Education in Common

Radical Futures of Education

Re-Centering Possibility

To discuss the future of education without interrogating its foundations is to reproduce the very inequalities that education ought to dismantle. Education has, for too long, been framed as a universal good while operating through exclusionary logics of Eurocentric knowledge, narrow economic outcomes, and technocratic solutions that rarely serve those at the margins. As both history and contemporary evidence demonstrate, schools and universities have too often functioned as instruments of reproduction: reproducing privilege, reproducing injustice, reproducing alienation.

Yet there is nothing inevitable about this. Education can also be a space of radical reimagining. Futures are not given—they are made. The idea of multiple educational futures challenges us to discard a “business-as-usual” model where learners are merely prepared for labor markets, and invites us instead to rethink education as a profound cultural and political project.

This requires a commitment to radical innovation. By radical, I do not mean simplistic technological leaps or managerial reforms, but rather an insistence on addressing the root: asking what education is for, who it serves, and what forms of knowledge it elevates. An education designed for solidarity instead of competition, for ecological care instead of extraction, for justice instead of conformity—such an education would change not simply schools, but the world itself.

Anthropology is vital in this work. It teaches us to see education not as a homogenous system but as a plurality of practices, deeply embedded in contexts of culture, history, and power. An ethnographic lens reveals how rural Kenyan youth navigate educational exclusion, just as it uncovers how Indigenous communities mobilize ancestral knowledge for survival and transformation. Anthropology refuses the fiction of neutrality: it insists we attend to who creates knowledge, on whose terms, and to what end.

To reimagine the futures of education, then, is to claim it as a site of struggle and liberation. Radical educational innovation, grounded in anthropological insight, can remake learning as a convivial, plural, and justice-oriented force. The world depends on nothing less.

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