I Teach The Future
Teach the Future wants to introduce futures thinking to middle schools, high schools, and colleges across the country. We want to teach the future as we teach history or math.
To do this, we need to develop and distribute course materials. We are raising funds to compensate teachers to develop these course materials over the summer.
Once these materials are developed, we will distribute them freely to teachers around the world to use in their classrooms and to introduce to their school districts.
As an established discipline in select universities and businesses around the world, don’t you think it’s time to teach the future in all secondary schools and colleges?
Change Is hard, but stagnation is fatal.
A 2007 video, "Did You Know," took the Internet by storm. Originally produced by a teacher in Colorado Springs for his Board of Education, it asked provocative
questions and gave unsettling answers about the challenge of exponential change. At last, people were thinking and talking about change in a new way, and they began to realize that education needed to take this increasing rate of change seriously.
That was eight years ago. As the video said, at that time, MySpace would have been the 11th-largest country on Earth, but today a 15-year-old does not even know what MySpace was.
Change is Exponential.
Most of us agree; change is inevitable. Yet the change we are experiencing today is accelerating as never before due to the digital revolution. As a result, today’s students need to know how to anticipate and influence their rapidly approaching future in
a systematic and useful way.
So, Dr. Peter Bishop, a futures educator for 30 years, established Teach the Future
to do just that. Teach the Future is a network of educators and community partners that encourages and supports teachers and administrators to teach the futures thinking in their classes and their schools.
Because teachers have not been taught about the future either, our first goal is to produce a set of useful and effective teaching materials that teachers can use to teach the future. We will hire teachers in the summer to create those materials.
The Emery Experience
Darci Papell was one of 14 students at Emery High School who took a course on the future of
Houston in Fall 2013. Afterwards, she said that one of the most important things she learned was the opportunity to study a field, urban healthcare in her case, and then "come to conclusions [about the future] by myself." Darci is now a first year student
at the University of California, Berkley.
The Matching Gift
Dr. Peter Bishop has kicked off this fundraising campaign with a personal donation of $10,000 to Teach the Future, and he will personally match, dollar-for-dollar, the first $20,000 donated to this campaign in an independent gift to the organization.
Join the Conversation
Become part of the Teach the Future community on
Facebook,
LinkedIn,
Google+ and
Tumblr. And we tweet at
@teachfutures. See you there.
