To many children and young people, adults seem distinguishable by their finishedness, their completeness. We have \u201cgrown up\u201d. We have become inflexible, we have ceased to play, to imagine; our appetite for adventure has been diminished, not increased, by our understanding of the world; our wild, and even gentle, ambitions have been curtailed by the demands of \u201cthe real world\u201d. Instead of growing in confidence and maturity enough to be wrong and to change our minds, the adult world seems very often to promote an infantile belief in the benefits and possibility of absolute certainty, mastery, fixedness.<\/p>\n
The assumption of due respect for this completedness often establishes authority and provides boundaries within formal education: I am the one who knows, and you are the one who is in the process of knowing, of becoming the possessor of knowledge, of completion.<\/p>\n
For me, then, a fundamental purpose of education should be to acknowledge the inevitability of change, celebrate the value of life as a thing in process, and promote an awareness of other ways of doing things – of discoveries yet to be made and solutions yet to be invented.<\/p>\n
Change is, of course, not always positive. It can be damaging and difficult to come to terms with. Even positive changes – for example, changes in how people deal with terrible things that have affected them – which might free us up and make us happier people, are extremely difficult to go through. But the alternatives to change, if there are any, are entropy, denial and death.<\/p>\n
Education should ensure that children, young people and adults are equipped to be unsettled, confronted by difference, to be changed, and to effect change. Education is a conduit to different cultures, different places, different times – to different ways of thinking about things and doing things.<\/p>\n
Education provides us with an introduction to things unimagined and unencountered. It should provide the critical challenge to examine our beliefs, interpretations and horizons, the ability to re-examine ourselves in new contexts, to develop new interests, to review the ways in which we understand ourselves and our place in the world.<\/p>\n
The purpose of education should be to expand expectations, not to confine them – to support our learners in understanding the impact they can have on their world.<\/p>\n
We cannot expect education built upon a fixation with certainty to meet the urgent needs of social, economic and political change.<\/p>\n
\u2018An introduction to things unimagined\u2019 Josie Fraser, social and educational technologist’<\/p>\n