When Education Becomes Permanent Preparation

A few days ago, I read a piece by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker called Do We Think Too Much About the Future?

Rothman’s argument is that modern life has become increasingly organized around anticipation. We predict, prepare, optimize, forecast, and rehearse tomorrow constantly. The future no longer sits somewhere ahead of us. In many ways, we already live inside it psychologically.

The more I thought about this in relation to schools, the more I wondered whether education has become one of the clearest expressions of this condition.

Of course, schools have always had one eye on what comes next. Parents entrust schools with helping young people move toward adulthood, independence, and opportunity. But older ideas of education seemed to hold a different balance. Education was not only preparation for life. It was also part of life itself.

In earlier times, literature did not need to justify itself through transferable skills. Science still contained wonder before it became entangled with innovation agendas and employability. History was valued because it connected young people to human stories larger than themselves, not simply because it strengthened analytical thinking.

Today the language of school feels different.

Schools speak constantly about preparing students for uncertainty, disruption, adaptability, AI, and jobs that do not yet exist. And don’t get me wrong, this is understandable. The world is changing rapidly, and schools cannot afford nostalgia disguised as principle.

But increasingly, schools risk communicating something far more consequential alongside these ambitions: that life is always somewhere further ahead.

So the fourteen-year-old is busy assembling a portfolio of leadership roles, service activities, competitions, and internships already shaped by the demands of university admissions. Parents discuss strategic pathways for children who haven't yet learned to ride a bike. Every interest, club, subject, and hobby is subtly translated into future value.

Even wellbeing is often framed instrumentally. We want students emotionally regulated because calmer children perform better academically. We want resilience because the years ahead may be difficult. We want mindfulness because it may improve focus and performance.

And somewhere inside all of this, young people can begin absorbing a difficult lesson very early: who you are right now is always slightly insufficient compared to who you are preparing to become.

Reading Rothman, I found myself thinking again about the way experience strategy asks schools an altogether different kind of question. Not simply whether students are succeeding, but what human beings are actually experiencing while they are here.

Our work with schools around the world convinces us that every school creates a feeling around life and learning, whether it means to or not.

Some create an atmosphere of permanent anticipation, where the next assessment, milestone, application, or performance metric is always waiting just ahead. Others create environments where students can still experience learning as something alive in the present, not simply preparation for judgment later.

This is the tension modern schools now have to confront.

Schools absolutely should prepare young people for a changing world. They should evolve intelligently alongside it. But if education becomes entirely dominated by preparation, optimization, and positioning, something essential can begin to disappear: the experience of being human in the present tense.

As artificial intelligence increasingly commoditizes access to knowledge and information, I suspect this question will only become more significant. The schools that stand out may not simply be the ones most aggressively chasing change, but the ones where young people still feel awake to their own lives while they are living them.

Because ultimately, schools are not only shaping future adults. They are also shaping whether childhood itself feels hurried, performative, and transactional, or whether some part of it still remains human.

And if Rothman is correct, then all of us will have to decide if childhood is a phase of life to be lived, or simply a staging ground for what lies ahead.

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash