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This article reports on futures-oriented teaching and research in the United Kingdom, which derives its inspiration from the field of futures studies. The article focuses on the need for a futures dimension within the school curriculum and appropriate training and support for teachers and student teachers. Attention is drawn to related educational research on young people's hopes and fears for the future, how college students envision their preferred futures, and the sources of hope that educators draw on in troubled times.
My interest in futures is a long-standing one arising out of my work, which is mainly, but not entirely, with practicing teachers and with students training to be teachers. This focus on education in schools puts a particular slant on my futures work. In essence, I am interested in how to help busy teachers and their pupils think more critically and creatively about the future and the appropriate research needed to support this (Hicks, 1998b).
THEORIZING EDUCATION
In her account of contemporary political ideas, Goodwin (1987) highlights the notion of competing ideologies, that is, "a doctrine about the right way, or ideal way, of organising society and conducting politics, based on wider considerations about the nature of human life and knowledge" (p. 27). This notion of ideology lies at the heart of the human endeavor that can, of course, never be "value-free." Education therefore is contested territory, and philosophers and educators have long debated the various purposes of education. Kemmis, Cole, and Suggett (1983) have accordingly identified three differing metaorientations within education: the vocational/neoclassical, the liberal/progressive, and the socially critical. Each perspective or ideology makes fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of knowledge, the purposes of education, the role of the school, and the organization of teaching and learning itself.
Those educators who are concerned about the turbulent nature of national and global change today will often take a socially critical perspective. They believe that education has a crucial role to play in challenging rather than reproducing existing societal inequalities by preparing students to participate in social, political, economic, and environmental activities as active and responsible citizens. Richardson (1990) suggests that this involves the weaving together of two educational traditions.
The one tradition is concerned with learner-centred education and the development and fulfilment...