What exactly should be included in future studies education for early childhood?

Firstly, let’s be clear, we do not want to study, project or pretend to know the future. Rather, future studies is about possibilities – creating radical peripheries that pull the central system away from itself.  Ideally, we’d be able to adjust, retract and flourish without calcification in the limitless chaotic worlds we wade through. There are infinite interconnected skills that are required to move our hopes forward.  The key is letting young children, who inherently have surrealist luxuries, create opportunities to find their own peripheries. Our job is to be the guide, the bomb, a door between.

At this point the introductory topics below are pretty unclear. The topics are meant to be placeholders for further development and clarification, which eventually will be elaborated on and fully specified, or documented as they happen with the FSxK study group. The topics will become highlighted links when they’ve been expanded upon in a further article.

The four essential themes for children in future studies, in my opinion, are: Systems, Change, Relations, and Chaos. Within each of those broad categories fall a myriad of smaller, still broad, elements which should be fleshed out throughout a child’s experience within an educational framework. These categories function as the equivalents to Math, Science, Literature/Language and the Arts. In a future studies oriented space, the typical subjects would still be very important, but they would be in relation to the broader themes, giving them a much different radius.

Elements to introduce into Early Childhood Education:

Exchange Systems

Educational Systems (Institutional Critique and Awareness)

Food Systems

Time Systems

Living System (Cell to Organism… to Intergalactic Planets)

Cities and Dwelling

Globalism and Language

Expertise

Expenditure and Energy

Myriads

Materiality

The imperceptible

The periphery

Your multiplicity

Chance

Abstractions

Non-Human and Human Relations

Medias

Magical reality

Presence (Transpersonal Education)

Connections, the space between (False Intervals)

Relationships (instead of things)

Limits (Knowing what you don’t know you don’t know)

Feel free to add to this list, it will constantly be changing.

Read more:

1. 10 Early Childhood + Futures Studies Resources The following books are excellent resources for practical and theoretical...
2. Teaching the Future The Journal of Future Studies, an international journal of foresight...
3. The Future School Part of the study of the future with young children...
4. A Future Story / By Lia By Lia G. Age 5. “We should love the...
5. Future Playgrounds I found a great resource today while looking at energy...
6. Children Tell The Future Futures 2010 (brought to you by the 4-and 5-year-old’s at...
7. Preschoolers View the Future Here is the presentation from a recent talk on some...
8. The future is…. Here is a list of what the future is according...