to love the future enough to save it

musings on why care matters more than ever in our curriculum, and how to nurture it in a technologically focused future

In recent conversations about the role of emerging technologies in education, I have found myself wondering what the possibilities could be when we talk about “future-focused” education—not just as a preparation for new technologies, but as a space to critically and care-fully consider the futures we actually want to shape.

Too often, we substitute technological use for future preparedness, assuming that fluency with the latest tools is enough to equip students for what’s ahead. But “the future” is not a fixed destination, nor is it solely defined by innovation. VR, AR, AI, ChatGPT, are all easy to name, easy to slap onto an educational program—it’s sexy, if your definition of sexy is Silicon Valley, that is. But the implication of this solution is that all students need in our rapidly changing world is how to prompt AI. Of course, they’ll still have their math and science and language skills, right—or maybe not if, you know, their chatbot has the answer.

Perhaps you’re thinking—hey, AI can help us be more creative! I use AI to challenge my thinking and to improve my writing! And yes—when used with discernment, these tools can expand what’s possible. But consider what’s required to use AI in that way: the ability to ask useful questions, to exercise judgment, to imagine something worth building in the first place. All of that draws on a foundation of prior experience—of curiosity, interests, ideas cultivated over time.

Maybe we could try giving students that foundation by scripting frameworks and prompt lists. Tell them how to use AI in a way that we, right now, think is acceptable and hopefully even useful.

But then we’re back to content-based learning. A curriculum might update its tools—Photoshop instead of film, AI iteration instead of essays—but without reflection, that’s the same problem, just dressed in a black turtleneck. It still misses the point. Tools will change. They’re always changing.

And we’re back to the place we thought we’d left when we started to acknowledge the importance of transferable, interdisciplinary skills in our curriculums.

So what should “future-focused” education look like, then?

Firstly, it shouldn’t just focus on equipping students with the tools to navigate the complex world they’re inheriting. It should also nurture their capacity—and their conviction—to reimagine and reshape that world for the better.

To do this, we don’t just need students who can use the newest technologies. We need humans who can think critically, ethically, and imaginatively about the impact and development of those tools. Humans who understand that the tools we create are never neutral, and that humanness and integrity must drive the inquiry and creativity they make possible.

In a world defined by the abundance and hyper-accessibility of information, education is no longer just about what students know. It’s about how they connect observations, what questions they ask, and how they choose to act on the answers.

And what makes that possible is care.

Without care, education risks becoming a set of disconnected skills with no purpose to drive their application. Care is what anchors attention. It is what compels students to connect ideas, to synthesise meaning, to act on what they’ve learned, and to reflect on its impact. Care drives how and why we pursue knowledge, and what we choose to do with it.

But care doesn’t grow in abstraction. It is nurtured through experience—through felt relationships, through contact with people, places, and our environments. It grows when we are engaged not just as minds, but as whole human beings—embodied, situated, relational. This also emphasises the continued importance of outdoor education, social emotional learning, arts education, and their role in developing learners who feel the world, not just think about it. In doing so, we are reminded that we are not separate from their environments—we are shaped by them, and shaping them in return. Everything is connected.

In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen draws on the work of ecologist Robert Pyle, who suggests that the stewardship and responsibility we feel towards our environments can be nurtured by our direct experience with them. Rosen distinguishes between ‘knowledge about’ and ‘experience with’ to suggest that when learning is accompanied by connection, it can be applied with care. This distinction is not only ecologically salient. It is pedagogically relevant. It speaks to the conditions under which learning becomes actionable—maybe even joyful!

It echoes what we know from the science of learning: that deep, transferable understanding is rooted in experience. The learning that endures—the kind students can carry and apply—is constructed not through passive absorption, but through active engagement, emotional relevance, multisensory input, desirable difficulty, learning over time, and opportunities to connect knowledge across contexts. Care, then, is not just a “nice to have.” It is a key driver of retention, transfer, and ethical application.

Even beyond care, an overreliance on these technologies threatens other qualities vital to learning: patience, presence, and deliberation. These are not just skills we can sacrifice at the altar of so-called progress, but essential foundations for critical thinking, decision-making, and long-term perspectives. The patience to sit with uncertainty, to delay gratification, to grapple with complexity—these are the very conditions under which insight emerges. When we default to tools that condition us to expect immediacy, we condition students to value reaction over reflection, convenience over care. This has consequences not only for how they learn, but for how they come to understand their responsibility to the future. Patience, after all, is one of the earliest conditions for reciprocal altruism. It’s what allows us to invest in people, in places we may never personally see in physical or temporal distance—but that still depend on our care. This kind of future thinking should be a part of the “future-focus” in our curriculum too.

So when education becomes overly mediated—when screens and simulations replace lived experience—we risk displacing the very conditions under which students come to care. This is not a call to ban technology. Far from it. We know these tools are already offering powerful new possibilities in the urgent and complex problems we face today, such as in climate modelling and medical therapies. But we have to think deeply about how they are used in learning.

Because when these new technologies become the primary way students encounter the world—when they mediate or replace embodied, relational, sensory experience—they risk flattening their experience into representation. This risks teaching them, subtly, that interaction happens best at a distance. And that matters—especially for young people still developing their ethical frameworks, still figuring out where they stand in this world, and what they want to stand for.

At the heart of all this is a question for the present: what does this mean for educators today?

One of the most immediate challenges we face is how to respond to students using AI in ways that undermine their learning. At the very least, we have a consensus that trying to detect AI is a whack-a-mole game, given that our detection tools are ineffective at best and unethical at worst.

I think the more powerful response is pedagogical.

We need to give students opportunities to engage with the philosophical and ethical questions these technologies raise—not to prevent their use, but to help students take agency in how they use them.

Across our curricula, we must provide the space for students in conversations about what these tools are, how they work, and what it means to use them responsibly in different fields. In doing so, we don’t just preserve the skills we’re afraid of losing—we can actively nurture them.

But for them to gain this critical, ethical lens we hope they apply to their future, we must design learning that cultivates the conditions for care.

That is the “future” thinking our future-focused curriculums must prioritise, while we still can.

Not just how to use new technologies, but how to consider their impact, how to reimagine them,

how to hold onto the parts of the human experience we don’t want to lose

before we forget why they matter.

Not just to keep up with the future—

but to love it enough to save it.

:)