Adapted from www.educationfutures.com/timeline: Education Futures celebrates its first five years of exploring new futures in human capital development with a timeline of the history of modern education. This timeline provides not only a glimpse into the past and present, but plots out a plausible future history for human capital development. The future history presented is intended to be edgy, but also as a conversation starter on futures for education and future thinking in human capital development. Although this timeline is largely U.S.-centric, the trends impacting it are global. Please consult the glossary, below, for additional information regarding many of the themes presented. As always, we invite your feedback and suggestions for further development!

1. The Education Futures
Timeline of Education
1657-2045
www.educationfutures.com/timeline

2. About
Utilizing many of the best resources for projecting futures for
human capital development, this timeline provides a glimpse
of the past, present and plausible futures for education.
To begin, simply hover your mouse over toward the right of
the timeline, or select a year to jump to from below.
To learn more about these futures, or to suggest your own,
visit www.educationfutures.com.

3. 1657
Jan Amos Comenius publishes “Orbis Sensualium
Pictus” [“World in Pictures”], launching modern education in
the West.

4. 1900
As nations race to massify education, John Dewey publishes
'The School and Society,' linking classical philosophies of
Plato and Rouseau to connect the individual with society in
education. He would make many more contributions to
Progressive education.

5. 1983
As other nations begin to embrace Progressive education, the
U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education
publishes 'A Nation at Risk,' which emphasized quantitative
performance measurement in schools. A period of reforms,
centered on testing regimes, begins.
This comes to be known as the beginning of the Dark Ages of
Modern Education.

6. 2001
The No Child Left Behind Act is signed into law, launching
Federally-mandated, standards-based education reform and
increased accountability within schools. Critics maintain that the
rote information-based, high-stakes testing regimes it created
suppresses the critical thinking among students, and eliminates
most opportunities for creative development and expression in the
formal education system.

7. 2007
MIT Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child release the XO-1
(the '$100 laptop'), designed to be distributed to children in
developing countries around the world to learn, explore and
express their creativity.

8. 2012
The Semantic Web (Web 3.0) takes off. Information systems
become outdated rapidly as competent, automated
knowledge systems emerge. The need for rote learning in
education disappears almost immediately as accurate
information is available immediately through the ubiquitous
deployment of Web-enabled tools.

9. 2015
Amid escalating criticism that the NCLB regime is creating
automatons that are routinely outperformed by software, the
U.S. Congress repeals the NCLB Act. The President calls for a
new, 'Manhattan project in education,' that will ensure the
nation's competitive success through the successful, purposive
application of creative ideas: Innovation.
The Dark Ages of Modern Education formally ends.

10. 2017
The pervasiveness of mobile and augmented reality
technologies are accepted and finally mainstreamed in
schools. Students are encouraged to use these technologies
not only to locate and interpret information, but also to
solve, creatively, problems that extend beyond the usual
curriculum.

11. 2020
After five years of trials, several medical device companies
begin mass marketing implants that provide mobile
communication and information services 24 hours a day, 7
days a week. Wealthier parents begin cautiously adopting
the technologies, spending large sums of money for basic
implants for their children, who begin to outperform their
peers in schools.

12. 2022
Partially credited to the use of augmenting technologies, a
nine-year-old girl from Ecuador wins the Nobel Prize in
Literature for a poetic novel about what it means to be truly
human. She astonishes the world by writing the text in
Chinese, and not her native Spanish.

13. 2023
Schools reach an enrollment crisis when shifts in
demographics and an increase in competition from non-
formal and informal modes of education begin diverting
pupils from formal educational organizations. The nation is
shocked when the New York City Department of Education
announces it is closing down 80% of its schools.

14. 2025
Machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence. The
Turing test is passed routinely by various artificial
intelligences.

15. 2027
Costco and Target begin carrying FDA-approved conception
enhancement kits for $24.99. Through genetic manipulation,
the products promise not only to enhance physical
performance, but to also increase the average intelligence of
children conceived through the product by 40 IQ points over
year 2010 baseline levels.

16. 2028
To boost national competitiveness, China mandates that all
parents conceive genetically enhanced children, imposing
large fines if they fail to produce offspring that are
significantly more intelligent than the previous generation.
Viewing China's move as a Sputnik-like challenge to human
capital development, Western states respond with financial
incentives for transhuman research and tax credits to
technologically augmented families.

17. 2030
Certain elements of the population begin merging human
thinking and cognitive functions with machine intelligence.
The boundaries between human and machine intelligence
become hard to define in both physical and virtual terms.

18. 2032
School teachers and university faculty that refuse to upgrade
their cognitive functions are asked to retire early as,
regularly, they are outmoded and outperformed by enhanced
pupils.

19. 2033
Several conservative colleges announce a neo-Luddite
movement to preserve 'traditional' teaching and learning by
restricting the use of technology among their faculty, staff
and students, including a prohibition of intelligence
augmentation through the use of mobile devices. Their
graduates, unable to compete in an intelligence-driven
market, become janitors, beauticians, and other low-wage
service workers.

20. 2035
An intelligent machine decides it wants to have children, and
utilizing its best knowledge from genetics, nanotechnology
and robotics, designs its own, new successor species, which,
in turn, initiates a rapid cycle of redesign and evolution. A
'golden age' begins of non-human originated creative and
innovative inputs into society and culture.

21. 2037
Technological advancements make formal education
obsolete, and the few remaining organized, formal schools of
education close their doors.

22. 2045
The Technological Singularity: Possessing neither the
smartest minds nor the strongest performers on Earth,
humans can no longer imagine their own futures. From their
perspective, change occurs seemingly instantaneously, at a
planetary magnitude. Their futures will be determined by
'others.'