Nothing is new, but everything has changed: A viewpoint on the future school

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Nothing is new, but everything has changed: A viewpoint on the future school António Nóvoa1 · Yara Alvim2

© UNESCO IBE 2020

Abstract  This Viewpoint argues that the debates about the future of education and the need to rethink the school model started long before the pandemic crisis. But the situation we are experiencing has accelerated this need and showed that changes are possible. Consumerist trends in education have been accentuated, now with the massive use of digital tools. These trends, which, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, have supported “personalization of learning”, can lead to the disintegration of the school. But dynamics of transformation and metamorphosis of the school have also emerged, reinforcing education as a public and common good. The authors seek to enunciate these dynamics that redefine three bases of the school model: the social contract around education, the organizational structure of the school, and the pedagogy of the lesson. Keywords  Future of education · Pandemic · Education change · Metamorphosis of the school

All the 20th century futurologies that predicted the future by carrying currents through the present into the future have collapsed. Yet we continue to predict 2025 and 2050 while we are unable to understand 2020. The experience of the eruption of the unexpected in history has barely penetrated consciousness. The

* António Nóvoa [email protected] Yara Alvim [email protected] 1

Institute of Education, University of Lisbon, Alameda da Universidade, 1649‑013 Lisbon, Portugal

2

Faculty of Education, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Rua José Lourenço Kelmer, Juiz de Fora, MG 36036‑900, Brazil



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A. Nóvoa, Y. Alvim

arrival of the unpredictable was foreseeable, but not its nature. Hence my permanent maxim: “Expect the unexpected”. Morin 2020, p.3.

Rethinking the school model A point of view is a view from a point, from a given position. Our point of view is the long felt need to transform a school model that, having been built in the nineteenth century, spanned the twentieth century and arrived, showing signs of fragility, in the twenty-first century. The pandemic just made inevitable what was already needed. Many of us have written, in recent years, about the end of the school model (Nóvoa 2006) and the need to rethink the institutional bases of the school. See, on this matter, The One Best System (1974) by David Tyack, and his Tinkering toward Utopia (1995), in collaboration with Larry Cuban. The reinforcement of education as a public and common good is the beacon that guides the transformations we support. Let us point out, in rough lines, three dimensions of the school model that need to be rethought today: First: The acceptance of a social contract that assigns the primary responsibility for the education of children to specialized education systems. Second: The consolidation of an organizational structure, built around a delimited school space whose central reference is the classroom, in which activities are devel