Educational change, inertia and potential futures

General conservatism in the discourse on education

The discourse on education generally may be more conservative than we normally appreciate, both within and outside the system. However, this is difficult to substantiate, both for lack of empirical data and for conceptual reasons – it is difficult to determine what a conservative discourse is. It is difficult to go against the public sentiment and if it does not want changes, they will only happen very gradually in a democratic setting. Thus tradition, indiscriminate respect for old values and good performance using longstanding normative criteria, may hold change at bay within education, especially when it depends on public (parental) support. Here we are referring to the literal meaning of the term conservative. We take conservatism to refer to explicit or implicit, cultural, social and often systemic factors, such as the curriculum, that happen to be dominant or held in high esteem in a given society, and which are generally taken for granted with an appeal to tradition or habit.

Educational systems evolve at a notoriously slow pace and this applies to their form, operation and content; perhaps most to this last part.⁵ A very important reason why education does not change is simply that there is little catalyst for change. Labaree [23, see esp. ch. 5] argues that educational reforms have always had problems getting past the classroom door, which may be a sensible buffer for the system. Nevertheless, we argue that curricular change should perhaps be the most important part of necessary educational development, without forgetting the principal aims of education as e.g., argued by Nussbaum [24], emphasising democracy, but also Biesta [25] who presents an inspiring and modern raison d'être for education, or Reiss and White [26], also with a timely call for an aims-based discussion of education.

Traditions, traditional values and often very strong interests keep education within the confines of old times (some even see this as the role of education). The traditions are strong and rigorous and so are the conservative constraints, which can be found at every level of society. They relate to old or traditional values, old content and old ways of doing things, and not least, entrenched interests. Of course, some old values should be cherished, because they are fundamental to educational enterprise, but which? And conversely, which traditional subject matters should be done away with? In his discussion of the fate of the “new math” in the US with emphasis on set theory and learning by discovery, Phillips [27] notes that “parents and teachers called for a return to the traditional practices of memorized facts and rote calculations” p. 143.

Here the reference is to the views of many parents and politicians and a somewhat conservative impetus from industry that the education system should mainly serve the current economy, rather than the potential economy of the coming decades. Thus industry itself may be unduly conservative, despite the impetus to compete and innovate (see e.g. discusssion from the UK [28]). Moreover, the part of the European 2020⁶ growth effort, which focused on education saw it primarily as a tool to strengthen the labour market by reducing dropout and increasing the level of tertiary education.

It is interesting to consider to which extent the universities act as progressive or innovative catalysts on the educational levels below the tertiary stage, with their entrance requirements sometimes based on standardised high stake tests. It is, indeed, worth speculating to what extent the university, as an institution, can call itself foresighted, creative and progressive with regard to the education of young people while it also, directly or indirectly, tries to influence the curriculum of the previous levels without a clear future oriented curricular agenda. This directs the attention towards the curriculum at the universities and the trickling down effect into the school levels below; a part of education that one would like to see as being characterised by foresight from the presumed dynamic changes taking place at these top echelons of the educational system. A report commissioned by the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council (U.S.) Committee on Undergraduate Physics Education Research and Implementation [29] states that impediments to change include “traditional academic cultures” and that the “subject matter and skills that undergraduates study [in physics] have remained largely static for more than 50 years. Students learn little about current discoveries and research, which they might find exciting or relevant to their lives” [29, p. 2]. These are very strong statements, from a country that has been considered to be at the forefront in the physical sciences, and a serious hint that rapid changes in content, method and technology struggle to find their way into our school systems, and perhaps some of the blame lies with higher education.

The academic discourse may indeed be conservative. Academia is normally considered to be at the cutting edge, to be the avant-garde, to be at least one, if not two steps ahead. Is it? Uzzi and Mukherjee [30] suggest that high impact research work travels the trodden path, but nevertheless carries an innovative element, as “the highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations” [30, p. 468]. Thus, there is a hint that academia may not always be as dynamic, inventive or creative as we want to believe it is, even when we are referring to the ballpark of cutting edge research. Thus it is possible to assume that the environment that surrounds primary and secondary education might consist of more inertial characteristics than we normally expect.

