This article, which kicks off the column “The Future Is Learned,” does not set out to discuss the future of education, but rather addresses the future within education. Nor is it just another piece offering recommendations on technologies and practices to improve day-to-day life at school. The idea is to use this new space to reflect on desirable trends in learning and to consider how education relates to the future—this time that does not yet exist, but which already holds new worlds for those who will live in it.

Our relationship with the future has changed over time. In the past, people lived and died in the same society in which they were born. Today’s generations, however, experience numerous changes within a single lifetime, due to the rapid advances driven by science and technology.

For our ancestors, the future was a matter of divination and speculation, left to oracles, fortune-tellers, and prophets. It was in the postwar period of the 1950s that the future began to be studied scientifically to inform the development of government and business strategies. But even in the face of the threat of a third world war, changes were linear and continuous. It was possible, with a certain degree of comfort, to view the world through the lens of probability.

Today, we live under the imperative of uncertainty as a condition for survival. Changes are happening rapidly and leading us toward lifestyles and work models that break with familiar patterns. In this context, we cannot help but ask how children and young people are being prepared for this historic transition between the world that is coming to an end and the world that is being born.

Even as they navigate so many changes, schools still keep the future at arm's length from the curriculum, and teachers are ill-equipped to integrate it into their practices and reflections.

In the face of the growing complexity, chaos, and contradiction that are undermining society’s creative potential, nothing is more important for the educational ecosystem than exploring the future as a powerful organizing concept for change in school activities. As early as 1974, futurist Alvin Toffler was already highlighting the importance of teaching and learning about the future and offering insights into the gap between obsolete education and the emergence of new models.

Integrating the future into teaching and learning processes is intellectually stimulating for both teachers and students, as it broadens their thinking and adds imaginative value that is useful for developing responses to change.

The use of concepts and techniques that allow us to go beyond the probable helps to dispel fear, strengthening creative potential. This is valuable preparation for life, as it makes young people co-responsible for the world, helping them identify their purposes across all dimensions in the face of the challenges already on the horizon: new models of teaching and learning, the relationship between humans and machines, professions that do not yet exist but will be necessary, innovations in an intergenerational world, dichotomies between democracy and surveillance, post-pandemic lifestyles, the rise of new consumer cultures, changing family structures, access to natural resources amid climate change, augmented intelligence technologies, production systems in new economies, and income models in increasingly unequal societies—these are just some of the new realities on the horizon. Why not prepare for them in advance?

The set of changes listed goes beyond what our own imagination can conceive and beyond the educational system’s capacity to bring about change.

But how can we teach about the future if it doesn’t exist? Well, we could say that we study the past, and it doesn’t exist either. The future has yet to exist, and the past has existed. History teaches us about the past through records embodied in symbols, images, fossils, artifacts, books, documents, and objects. The future also has its records, only they are immaterial: trends, expectations, fears, and desires—which are nonetheless realities.

As an educational program, Futurism reached institutions of higher education in the late 1970s in the United States and shortly thereafter in Europe, making its mark around the world over the past 30 years. In 2012, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) established the Chair in Future Literacy, featuring concepts and techniques that encourage educators to go beyond the probable, stimulating the creation of possible futures among students, just as the “Teach the Future” movement promotes “literacy of futures” among teachers and students in more than 20 countries.

In Brazilian schools, what is still taught today in the humanities and exact sciences is limited to what can be proven and tested along continuous lines connecting the past, the present, and the future. With an eye toward new curricula, futurism plays an important role at a time when we are seeking learning models that make sense to students: an interdisciplinary field that studies the future, taking into account both current and upcoming changes, so that individuals and organizations can anticipate them.

We are increasingly faced with the need to look ahead. This new perspective requires broadening the temporal horizons in educational systems. As a first strategy, we must correct what Australian futurist and educator Noel Gough calls “temporal asymmetry”: the overemphasis on the past and present at the expense of the future, which reveals humanity’s natural resistance to dealing with the unknown. This resistance often turns into fear, phobia, and anxiety, most notably in the emotions of adolescents facing an uncertain future.

In light of the historic transition brought about by the global pandemic, how will education position itself for the future? If the purpose of education is to help human beings reach their full creative potential through the development of skills and abilities, why do we teach history but not the future?

The incorporation of futurism into schools could represent a major revolution. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s leaders and will inherit the challenges related to the problems we have created in the present. And it is up to us, as educators and mentors of the new generations, to help them navigate this journey.