The future of education in the impulse society: Why schools and teachers matter

Reflections about the future of education often depict the desirable future as one in which we need powerful learning environments where students can pursue personalized trajectories, learning from real-life situations, so that they will acquire useful knowledge and skills that will allow them to adjust flexibly to a rapidly changing society. In such a set-up, teachers have become facilitators of learning. In this paper, I show why such a view of the future of education is misguided and ultimately uneducational. I make a case for the school as the time we set free from economic and societal demands in order to give the new generations a fair chance at arriving in the world by opening new horizons for them. Teachers, in this view, are not simply there to facilitate what is already happening, but have the task of giving students more than they may have been able to ask for. Such a future for education relies on an understanding that school is not a function or functionary for society, but always needs to stand at a critical distance from society.