The Future Makers
In September 2013, the Center for the Future of Museums and The Henry Ford Foundation invited a group of “policy experts, practitioners, funders, education innovators, reformers, student activists and others shaping the conversation about U.S. education” to a conference at National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
According to Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of CFM and a “professional museum futurist,” they were invited “in response to forecasts from CFM and other futures organizations that America is on the cusp of transformational change in the educational system.”
If you weren’t aware that there are powerful groups that forecast (plan) our future for us, read here for more. Essentially, these groups, including Global Education Futures and KnowledgeWorks – both of which work with organizations as high up the chain as UNESCO – get together to create maps of the future they envision for the rest of us.
Curiously, despite their rhetoric of innovation and “disruptive” ideas, these forecasters all seem to have the very same vision of the future: doing away with our education system as we know it and replacing it with a digitalized, personalized-standardized, data-cized, competency-based system.
Oddly enough, this just so happens to be the same vision that giant corporations like Microsoft, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Exxon-Mobile have projected for us, along with members of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Oh – and the US. Department of Education.
Merritt, of course, and her fellow futurists, are well aware of the The Future Makers – Save Maine Schools: