Education Futures

09/10/2026

GEFRI now supports MCP.

That means AI assistants can work directly with current and historical GEFRI data, compare countries and regions, inspect the indicators behind the scores, and bring that evidence into a wider analysis alongside policy documents, research, and other contextual knowledge.

This brings faster access to data AND adds the ability to make better sense of the data in context with your existing AI workflows.

I wrote a short piece on what this opens up for research, policy analysis, and comparative work:

AI assistants can now connect directly to GEFRI to work with current and historical data, compare countries and regions, and interpret results alongside other sources and contextual knowledge.

09/09/2026

Manifesto 25 is now available in 21 languages!

We have added Bengali, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Urdu, and Vietnamese, extending the manifesto well beyond the languages in which it first circulated.

The ideas in Manifesto 25 were never meant to belong to one country, one education system, or one linguistic community. Its arguments about agency, learning, institutions, and the futures we choose to build take on different meanings when they enter different cultural and political contexts. Translation gives those ideas more places to be tested, questioned, adapted, and argued with.

The new editions join Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish, alongside the original English.

Read Manifesto 25 in all 21 languages:

Manifesto 25 is a call to rethink education through equity, trust, creativity, learner-centered ecosystems, and a positive rebellion against outdated systems.

08/31/2026

What if the biggest problem facing education after 2030 is not that we are failing to prepare learners for the future, but that the future is becoming too unstable to prepare for in the ways we have come to expect?

In my new white paper, "Unprepared: Education beyond 2030," I argue that education is reaching a breaking point in its traditional promise of preparation. AI is changing work and knowledge faster than institutions can govern it. Climate disruption is becoming a material condition of schooling. Demographic pressures are pulling systems in opposite directions. All of this is happening while hundreds of millions of learners still lack access to education or foundational skills.

The danger is what I call "preparation without power": asking people to become more adaptable, resilient, skilled, and "future ready" while the infrastructures shaping learning, work, data, technology, and opportunity remain beyond their control.

The paper explores what may follow: human lag, agency collapse, educational neo-feudalism, the narrowing of higher education, climate disruption, and growing dependence on automated systems. It also asks what a different future would require.

My argument is that education beyond 2030 must move from preparation alone toward educational sovereignty: the ability of learners, educators, institutions, and communities to govern, limit, exit, and build the systems through which learning occurs.

Education cannot promise certainty about the future. But educators can still protect the agency, judgment, and collective capacity people will need to shape it. The central question for education beyond 2030 is who gets to govern and act as the systems around us become harder to understand and control.

Read the white paper:

A white paper on why educational preparation is breaking down and what institutions must build beyond 2030.

08/26/2026

We’re nerding up KnowMapped a bit. (Well, actually a lot.)

You can use KnowMapped’s built-in AI to generate knowledge maps from documents, text, or prompts, or connect your own AI workflow through MCP. ChatGPT, Codex, or another compatible client can create maps, add concepts and relationships, and keep working with existing maps as your analysis develops.

Use ours or roll your own. The new post explains how the two approaches fit together and how KnowMapped MCP works in practice.

KnowMapped MCP allows compatible AI assistants to create and edit knowledge maps directly, connecting conversational workflows with KnowMapped's visual mapping environment.

08/21/2026

Happy Friday. Now that many schools and universities across the Northern Hemisphere are coming back to life for a new academic year, I want to make sure this did not get lost in the summer shuffle.

In July, we released the mid-2026 update of the Global Education Futures Readiness Index, or GEFRI, with revised data for 217 countries and jurisdictions, a new scoring engine, new interactive tools, and recalculated historical scores going back to 2016.

The update reinforces something I keep coming back to: futures readiness is not about having strength in one area. It depends on balance across infrastructure, human capital, school access and gender parity, innovation, and governance. In fact, 65.9% of countries show a gap of at least 30 points between their strongest and weakest dimensions.

One of the clearest patterns is that infrastructure continues to outpace innovation. In 83.4% of countries, infrastructure scores are markedly stronger than research and innovation capacity. That means many systems have become better equipped to adopt technology than to shape it, evaluate it, or produce it themselves.

That gap deserves more attention as schools return to conversations about AI, digital transformation, workforce readiness, and education reform. Connectivity and devices can create the conditions for change, but they do not guarantee the institutional, human, or research capacity needed to direct that change.

The updated GEFRI is designed to help move the conversation from rankings toward diagnosis: Where is a system actually constrained? Which dimension is holding progress back? Are gains in one area being undermined by weakness somewhere else?

