Year: 2007
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Introduction: What is the future? In a famous remark about education, Antonio Gramsci pointed to the urgent need to understand schools through the lens of “an historical conception of the world that understands movement and change, and that appreciates the sum of effort and sacrifice which the present has cost the past, and which the future is costing the present” (Gramsci, 1971, p34). While ‘futuring’ has been an enthusiasm for literacy educators, even more so since the turn of the millennium, the serious costs to be borne now for present conditions to be maintained, and the even more dramatic cost of adapting to rapid changes in the communicational environment, are not notions that have been at the front of most speculations. In this paper, I argue that we need to develop ways of theorising the future explicitly. More specifically, a point here is to see the future of ‘literacy education’ as part of broader patterns of social and institutional futures, and to have a ‘moral analysis’ of the future. This amounts to a recognition that choices facing societies such as ours, even choices about the apparently technical matters of educating our youngsters to read and write, call for moral rationalities to do with equity and excellence, the relative status of the 200 or so languages spoken in Australia, and the affordances and limits of the technologies that are reshaping our educational, work, civil, and domestic lives.
Author: Peter Freebody
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1566370664