The Future of Work & Education, Revisited
It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since we put on MakeKnowledge’s two-day “Future of Work & Education” event in 2020. How have the ideas held up since?
When we held the event in February 2020, there were few inklings of the COVID pandemic close at hand. Little did we know at that time what havoc the pandemic and shutdown would wreak in the worlds of work and education. And yet our conference was way ahead of the curve in modeling just how adaptable we could become — the conference itself was a hybrid event, with some participants joining in person, and some coming from around the world via Zoom. Likewise, many of our speakers joined us in person, but we also had one speaker Zoom in from Italy, and others from various parts of the US. It wasn’t only the format that foreshadowed the hybrid future we were about to enter. So did some of the speakers and their themes. Jen Dennard from Range.co gave us a glimpse into the world of remote and hybrid work, and how good tools and practices can support strong, healthy teams wherever their members happen to be.
One of the key organizing principles of the conference was that we need to think about work and education together. These are not separate spheres, no just sequential stages of human life, but they are intimately connected in a number of ways. This is sometimes ignored by the “thought leaders” on work, who imagine that education’s role is to fill up students with knowledge and skills, sort them into different buckets, and then hand them off to “work,” a separate domain with its own rules and structures. Hearing descriptions about the world of work and the future of work abstracted from human experience of growing, learning, and aging is like visiting a Victorian zoo. Over here in this cage, there’s a single male sloth, but what can you tell about sloths in general here? Are sloths social? Do they nurture their babies or let them fend for themselves? And so on. Creating a barrier between work and education also ignores the work that happens inside schools, specifically what teachers as workers do, and how the shape of their working together matters.
The COVID shutdown suddenly woke us up to one big aspect of the connection between work and education: when workers were all sent home, many had to figure out how to get work done while also parenting and managing their children’s remote schooling. Schools that figured out how to open early suddenly were deluged with inquiries about extra spaces. There was a short-lived cry to pay teachers way more: “Give them all a million dollars a year!” But of course many teachers were in a similar boat — having to teach 30 kids on screen, while managing children of their own in the background, dealing with iffy wifi, and leaning on tech support that wasn’t staffed for all the new demands.
In 2023 the shutdown is behind us, even if the virus is still with us. What does the work ahead look like? Society seems to have forgotten its fever dreams about supporting “essential workers” and teachers. Even leaving aside the places where extremists are politicizing teaching and curricula, there are still big issues to tackle in re-envisioning work and education. Our speaker (and former Minister of Education of Italy) Lorenzo Fioramonti reminds us that we can aim at creating a wellbeing economy where everyone can thrive. What do work and education look like when we dream together?
We’re still too susceptible to stories of what the market might do for work and education. In the last few months, the locus of that energy has been on the promise of generative AI. But the important question is not whether AI is inevitable, but how we harness it and other new tools. And the key word we need to interrogate in that sentence is “we.” Who is the “we” of our big visions and dreams? Will the power of our newest tools be used to further concentrate power in the hands of a few? Or can we find ways to empower communities that have been excluded? Can we create new onramps and opportunities for students of all backgrounds and zip code and latitudes?
I want to thank all of the presenters and all those who helped us launch that groundbreaking event in 2020. Some have moved on from the positions they held then, but all continue to do good work in different parts of the world.
Some of the videos from the event are up on our YouTube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/@makeknowledge-org.