As a Man Who Can See the Future

Physicists assure us that despite how it seems, there is no difference between the past and the future. The math tells us it's true, even as the perspective provided by the biology of human bodies simply doesn't allow us to experience the past (except through our unreliable memories) or the future (except through even more unreliable fortune tellers). The cliché is to shrug and say that all we have is the present, but even the present isn't truly available to us. It takes a few milliseconds for our sensations to reach our brains, so even what we are experiencing right now is actually occurring ever so slightly in the past.

In his introduction to The Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "Stephen Hawking . . . found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child's play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now . . . To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say: 'Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are.'"

I'll be 63 in a few weeks, more than 20 years older than Vonnegut was when he wrote his great novel. As a young man, I often wondered about what would become of me. I worried about it. I wished for a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of my life as an old man. I thought that if I could see where I live in the future, how I live, who I'm with, I could rest easy in the choices I was making in the present. If I saw my future self as, say, a professional baseball coach, I would know not to quit playing baseball. If I saw my future self as a happily married man, I'd know not to mourn the women with whom I'd already broken up. If I saw my future as a down-and-out drifter, or a convict, or if there was no future at all, I'd at least be able to relax and enjoy myself while I still could. After all, if the math is right, if the future already exists, there's nothing I can do to change it, even if everything I do will help bring it to reality.

Like Vonnegut, remembering the future is now child's play for me, but what never occurred to me as a young man is that there is a future beyond 63. From my younger perspective, life seemed to be about striving to get through school, get on that career track, find that special someone, then, I guess, just coast the rest of the way. If I'd seen myself as I am today, I'm quite certain that I'd have, at some level, neglected to live in the present because what I have now would have looked, on the surface, pretty good to my younger self. If I'd known the whole story from the start, my life would have been a lot of going through the motions which is how people with clinical depression say they experience life. Oh sure, I'd get fired up for the day I met my wife or the birth of our daughter, but every bit of joy would be tempered by the certainty of those times when illness or stupidity or bad luck made life suck. And always, down the road, would be this 63-year-old man that I've become no matter what I did. All this to say that I'm thankful that I never met the genii to grant my wish for a peek into the future.

Schooling, as it's practiced today, is an effort to shape this unknowable future. "We must get our children ready for the jobs of tomorrow" is the mantra of our policymakers whenever they talk about education. It's BS, of course, because no one knows what those jobs of tomorrow are going to be. At best, our schools are preparing children for the jobs of today, most of which are soon be relegated to the past. But really, when we look at what's actually being taught in our schools, we're mostly just preparing children for the jobs of yesterday.

Maybe we shouldn't be preparing our children for anything, but rather give them permission to live the life they are prepared for right now.

As a man who can see the future, I'm here in the present to urge us all to forget this crazy project of 20 years of mandatory vocational training for every child, humans who show they know more than we do. They show us they clearly understand that if they are to be princesses or superheroes, the time is right now. And if a child knows that, right now, they want to be something more pedestrian, like a supermarket cashier or to sell popcorn at a movie theater, not only do our laws forbid it, our entire system of schooling tells them "No." They must first be educated for at least two decades in order to fill their past up with what those of us who do see the future know will be mostly useless. And what bits and pieces that do turn out to be relevant can be more easily learned by simply living, maybe even as a cashier or popcorn seller. We tell children, "But, supermarkets and movie theaters won't exist by the time we're finished with you," "Princess is not legitimate career tracks," and they may or may not know to reply, "Duh! That's why I need to be those things now!"

If I'd gotten my wish and seen myself as the 63-year-old I am, I might well have given up playing baseball on the spot instead of, you know, being a baseball player for as long as I could. I might well have never made all those friends as I waited for my one true love. I might well have never tried my hand at the many "careers" I explored before settling on this one. At the end of the day, the more we cast our gaze on the future, the less we live in the present . . . Or rather that moment a few dozen milliseconds in the past that appears to us as right now.

That dog of the future is curled up at our feet right now. It's always there, knowing and liking us. We ought not have to wait our entire lives to pet it.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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