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This chapter explores essential questions of the role of education in society and how it must change as humanity assumes control and responsibility for many of the Earth’s systems. The chapter begins with an analysis of foundational concepts of education’s purpose and how and when its purpose as a societal construct was clear. Looking forward, humanity’s fate in the twenty-first century is tied together or commonly held. Sustainable well-being, complexity and systems change in education, and how teaching and learning should be reconfigured for an era of uncertainty are all examined as areas for redesign of teaching, learning and education systems themselves. The chapter concludes with the assertion that for a post-Enlightenment, deeply interconnected age marked by uncertainty and transformational technology, education’s purpose is to enable societies to succeed at a new frontier where the taxonomies of today are limiting progress.

This chapter explores foundational issues around the meanings, creation, measurement, and continuous renewal of sustainable well-being societies. It begins with a probe into the long history of concern around advancing human well-being and follows with an inquiry into the deep roots of why sustainable well-being societies are not ubiquitous today. Four bedrock assumptions that forged the status quo and form the core of the dominant, guiding metanarrative are identified. While these cornerstones of the prevailing metanarrative may have had significant relevance for leveraging opportunities and advancing quality of life in the past, they are no longer consistent with our knowledge of the state of the planet, the goals of sustainable well-being societies, or our survival as a species. I argue that the growing calls for large-scale, transformative change rest on three, intertwined building blocks: constructing new, life-affirming metanarratives; clarifying what we mean by sustainable well-being societies and how to measure them; and learning how to use broad heuristics to rapidly develop, prototype, and test promising social and technological innovations. The chapter concludes with sanguine examples that illustrate how meaningful, lasting change is already resulting from using these sorts of heuristics to create powerful new models that are displacing the existing model of reality, not by fighting it, but by making it obsolete.

The purpose of this article is to analyse some key value-loaded structural factors that influence the operational culture of basic education. These factors have to be recognised when aiming to develop school work and promote sustainable wellbeing society. The study of school history in the USA and Finland has long recognized certain permanent dilemmas affecting the development work of basic education. Visions of educational policy, new curriculum targets or technological applications relating to education cannot remove the tensions existing inside education, and people working on this kind of development are not always aware of the part it plays in the development work. This article deals with the tensions between different values that are produced by the educational institutions and the surrounding society, and that can be found in the educational rhetoric, in the curriculum and the instruction models and pedagogic practices of basic education.

If education is to play a role in the transition to a sustainable well-being society, what issues of purpose and practice arise? How can schools achieve the agility, not only to adapt to a changing environment, but also to engage in transformative action? What roles must the teacher assume in such a setting, and what kinds of training and development will be necessary? In this reflective essay on practice, the authors maintain that the school of the future ignores the basic axioms of twentieth-century schooling, i.e., separate students into “tracks,” divide knowledge into “subjects,” and hold school apart from the world. Drawing from their experiences at High Tech High, a public charter school organization in California, the authors offer concrete examples from across the K-12 years, describing efforts at High Tech High and its embedded graduate school of education to create an equitable community of inquiry in which all students and staff engage in action research, improvement science, and other forms of inquiry focused on key questions of sustainability: who are we, what kind of community do we envision, and how do we move forward together?

Sustainable development is said to be the greatest learning challenge that mankind has ever faced. When exploring this statement closely, it seems that the question is about unlearning. Unsustainable ways of living as well as economic models and production systems accelerating environmental problems are so deeply rooted in our culture and daily lives that it feels almost impossible to change them. Nevertheless, this transformation is the only way that enables us to thrive on this planet in the future. Are we prisoners of our current worldview, culture and our mental models with a predetermined destiny? Or is there a power inside us that can give the humankind a chance for a fundamental mind shift? What can educational organisations and systems do to liberate this potential?

How can we make better decisions to solve complex problems? How can we reach for unseen ideas and inventions? A sustainable and coherent future is embedded in coherent decision making, successful problem solving and radical innovating. Solving the seemingly impossible and creating something outside of our current imagination cannot be reached just with novel combinations of existing components. We must exceed the known. Often, we do not realize that current problem scoping narrows down possible future solutions. We ignore the potentials we consider impossible. However, there is a vast untapped potential of the human mind. Studies made with creative and highly intuitive individuals show that the boundaries of the mind can be surpassed for example through intentional intuiting. Intentional intuiting opens new ways to acquire information, recognize meaningful outliers and enhance creativity. People who can leverage intuiting and resilient thinking create a head start compared with analytical thinkers. These types of skills are trainable and can work as drivers for the sustainable wellbeing of future societies.

Over the past one hundred years, systems of free, public education have been powerful engines of change, propelling societies to realize greater potential socially and economically and socially. We are at a moment where education is again needed to help address the significant and complex challenges facing our respective nations and the planet. Educators are a critical part of engineering that paradigm shift. There is the need to fundamentally rethink the structure of how we train and support educators, which can unlock their potential to be more effective agents of change, thereby promoting greater sustainability and well-being in students, among fellow educators and on the broader system itself. In this chapter, we tell the story of how our system of education is currently not working for kids or most of the adults in it; we set the context by examining megatrends for what’s currently impacting education; we lay out the logic for why rethinking how adults in the system learn is a priority with an example of what the future of educator learning could be. In conclusion, this chapter makes an argument for why rethinking professional learning has the power to transform education systems moving forward.

The rate of change in our lives today has pushed us to evolve and adapt our daily practices so quickly, that if one does not pause to reflect on them it is easy to overlook just how much our world has changed. The past 50, 20, and even just the past 10 years has produced deep and profound changes in our world. Just 20 years ago, many educational systems were under intense scrutiny for not being effective and/or equitable for all learners. Many educational systems were not up to par—and to think, that was before these global dramatic shifts. The call and demand for radically improved, but more poignantly, educational systems have never been higher. What does it mean to prepare young learners for a life in today’s world? What do they need? What do we value? How can we deliver that? These are complex yet critically important questions to the future of education. Today, each of us faces a highly complex, rapidly changing world that affects our lives at a local level. The way we communicate, do business, even interface with our doctors and government officials is altering. Entire industries are deeply impacted by new technologies that continue to arrive at a rapidly increasing pace, with once long-held traditional job skills being phased out—leaving a growing generation of people to ask how they are to make a living.

Those who study the future tend to imagine worlds where burdens are eased and pleasure and personal freedom are elevated. While the concept of work has not disappeared from their predictions, changing technological and global realities have caused a re-imagining of that world. This chapter explores how to educate young students for work environments in a very different future. Specifically, I demonstrate how creativity and arts learning strengthen students’ ability to manage and navigate that new world and contribute to a sustainable society. I offer an educational case study of a highly successful urban public high school for the arts and argue that its intensive arts education model prepares passionate students who can engage with an uncertain future, even if they are less advantaged.

Education has played an important role promoting well-being and the sustainable development of our society. But what will be the role and responsibility of education in a changing world? Is there a need for formal education or even a physical place called school in the future? Today, information is everywhere, accessible to everyone and anyone can modify it—you can learn new skills through the web and the need for formal education as it has been traditionally practiced has diminished. Schools are not isolated institutions; their future growth and prospect are strongly connected to societal development trends and to education policy. And at the same time, the school itself can bring about change and influence future development trends. Our actions for tomorrow are never objective and are affecting how the future society will be. This chapter analyses the forces affecting change in schools to understand how they are changing. Diversification of populations in schools is reviewed through the lens of Helsinki’s public schools to better understand issues of identity at the individual and communal level.