In this video, Dr. Keri Facer shares thought-provoking ideas on the role universities should play in society to prepare for the future.
“The question we need to ask ourselves is: How do we create meaningful ways of earning a living that combine multiple ways of being?” According to Dr. Facer, the real challenge for universities is to focus on multiple occupations and employments as a way of achieving different expressions of individuality, as opposed to the way things were done in the industrial era where education was based on one type of skill to undertake one type of job.
She imagines the university’s role as a public space for societies to think and understand the various possible futures, and not simply as a training ground that offers a degree at the end. She emphasizes that we need to to protect our universities as the places where civil society discusses the future.
Today, many universities try to predict the future of education and plan a dominant vision of how to get there. According to Keri Facer, the real challenge is to disclose the creative possibilities of the present because we do not know what the future will look like.
This interview was filmed for the 2014 World Innovation Summit for Education.