well structured essay. I support your visionary initiative 100% and I especially like the idea of people becoming future-literate. What a great expression!

Extremely important, you write:

"To truly influence the course of humanity, an initiative will have to start by influencing the minds of the most people possible, and to do so, it must implicate them in the process. The time has come to have a well-informed, serious worldwide conversation about the future."

The first challenge will be to conduct an open conversation free of any political agenda. The second challenge is to get it started soon enough. Perhaps this FQXi contest is a precursor to getting such a conversation going.

I agree with your comments to my essay that the concept of Greater Earth meshes well with your futurocentric curriculum. If all humanity would have the necessary room, resources, information, education and technology to survive and thrive, there would be no limit to human aspirations. Everyone needs to be made aware of these possibilities and opportunities. Worldwide peace and prosperity could indeed be obtained if we all would become future-literate.

I hope to see you in the finals!

Arthur

Dear Marc,

interesting work. The potential risk of an essay centred on education is one of sounding a bit obvious, but I think you have sufficiently avoided this problem, by providing some non-trivial arguments, justifications, and implementation details for your proposal. The prose and the logic is fluent, and makes up for a pleasurable, effortless reading.

I certainly agree that education is likely to be more effective, in steering our future, than some global institutional efforts, whose results `are often disappointing`.

Some criticism now. There are at least a couple of points in which the text, in my opinion, suffers from the `do the right thing` syndrome (in other words, is excessively generic), i.e. TOPICS 12 and 13 of your futurocentric curriculum. They sound to me too generic and obvious to capture a concrete implementation, and invite a (perhaps equally obvious) reaction that I am pretty sure you would agree with: the devil is in the details! Who can tell to really understand `the way the world works`? Which world? First, second, third? One thing is trying to come up with a futurocentric curriculum by having a `discussion` within, say, the United States. Another thing would be to involve (also) Europe, with its more marked diversity among countries. And yet another thing is to extend it to Middle East, Far East, Africa, etc. There are many worlds; and even it there were only one, it would still be a complex system endlessly open to unpredictable evolution steps (I`m being quick and generic too, but I guess you get the point).

You very correctly point out that inventions such as the cell phone have contributed to steering humanity (at least in life styles) beyond `the prognostications of professional futurists`, and, I would add, beyond the control and capacity of global `political` institutions. Who can predict what the next revolutionary invention would be, and what effects it will induce? These factors, largely unpredictable and un-steerable, are likely to play a stronger role than any other.

About the implementation of your plan, I appreciated your experienced concern for motivating high-school students to work on the topics of the envisaged curriculum. One may wonder, however, whether perspectives on the medium-long-term collective future of humanity would be more effective, in motivating high-school students, than the perspective of their short-term, individual, professional future. In this respect I find the essay by Hossenfelder as more realistic, when it assesses the laziness of human beings: we are not so good in interacting with scenarios that are far in space and time. (I guess that your proposal could nicely borrow some of her original ideas.)

Finally, a closing, semi-serious remark. I think your final quote of the Millenium Institute:

`These great conversations will be better informed if we realize that the world is improving better than most pessimists know and that future dangers are worse than most optimists indicate.`

is a good example of the weakness and genericity of these global endeavours. To me the quote is perfectly tautological: it directly follows from the definition of optimistic and pessimistic person!

Best regards

Tommaso