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Learning for an unknown future

What is it to learn for an unknown future? It might be said that the future has always been unknown but our opening question surely takes on a new pedagogical challenge if not urgency in the contemporary age. Indeed, it could be said that our opening question has never been generally acknowledged to be a significant motivating curricular and pedagogical question in higher education. Be all this as it may, the question (What is it to learn for an unknown future?) surely deserves more attention than it has so far received. After all, if the future is unknown, what kind of learning is appropriate for it? The preposition ‘for’ carries weight here. The preposition implies an education in which – in our presenting case in point – a sense of an unknown future is probably evidently present; or, at least, serves as a major organizing principle in the design of the curriculum and in the enacting of the pedagogy. If future-as-unknown was missing either from the curriculum or from the pedagogy in some way not far from the surface, we could hardly say that we were in the presence of a learning ‘for’ an unknown future. Generic skills may seem to offer the basis of just such a learning for an unknown future. Generic skills, by definition, are those that surely hold across manifold situations, even unknown ones. I want to suggest, however, that the idea of skills, even generic skills, is a cul-de-sac. In contrast, the way forward lies in construing and enacting a pedagogy for human being. In other words, learning for an unknown future has to be a learning understood neither in terms of knowledge or skills but of human qualities and dispositions. Learning for an unknown future calls, in short, for an ontological turn.