If you missed the update over the summer, this is a good time to take another look:

https://educationfutures.com/post/the-gefri-mid-2026-update-new-data-persistent-readiness-gaps/

And explore the data directly at:

https://gefri.educationfutures.com

The mid-2026 GEFRI update provides a view of how well education systems are positioned to respond to social, technological, economic, and institutional change.

08/19/2026

Almost a year ago, I published a piece asking what many view a provocative question: Is AI making humans “cognitively lazy”? (Well, actually, it was in response to many, many articles I've been reading about AI and laziness. I couldn't help myself. I had to respond!)

I have been thinking about that question again lately, and it feels more urgent now than when I wrote it. The conversation seems much more intense now.

The concern was never that using tools makes us less intelligent. Humans have always offloaded some cognitive work. We write things down, use calculators, search the web, and rely on GPS. Tools change what we do ourselves and what we hand off.

AI pushes that much further because it can now take over parts of the thinking process itself: forming an argument, generating an explanation, proposing an interpretation, solving a problem, even making decisions for us as to what is worth considering.

This makes timing so important.

There is a real difference between struggling with a question and then asking AI to challenge, extend, or refine your thinking, and asking AI what to think before you have done much thinking at all.

The phrase from the article that I keep coming back to is simple: do some thinking before you ask the model.

As AI becomes more embedded in education, we need to preserve space for first-pass human thought. Students still need opportunities to retrieve, struggle, speculate, make mistakes, form judgments, and develop ideas before an intelligent system supplies a polished path forward.

The ship has sailed on the question of whether students should use AI. The more urgent question is which parts of thinking we want learners to keep practicing for themselves, and how we design learning so those capacities continue to grow.

I wrote about the evidence, cognitive offloading, an MIT study, assessment, and what this could mean for teaching in “Is AI making humans ‘cognitively lazy’?”

Nearly a year later, I think the core argument has become more pressing: AI should *extend* human thinking, and not arrive so early that it replaces the work through which understanding develops.

https://educationfutures.com/post/is-ai-making-us-cognitively-lazy/

AI has renewed debate about learning, memory, and creativity in an age of cognitive offloading. Cognitive offloading means using…

08/19/2026

A few weeks ago, I shared my new paper on AI, coloniality, and educational sovereignty. I want to come back to one idea from it because I think it speaks directly to the present moment as institutions head into another academic year: we keep asking whether schools and universities are “AI ready,” but I think that may be the wrong question.

A school can be highly AI-ready and still have very little control over the systems it adopts. So I would rather ask whether an institution has educational sovereignty. Can it examine how an AI system behaves in its own context? Will it know when the system changes? Can students and educators retrieve their work and data in usable form? Are learning support and surveillance kept separate? Who absorbs the labor when the system fails and people have to do all the work to verify, repair, investigate, or re-teach? And can educators and students meaningfully pause or reject a system that undermines inquiry, equity, or academic freedom?

These questions shift the conversation from access to authority. Readiness tells us whether we can adopt AI. Sovereignty asks whether we still govern education after we do.

That distinction sits at the center of my recent paper, “Beyond the digital enclosure: AI, coloniality, and the pursuit of educational sovereignty.” I am curious how institutions are handling this in practice. Are your AI governance conversations focused on what users may do with AI, or on what institutions should be able to demand from the companies providing it?

Read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1108/LFET-01-2026-0004..or my archived, author manuscript: https://educationfutures.com/beyond-the-digital-enclosure/

No time to read? No worries, I KnowMapped it: https://app.knowmapped.com/public/a73c5b8f-6c0e-4238-b419-f4570ed578bb

07/16/2026

GEFRI’s mid-2026 update reveals a persistent global readiness gap ...AND introduces scoring engine 1.2, with revised Human Capital measures, stronger evidence-reliability safeguards, and recalculated scores dating back to 2016. Explore what the new data show about where countries are advancing, where progress remains uneven, and why building readiness for education futures requires more than access to technology alone.

The mid-2026 GEFRI update provides a view of how well education systems are positioned to respond to social, technological, economic, and institutional change.

11/17/2025

We just pushed a UI update to GEFRI that we hope enhances how people use and interpret the dataset.

The Global Education Futures Readiness Index (GEFRI) measures how well countries are equipping their education systems for emerging challenges and opportunities. It draws on indicators across innovation, infrastructure, human capital, governance, and equity to provide a balanced view of each country’s capacity to support future-ready learning.

Benchmarking how prepared countries are for the future of education.

05/23/2025

What if we viewed activism not as learning's most authentic expression?

What if we viewed activism not as a deviation from learning, but as its most authentic expression? Students learn…