Education is an institution in more than one sense

Institutions change slowly. The educational edifice is an institution at more than one level. It is an intricate system, which has developed to become stable. Perhaps, no social institution equals the system of education in terms of its strong and rich legacy, reinforced by laws, regulations, culture and traditions; a system that also rests on a number of principles, most notably those of equality of access and basic education for all. Monolithic rules have gradually taken over as the system develops, reflected in institutional and academic drift, where an institution of schooling has a tendency to slowly extend itself, even into the arenas of pre-school and kindergarten, and also into non-formal education as tertiary education expands. Play in kindergarten, very gradually, gives way to school type practices and content. At higher levels, the curriculum in vocational and professional schools may also gradually become more academic [31]. And there may be incremental transfer of vocational training from industry into the school system. Some, but not all of these developments have an ideological basis and Rizvi and Lingard [32] suggest that “neoliberalism has underpinned the education policy shifts around the world” [32, p. 184] with characteristics, which Sahlberg [10] calls GERM (see next section) and the testing and evaluation mechanisms are becoming institutions in their own right [33]. The school system is also an effective gatekeeper, most often using substantive entrance criteria between levels, which are then carried into the labour market. It thus has a formidable credential power, which exerts an overwhelming control. The different educational levels interact and thus it may be impossible for one level in the system to make changes, particularly in the curriculum, if the level above is not ready to accept this or accommodate these in some way, and thus there is a form of institutional top-down control within the system. The ingredients of such systems are therefore not easily changed.

The schools themselves are also institutions, in addition to being organizations, as they are impregnated with structural ideas, norms and values. There is an important distinction to be made between schools as organizations that can be moulded by administrative changes or leadership, and schools when they exhibit the characteristics of institutions (see e.g., [34]) where norms and values are in control. Waks [7] argues that”fundamental educational change is not primarily about organizations [ ... but] is primarily about change in educational ideas, norms, organizational arrangements, and frameworks that constitute education as a social institution” (p. 294). Thus it becomes important to gauge to what extent the various features of the educational edifice should be regarded as an institution.

Making the situation particularly complex, the curriculum is itself is an institutional structure within the educational edifice, in the sense that its framework has evolved over a long time and which has a fairly robust structure with strong cultural underpinnings; it is intertwined with that of the school system and the schools as well as with national cultures. Reid [35] discusses the various ways in which the curriculum can be seen as an institution, being “a socially embedded idea”, thus dependent on the culture in which it is situated, i.e., “the community that holds and supports it” [35, p. 8]. This implies that the changes to it are necessarily slow and efforts of change face significant difficulties, unless they are marginal modifications or additions. There are of course variations, but the fundamental structure is not easy to tamper with. White [4] demonstrates this with a historical analysis of the recurring content features of the English curriculum, in terms of the school subjects, demonstrating their permanence.

Thus, if education is recognised as an institution, the institutional analysis of education consequently becomes of utmost importance when attempting to understand the constraints on educational change. Meyer and Rowan [36] note that the theoretical framework contributed by the New Institutionalism in education suggests “that the key constraint for educational institutions […] is the need to maintain the trust and confidence of the public at large – in short, to maintain legitimacy by conforming to institutionalized norms, values, and technical lore” p. 5. It is therefore very serious when Borman and John [33] suggest that the gradual development of measurement and evaluation regimes in educational systems is in a sense institutionalizing mistrust. The more different sections of a system become institutionalised the more difficult they are to change.

Standards are difficult to challenge and change

Standards and accountability are conservative when it comes to the processes and content of education. Educational curricula around the world are driven by a set of standards, national or international. Setting standards is a clear sign of ambition. The problems with standards, however, especially those with high stakes, is that they are inherently conservative. They build on tested ideas and are consistently being more finely tuned, probably the more so, the higher the stakes. Standards are normally proposed and defended by those (especially institutions) with a relatively secure position, and those, which have also successfully met the criteria used. The standards must also be taken to be well intentioned and ambitious; they are enforced to ensure high quality work in the system. Nevertheless, they practically ensure that new things, new materials, new content will only have a very marginal space within the curriculum.⁷ Noting this pernicious (and conservative) aspect is not meant to criticize the genuine ambition to shape high quality curricula. The situation may, however, be more serious. As noted above, Borman and John [33] argue that governments, in an effort to enhance trust in their educational systems, shift an operational focus “to instruments of checks and control” p. 6, i.e. to various testing and evaluation mechanisms. This is particularly interesting as it suggests that gradually developing mistrust is understood to be largely due to a lack of information by the population, which then has to be remedied, rather than due to stagnation within the system. It is thus simultaneously a question of both the driving forces and the consequences, which can be complex and perhaps also unintended as argued by Zhao [37], see especially chapters 6–8. Ravitch [13], in her condemnation of the current discourse on tests, suggests that the strong alliance of testing and privatisation controls the current political features of the educational system and there is no question that much of the current debate is in the throes of a PISA race, which emphasises certain literacies. In that connection, Sahlberg [38] has suggested that much of the public and political debate falls under a framework he calls the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). This framework has six key ingredients, which may exert overwhelming control on the way education develops and consequently any decision regarding the shaping of educational content. These are, according to Sahlberg, the emphasis on standardized teaching and learning (to the detriment of innovative exploration of such practices), focus on literacy and numeracy (to the detriment of other subjects, such as art, music and sports), the tendency to teach for predetermined results (to the detriment of a wide range of novel areas), the inclination to borrow reform ideas (to the detriment of dynamic authentic experimentation), the demand for test-based accountability (with enormous effort spent on testing and preparation). And all of this results in substantial external control - building up enormous bureaucratic control to the detriment of dynamic professionalism.⁸ At least four of the components listed above are top-down control factors. There can also be found an emphasis on placing trust in the education market as well as an underlying message that the quality of modern education is determined by PISA scores based on certain globally accepted skills, in particular literacy and numeracy. All of these aspects taken together present an incredibly narrow basis on which to judge the whole modern educational edifice which stifles innovative grass-root efforts, with conomitant signs of globalised educational governance [39]. Standards and the accompanying mechanisms of implementation are perhaps - and probably contrary to their intended effects - among the strongest conservative straightjacket vis-à-vis the curriculum.

Are traditional ideas (subjects) still good?

Traditional disciplines were valuable. In his exploration of the history of the English curriculum, White [4] notes that “governments have insisted that the existing structure of academic subjects is not to be tampered with. Rather than seizing the opportunity to rethink school education as a genuinely aims-based enterprise, they have clung to the centuries-old pattern” p. 139. This may imply that the structure of the curriculum is difficult to change. The current ideas, their underlying rationale, their apparent sensibility or utility and the ambition behind their introduction were all convincing and credible some time ago, even though it took considerable time for them to win their place. Of course it is still valuable to learn mathematics, grammar, spelling, physics, chemistry, natural history, and perhaps also Latin, or Greek and the classical texts or learn some of the modern European languages that have been the ingredients of many curricula. The question is if it is more valuable than something else? For the curricular debate, the problem arises when an attempt is made to determine the power or value of individual subjects or their detailed content only in absolute, rather than relative terms. An excellent example of this is the debate presented by different authors in Bramall and White [40] on the pros and cons of mathematics as a compulsory subject in secondary education. The disagreement is not about whether individual subjects can be shown to have inherent absolute value, but rather if they can be shown to be more valuable than one or several alternative subjects that have recently emerged. Here we mention in particular genetics, artificial intelligence and sustainability,⁹ or ancient subjects in new guises such as communication and ethics.¹⁰ All these could stand the test of being proper scientific disciplines that might also contend for the core of modern general education perhaps hand in hand with cultural, anthropological and economic studies.¹¹ It is even possible that outdoor studies¹² might be brought into the centre and perhaps it is sensible to move nature thus into the heart of educational curricula (see e.g., [41, 42]). The subjects mentioned here are not intended as a judgment of what should be the ingredients of general education, but the point is rather to underline that the discussion of what education is, i.e., on what basis we select the content, needs to be on-going.

The emphasis on the time-honoured form of the curriculum may probably be traced to older generations in the educational debate and to a long-standing tradition, but it may also be influenced by the judgement of those outstanding young people who did so well with the traditional curriculum. On the basis of their continuing success, within the traditional academic or vocational environment, where they often play a leading role, there is a chance that they will attribute some causal relationship between the curriculum and their own success and therefore become champions of the traditional content and its generic value. The intrinsic strength of traditional subjects shows very clearly the dilemma for the innovative discourse. It is not a question of whether the old ideas are good; it is a question of whether there are new ideas that may be potentially better, more powerful, even if they have not been fully developed. It is thus the comparative problem that we have to deal with, not the absolute question.

