Futurelab held a meeting about the future of education with respect to building new schools and using technology. Below are some of the questions they asked themselves in their group discussion exercise.

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- Our vision for education 2025 includes…
- What will education 2025 look like if we don’t succeed? - What needs to change?
- What needs to be done now and by whom?
- What will stand in the way?
- What successes and failures can we learn from?

Reading these, it occurred to me that one of the problems with a lot of educational innovation is that it does not have a very concrete vision of the future at a specified future time backed up by an equally specific set of steps of how to get there. But an even bigger problem is that we don't have a sufficiently clear vision of the past. 2025 is only 17 years away. What would have similar meetings looked like in 1991, 1974, and 1957? We do have some evidence of that and also a lot of evidence that the transformation 17 years later was remarkably less than profound. In fact, schools of today look much more like they did in 1957 than they look different. They have computers that have modified some of the logistics of communication and access to information but the underlying pedagogies are not that different to even 1857 (or ever since the invention of public education and the blackboard). The content and the society around has changed but kind of like the Church of England, where we wouldn't have that much in common with the church-goer of 1857 but we could readily recognise their actions and purpose, schooling has altered but a little.

So what would the future have looked like to people in the past and what did really look like? A proper historical account of that is somewhat available. Here's my attempt at an incredibly coarse summary (also, the 17 year timeline doesn't quite work in all respects):

1957: The vision: Audio-visual materials will transform the delivery of content! New methods of instruction based on the proper psychological understanding of teaching and learning will make education almost a science. The reality 17 years later: Audio-visual materials fail to live up to their potential. Social context of psychology defeats any attempts at programmed instruction.

1974: The vision: This time we will make the audio-visual materials work and we'll add the nascent computing technologies to them to make content even more appealing and interactive (yes, that long ago). Reality 17 years later: Audio and video are still too cumbersome to use as anything but the occasional spice to vary the classroom routine.

1991: The vision: Computers have become more accessible so this time they will have the proper transformational effect (especially once interactive CD-ROMs achieve their full potential). Reality 17 year later: Nobody's heard of or even touched an interactive CD-ROM in the last 5 years. IT has become ICT, computer has become the network. The classroom is often filled with computers but most teaching is still done the same way as it was in 1991.

2008: The vision: Audio/visual technologies will finally become more accessible with the success of services like YouTube. Learning will become social and community-based. User-created content will make access to the necessary information much more participatory.  Mobile technologies will make learning personalised and distributed.

What are the possibilities for future realities? Although, I'm very much a proponent of new technologies, I suspect we will see a future just as different (and disappointing) from our present vision as people from 1957 saw 17 years later. But we may not notice. The one thing that the above summary ignored is other profound changes in educational administration and social context. E.g. the raising of the school leaving age and 'democratisation' of access between 1957 and 1974; the introduction of central control over aims via the national curriculum between 1974 and 1991; or the market-service orientation of educational provision since 1991. The external and internal contexts of education may look sufficiently different 17 years hence that we won't notice the underlying similarities. Or I may be wrong and this time we will really achieve the full potential of the technologies available and transform education in ways dreamed of by reformers since Rousseau or Dewey. Let's talk again in 2025.