Back in 2012, following the launch of one of the very first 1‑to‑1 tablet programmes in a UK school, a parent approached me at the Open Morning event and said, “I love the way you’re preparing children for the future.” I smiled and replied, “I’m not sure we’re doing that. We’re just preparing them for the present.”
It wasn’t a prepared response, and I didn’t mean to be facetious. I’ve just never thought it wise to plan other people’s futures for them, especially when it comes to children. I’ve always been cautious about projecting my biases onto any prediction. After all, when you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
That’s why I’ve remained healthily sceptical of concepts like “21st‑century skills”, which often turn out, when scrutinised, to be perfectly timeless ones: communication, problem-solving, curiosity. The sort of skill Cicero might have recognised. In any century, not just the 21st. You see, I’d rather we focus on teaching students what we know today, equipping them with the clarity, confidence and literacy they need to become the architects of their own tomorrow, not the future some old teacher (me!) can imagine for them.
A case study in premature certainty
In the early 2010s, under Michael Gove’s DfE, the UK government made computer science a central part of the national curriculum. Coding became yet another new literacy. Primary children were expected to learn programming logic. BBC micro:bits were handed out, and an army of teachers (qualified or not; who cares about small things like that?) was mobilised to teach computational thinking. The message was certainly unambiguous: this is what the country needs.
But fast forward to today, and the picture looks less certain. It turns out that computer science graduates are now finding the job market (un?)surprisingly inhospitable, to the point that many graduates are pursuing ‘panic Master’s’ degrees to delay their entry into a saturated market.
It turns out there’s a misalignment between what universities were teaching, what employers were looking for, and what students were led to expect. Degrees in computer science have proliferated, but entry-level roles have not. The result is a troubling paradox: a field once heralded as the future has become, as coding itself became automated by AI, a cul-de-sac for many.
Another Educational Fad?
In a previous article, I compared this kind of thinking to fighting the wars of the past. We are notoriously bad at predicting the future, yet we keep fooling ourselves into believing we can so well, and so we continue to try catching smoke with our hands. After all, it is not the first time that we declare that this skill, that tool, or those attributes are what the future demands, only to discover that the future has once again stubbornly decided to do its own thing.
Take the current call for yet another literacy: AI literacy. Just because something feels novel today doesn’t mean it will retain that novelty. In five years, large language models (LLMs) may well be as mundane and ubiquitous as the astonishingly fast algorithmic computations computers can perform today. In a sense, LLMs do with words what non-AI computers have long been doing with numbers. Should we build entire curricular movements around that premise? I’d caution against it. The risk is that we end up preparing students for a world we imagined that either never arrives, or arrives looking entirely different.
Breadth, critical thinking, and agency
We don’t need to predict the future to prepare young people well. We need to give them a rich and broad education rooted in the present, from which they can grow in whatever direction they choose. That means helping them develop the critical awareness to ask Where am I now? and Where might I want to go? rather than marching them towards the latest ministerial vision of “what the country needs”.
Let children specialise later when they know more about themselves and the world. Until then, equip them with tools that don’t go out of date: (actual) literacy, numeracy, oracy, historical and cultural awareness, the ability to question, to collaborate, to reflect. Don’t funnel them too early into tracks shaped by our short-term anxieties.
The coding boom of the 2010s wasn’t so much a failure of intent. Nobody had bad intentions. It was more a failure of foresight, as we mistook specific domain knowledge for a strategy. We felt we had to to do something, and that was something.
In short, and to bring this rant to a close, we should resist the impulse to predict the future as if we’re any good at it (spoiler: we’re not). In any case, the future is not ours to script, it is theirs to shape. And we don’t enable that through narrowing pathways, but by widening horizons.
If you enjoyed this article, you might like my previous one.
“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”
— Chinese proverb
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