There are two explicit lines of argument that make changes in and from the traditional subjects particularly difficult. They revolve around what students “need” to learn and the “necessary content basics”. The first refers to a very serious confusion when the term “need” is used as a synonym for useful or relevant. People often ask if there is a need to learn mathematics, languages, science or whatever subject that comes to mind, when they are in fact asking if it would be useful, or helpful to have some mastery of them. There are very few subjects or skills that are not valuable to know or master but very few that one individual – or even a large group – needs, i.e., would not survive or even thrive without being in command of. Yet another component of the traditional subject legacy is the idea of the content basics, in particular the fundamental principles (of mathematics, physics, biology, geography, etc.) that must be mastered before continuing onto more advanced subject content. There are probably very few who would question that some basics must be in place, not only literacy and arithmetic, but also the basics in the natural and even social sciences, in particular history, and of course the grammar of languages. But this must also be critically examined and they may be wrong. Fox [43] forcefully argues that the sensible option might often be to skip the basics of a subject and jump right to the frontiers of powerful (solid) knowledge and thus bring the young students to the exciting edges of knowledge in the making. But it is not only a pedagogical or an organizational issue he is addressing - and questioning, but the institution of the curriculum, with its legacy of norms and values.

A very important defence of the subject based curriculum is presented by Young [44] who argues that well developed disciplinary knowledge should be a point of departure for education, rather than the student or the context (e.g. problems facing the world). Thus he argues that powerful knowledge should not be defended on instrumental grounds, i.e., on its efficacy in solving social problems [45]. Instead, powerful knowledge should serve “the intellectual development of students” p. 24. The question remains; what subjects and their related conceptual ingredients would best aid this development? The line taken here is that various new subjects or those with very modern ingredients, such as those mentioned above, which all have very clear and profound technical, ethical and social dimensions, would best serve this purpose as these would help the young to connect to the world and apprehend and understand the challenges they face in the present and future world.¹³ It should be noted that even though the scientific nature of these areas are most noteworthy (e.g., genetics, computer and cognitive science, communication science) it would probably be their ethical and social dimensions that would be of greatest importance in a revised general curriculum.

New ideas are fuzzy and complex, but they may be eminently sensible

New ideas, new content, may be fuzzy and it may be difficult to demonstrate that they provide a better education given the aims setting the course and their applicability with regard to shaping educational content. New ideas that are meant to replace the old ones are sometimes woolly or cloudy, not well moulded and sometimes even vacuous – or even non-existent.¹⁴ This may especially hold when it comes to issues of competency, where the various competencies may inherently be very difficult to teach and test. This was the case with a number of “new” ideas that were proposed during the 20th century, classified as belonging to progressive education and constructivism, e.g. related to discovery or project learning, ideas meant to foster scientific exploration, social awareness, creativity, arts or moral values. This also applies to some of the 21st century skills programmes which have been repeatedly proposed for the last 20–30 years, not only for preparing for a new labour market, but also for personal development and will undoubtedly also apply to the new basic factors in the new EC eight key competencies [14].

The new ideas may not always have the evidential backing that they would benefit from, but which is difficult to provide. To the extent that the curriculum is meant to prepare for a distant future, the real test can only be done many decades into the future. Even if new ideas have a solid conceptual base, are well prepared and carried out in a seemingly competent manner, there may still be lingering problems. In this context, Lingard and McGregor [46] describe the implementation of a new curriculum in Queensland Australia, dubbed the “New Basics”, and which they judged to be particularly well conceptualized and skilfully implemented. The new curriculum had an ambitious combination of generic skills, new material and new pedagogic approaches. Nevertheless, in the context of testing and accountability, and under the influence of an Australian national curriculum, they conclude that “the New Basics have passed into the dustbin of Queensland educational history” p. 225. A part of the general problem may be that so-called “generic skills” or competencies are difficult to define and measure and thus to handle in concrete terms. Neither may they be as generic or transferable as often expected or wished. The issue of transfer is a huge problem for education, which seems to be neglected in much of the current discussion on the curriculum, even though it has been visible before [47]. The potential dissociation of process and content is pedagogically a serious problem, as also argued by McPeck [48] in the case of critical thinking and noted by Young, Lambert [6] in the more general case of generic skills.¹⁵

