On Misunderstanding Young & Muller’s Three Futures

Young and Muller’s 2010 paper outlining three educational scenarios for the future has provided a useful heuristic for teachers wishing to interpret tendencies and trends in educational practice and discourse (e.g. Ashbee, 2021; Robbins, 2021). In the original paper, Young and Muller state their preference for a Future 3 scenario, “on both social justice and epistemological grounds” (Young and Muller, 2010). This dual grounding of Future 3 is noticeably absent from many of the accounts written by teachers, however. The focus tends to be on the social justice arguments presented in Young and Muller’s paper (along with those put forward by Young in his 2014 book, Knowledge and the Future School: Curriculum and Social Justice), with the epistemological considerations neglected. The neglect of epistemology, I will argue, has led us to a Future 1 scenario — different to the old model in degree but not in kind — in spite of many influential figures perceiving themselves to be advocates of Future 3.

A teacher’s account of the three futures

The example of Robbins (2021) is instructive. In his account of the three educational futures, he begins his discussion of Future 1 by quoting from Young and Muller’s paper — “This is a naturalised or under-socialised concept of knowledge” — without offering any analysis of what this statement means. His attention then shifts entirely to social justice considerations: “In this future, knowledge belongs to the elite,” and does not return to the epistemological aspects of Future 1 at any point. His discussion of Future 2 contains a little more on that approach’s assumptions about knowledge — “Future 2 focuses on a series of generalisable concepts” — yet his focus remains on the drawbacks of such a scenario in terms of social justice: “This sends low-income students — the very ones Future 2 wants to help the most — down a path of low-value courses which limit their future academic potential.”

Turning to Future 3, Robbins understands boundaries entirely in terms of social justice rather than epistemology: “Future 3 recognises historical barriers to education for lower-income students and aims to provide students with the knowledge required to cross these barriers; to convert knowledge of the powerful into powerful knowledge.” He then introduces the distinction between substantive and disciplinary knowledge, seeming to imply that “the disciplinary knowledge of how new knowledge is created within a subject” is what sets Future 3 apart from Future 1.

The section ends on a hopeful note: “My own personal belief is that now more than ever we are able to create Future 3. By allowing teachers to deliver a powerful knowledge curriculum as they see fit, we can give students from less-privileged backgrounds the knowledge to access society at whatever level they choose.” As laudable as this hope certainly is, it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Young and Muller’s paper.

Future 3 collapses into Future 1

Robbins’ emphasis on social justice and access suggests that his conception of knowledge is indistinguishable from that which underpins a Future 1 scenario, i.e. that he sees knowledge as a series of givens to be passed on to students. This suggestion is borne out by his later advocacy of the methods of cognitive psychology, which argue that learning is best understood as a change in long term memory (e.g. see Clark, Kirschner, Sweller, 2012). The underlying assumption of such methods is that knowledge can be codified into a series of propositions and methods, loosely translatable to the categories of substantive and disciplinary knowledge introduced above. Hence, while he believes his epistemological account of Future 3 is distinct from that of Future 1, in that it includes facts about the discipline as well as the facts generated by the discipline, in reality it is a difference in degree rather than in kind.

Robbins is far from the only teacher or writer who claims to be advocating Future 3 yet in practice is operating much closer to Future 1 (see Morgan, Hordern, Hoadley, 2019). It may be argued that such distinctions are unimportant, provided teachers are, as Robbins undoubtedly is, committed to social justice. Yet, I would argue, the worldview that shapes a Future 1 scenario is in opposition to the worldview underpinning Young and Muller’s vision of Future 3.

A more radical approach

Young has long been critical of the tendency of the British education system to focus on knowledge that, by its very structure, excludes the majority of students from accessing it. Science offers a good example (Young, 1976): by focusing on highly specialised and abstract knowledge, the traditional science curriculum served in practice to make students less scientifically literate and more suspicious about the role of scientists in society (ibid.). The deficiency was not seen to be on the part of the curriculum itself, however, but on the part of those students (typically from working class backgrounds) who weren’t ‘suited’ to studying such complex material (see Keddie, 1971).

One approach to dealing with this problem was progressivism, which was defended by Young in the 1970s (Young, 1976) and later criticised in the 2010 paper with Muller under the name of Future 2. This approach reduced the amount of ‘content’ in the curriculum (thereby rendering it less specialised) and focused more on everyday, practical contexts (making it less abstract). This blurred the boundaries between scientific and everyday knowledge to such an extent that, as Robbins rightly points out, it still served to exclude the majority of students from accessing scientific knowledge.

The approach that has emerged as a response (or backlash) to progressivism has been to return the specialised and abstract knowledge back to the science curriculum and use the tools of cognitive psychology to ensure that more students have ‘access’. This is the position characterised by Robbins. There are two problems with such a stance. Firstly, there is a question whether the account of learning provided by cognitive psychology leads to genuine knowledge on the part of less-privileged students, or whether they are simply memorising more information without understanding the nature of the scientific disciplines (see Derry, 2020, for a more nuanced critique along these lines).

Secondly, the deficit assumption remains. Those students who fail to acquire the substantive and disciplinary knowledge of a given subject, even when the teacher has deployed the full arsenal of psychological tools, must somehow be deficient, i.e. incapable of learning such complex material in the first place. This is why the current scenario in education, following the National Curriculum reforms and overhaul of Ofsted’s inspection framework, differs from Future 1 in degree rather than in kind. This is true in a social sense as well as an epistemological sense. There may be fewer students excluded from the knowledge specified in the curriculum, but they are excluded nonetheless.

A genuine Future 3 scenario therefore depends on us altering the way we think about knowledge altogether. It requires us to rethink what we teach to our students, and how we teach it, in order that what is codified within the school curriculum really is accessible to all. The task of theorising Future 3 is to find a way to make knowledge accessible without losing sight of the boundaries that make it meaningful.

In a separate piece, to be posted subsequently, I have attempted to sketch an example from chemistry that might point to a way forward.

Bibliography

Ashbee, R. (2021). Curriculum: Theory, Culture and the Subject Specialisms. Routledge.

Clark, R. E., Kirschner, P. A., & Sweller, J. (2012). Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction. American Educator, 36(1), 6–11.

Derry, J. (2020). A Problem for Cognitive Load Theory — the Distinctively Human Life‐form. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(1), 5–22.

Keddie, N. in Young, M. F.D. (1972). Knowledge and control: New directions for the sociology of education. MacMillan.

Morgan, J., Hordern, J., & Hoadley, U. (2019). On the politics and ambition of the ‘turn’: unpacking the relations between Future 1 and Future 3. The Curriculum Journal, 30(2), 105–124.

Robbins, A. (2021). Middle Leadership Mastery: A toolkit for subject and pastoral leaders. Crown House Publishing Ltd.

Whitty, G., & Young, M. F. (1976). Explorations in the politics of school knowledge. Studies in Education.

Young, M., Lambert, D., Roberts, C., & Roberts, M. (2014). Knowledge and the future school: Curriculum and social justice. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Young, M., & Muller, J. (2010). Three educational scenarios for the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge. European journal of education, 45(1), 11–27.