Why schools need to change in times of social acceleration?

All school systems of the advanced economies of the Global North will over the next decades need to foster young people who are adaptive, resilient, creative and well, in the face of uncertain futures and known unknowns (such as, eg.: pandemics, wars, financial crises, precarious work, and environmental collapse). In order to meet this need, the institutional form of schools, their time-space matrices, and their (in Basil Bernstien’s terms) strongly classified and framed curricula, will need to change to facilitate a shift to problem-based and interdisciplinary learning. My comments on this topic will be framed within the social acceleration theory of modernity of Hartmut Rosa, locating these issues in a strong temporal context.

Professor David Kirk is currently Professor of Education and former Head of the School of Education (2014-17) at the University of Strathclyde. He is an educational researcher with teaching and research interests in educational innovation, curriculum history, and physical education and sport pedagogy.He is founding editor of the peer reviewed journal Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (Routledge) and editor of Routledge Studies in Physical Education and Youth Sport. He has held academic appointments previously in universities in England, Australia, Ireland and Belgium and he is currently Honorary Professor of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland. His most recent single-authored book Precarity, Critical Pedagogy and Physical Education was published by Routledge in 2020. His most recent co-authored book with Professor Ash Casey, Applying Models-based Practice in Physical Education, was published by Routledge in 2024.