Vested interests have a firm grip

Vested interests have a huge influence in all walks of life. Understandably, interests are attached to the ideas or visions that the subject experts have learned to value and want to promote. Many experts are culturally and intellectually attached to their subjects, to their fields, and therefore find even the idea of the subjects’ demise within the system totally sacrilegious. And the jobs people have may also be at stake. If the content of the curriculum is changed, perhaps beyond the existing competence of the current experts, and old material is replaced with new, or if current subjects are discontinued, job security might be at a serious risk. Thus, many people will understandably resist any change that has to do with them gradually giving up their subject, possibly having to completely renew themselves (even though many do) or lose their jobs. The fact that one may seriously threaten a variety of vested interests and ideals of those who are already lodged in the system, presents a vast challenge for those who argue for replacing the old with the new. This may operate at several levels and therefore perhaps presents the most formidable obstacles of all the ones mentioned here. It has so much to do with people’s livelihood. Thus, investigating previous examples of proposed new curricula which contain new insights, topics or competencies, it would be necessary to explore if these new aspects are basically added onto the content that is already there; if they became marginal add-ons? However, vested interests do not only affect the curriculum in isolation, but also education in schools more generally. Tyack and Cuban [1] note two principles of change that school reformers should know about. One is “how schools change reforms”, i.e., how schools adapt new ideas to the current practices and thereby often transform these new ideas in the process. The other is understanding “the grammar of schooling”, which means that new ideas or practices must be manageable within the system as it is operated. Goodson [49] rather pessimistically, but hopefully overstating the case writing on curriculum change, brings a different perspective, which points the same way, when he notes that the “personal and professional commitment that must exist at the heart of any new changes and reforms is absent [as] […] there is a mixture of profound indifference and active hostility to so many changes and reforms” p. 220.

The vested interests have thus influenced or rather controlled the educational discourse, in a number of ways. First, by controlling who can talk about what. It may often be inappropriate for non-subject specialists to discuss the content of a subject curriculum. Who would be eligible to discuss the mathematics or history curriculum within the professional environment of a school, aside from the subject specialists? The other specialists, e.g. the school leadership, might be eligible to talk about assessment procedures or didactics and of interdisciplinary exploration, but not the intricate content of the subject curriculum. Second, the discussion about content is most of the time defined by the existing subjects. Defending an existing subject will be done in absolute terms, as noted above, i.e. in terms of whether mathematics or arithmetic or numeracy are important or useful (which of course they are), rather than bringing them into the comparative domain, where they might not do as well.

Teacher education may stifle change

Modern education of teachers may supress rather than encourage developments of content in education. Even assuming that those responsible for teacher education are truly up to-date and that they follow the development of modern ideas, as well as tackling relevant new challenges in education, we still suggest that teacher education is conservative, in at least two ways. The first relates to the subject based segmentation that characterizes many teacher education programmes. Traditional subjects, and what their proponents decide to introduce, determine what teachers are prepared for. Thus, new subjects or issues or emphases do not gain ground within the programmes of teacher education unless there is space for them among the existing subjects. The examples might be the capacity to teach computer programming, the nature of sustainability challenges or the introduction of ethics as a serious challenge for many areas of modern society, or bringing new technology or multicultural issues to the fore. This is just to name a few important arenas of knowledge that new teachers will go without unless some space is opened up for these subjects within their TE program. If university biology teachers do not emphasise genetics as a potential part of general education or the mathematicians or psychologist do not introduce artificial intelligence at the university level for prospective teachers, there is a danger that these crucial topics will not be tackled in a serious way by many of the subject specialists preparing as teachers. For a long time, neither anthropology nor economics were a serious part of teacher education and thus not serious contenders as a part of general education. Interdisciplinary projects may also struggle to find their place within the university system since their implementation will largely depend on the extent to which the subject departments related to teacher education foster interdisciplinarity. Whatever views modern educators have on what counts as important subjects or skills for general education, the possibility for in-depth action by teachers is largely defined by subject departments that are often solely focussed on the development of their particular discipline. It is also possible that teacher education (pedagogy etc.) may become increasingly dissociated from the disciplines and the academic subjects from teaching [50] due to the academic drift of teacher education within the university level hierarchy, where it becomes entrenched at the Bologna stages [51].

Secondly, professional development, which is indeed a crucial part of teacher education, is rather chaotic and unsystematic in many educational systems. This literally holds back the development of education. There can be no doubt that it is totally insufficient that teacher education solely comprises initial training and then some sporadic updating. Given the rapid developments of knowledge, skills and the social and technological environment, the professional development of teachers becomes crucial for their continued professional competence. However, the professional development of teachers, following their formal teacher training program, is often not formally within the purview of universities, except on an ad hoc basis, and it is rarely formalised on par with the initial stages. This can have its pros and cons but the weakness lies in the lack of formalised effort to foster on-going professional development including perspectives toward possible futures. Sustained and effective development of new knowledge and competencies within the teaching profession needs an effective system, anchored also within the schools and their practices. It should also have strong ties with the professional enterprises, the universities, in accumulating frontier knowledge, not only in pedagogy but all the various developing spheres of modern knowledge.

Lack of motivation and little space for initiatives oriented towards possible futures

There is a lack of incentive or space to take the initiative. Educational leaders (within schools, not only principals) who could in principle take an initiative for future oriented school development are preoccupied with other things than probing research and future scenarios. Exploring research and following a wide spectrum of modern development is certainly time-consuming if these were to have some priority, both from the leadership and the teachers. Neither may be available [52].¹⁶ Changes and challenges within the system of education require immense energy, vision and understanding. Engaging constantly with new ideas, new thinking about education and dealing with the various inertias of change, when taken together, presents a formidable task even if the desire for change is present. The demands and pressure on the school system are steadily increasing, and consequently, the tasks for the leaders at all levels, multiply. They cannot, despite their potential interest, take time to immerse themselves in the ideas and development required by the complex task of attending to possible futures. It is not clear whether either Hargreaves and Shirley [53], who argue for the initiative of teachers, nor Young and Lambert [6], who imply the important active role of the subject specialists, have really dealt with this problem of ensuring that the teachers have the leeway, the time, the foresight and competence to introduce new ideas, when they quite rightly emphasise the trust that must be placed in the professional teacher and the school leadership for developing education.

One reason why new ideas do not emerge sufficiently within the sphere of education is that very few people who are engaged in education have the wide-ranging overview or perspective over all the different but pressing reasons for curricular change. Neither do they normally have the informed foresight necessary (only obtained by constant vigilance, following what is happening in many different fields) to motivate sensible developments. Crudely speaking, it is a problem of ignorance, which in a crucial sense is a concomitant of the expansion of knowledge [33]. Apart within some Think-Tanks or specialised future-oriented organisations, very few individuals have the opportunity or the responsibility to follow the multifaceted and substantial changes in the social, ethical, technological and cultural environment, and the possible educational implications. Hardly any government agencies and certainly not municipalities, schools or teachers engage in this. The field of education is also very fragmented in terms of professional expertise and mission, which is a serious problem for education in general and future orientation in particular.

There are clearinghouses,¹⁷ which deal mainly with existing evidence and are thus only marginally future oriented even though the evidence collected is meant to inform policy. Moreover, there are Think Tanks which also collect evidence but with a clear policy agenda, but rarely with focus on education. There are also future institutes,¹⁸ which are set up precisely to ensure that knowledge about possible futures is assembled. But such future institutes rarely focus on education and neither would they create steps for channelling emerging ideas into practice. Educational experts such as Murgatroyd [54] and Aviram [55] have attended to this issue in a direct, extensive and provocative way, but their ideas still need to find a way into the mainstream curricular debate. An additional problem here is that when a future perspective is at least nominally adopted, it tends to be very narrow, directed towards the labour market, the world of work, whereas scientific, social, ethical and cultural issues are somewhat neglected, but are probably more important.

No consequence if no change takes place

Nothing happens, even if we do not change much? Nothing dramatic happens if we do not exchange new ideas for old ones. In fact, it is of no consequence ― yet. The claim is made on the basis of two related reasons. One is that the main impact of much of education is meant to be seen many years after it takes place (even though we normally test immediately within education). The other is that no system would have any sort of comparison with other systems until possibly decades later. Therefore, it is unnecessarily onerous to take on the fight for new ideas, replacing old well-established and tested ones. And lamentably few would complain if nothing is done. Thus, perhaps lethargy or indifference could be counted as an inertial mould. This laissez-faire stance presents, nevertheless, at least three problems. First, young people are not given the opportunity to engage in the variety of interesting and valuable challenges that new ideas, new skills, new technologies or new cultures might afford them. They – and indeed all of us – are cheated, perhaps in a serious way. Of course, they will nevertheless survive; many of them will of course do very well, regardless, and indeed make much of the education they received. Second, many young people may be seriously demotivated if they feel that their education is not addressing the important issues or content that they think will become important and would stimulate them. Thirdly, many of the grand challenges of modernity and possible futures scenarios facing the world demand necessarily pre-emptive and pro-active action, which these young people are expected to grapple with at a later date. There is certain danger that inaction will weaken the preparation for these challenges and thus the potential response will be much feebler. In brief, the power to engender positive change will remain unharnessed. This also relates to the previous points of vested interests. There are so few, if any, that have a vested interest in the renewal of the curriculum and thus there are no agents or stakeholders in sight to take up the issue. This is a problem because it is possible to offer a very strong substantive argument for quite dramatic changes to the foundation of the curriculum, argued on the basis of changes already visible, but more importantly on the basis of changes that will occur in the next three or four decades which may lead to various future scenarios.