Next academic year’s incoming high school class will be the first to graduate on the other side of 2030. This matters because the year carries an unusual symbolic weight, perhaps greater than any other date in lived memory, even 2000.
2030.
It is, in one sense, an arbitrary marker, a new decade in the Common Era. Yet it has become a fixed point around which many national and institutional programs have organized their expectations, benchmarks, and warnings: SDGs, World Bank Human Capital Framework, Paris Climate Accords.
2030 is an event horizon because it crosses multiple thresholds at once: technological, ecological, and political. At the same time, it marks a point beyond which our collective imagination no longer sees clearly. It stands less as a prediction than as a shared recognition that the world is now moving at a velocity that outruns most of our institutions, systems, and boundaries. It names both what is passing out of reach and the uncertainty of what must now be met without the maps we have been using.
This is the world into which next year’s entering high school class will graduate.
Next academic year’s incoming Grade 6 class will graduate in 2033, Grade 3 in 2036. And August will welcome school’s youngest students, the first class to graduate high school in the 2040s.
2026 is thus also a threshold year for school, as it sets students on a trajectory to 2040. And if 2030 marks an event horizon, 2040 marks the world reorganized by its gravity.
In 2040, high school graduates will be 18 years old. With advances in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and depleted social welfare systems, it is not unreasonable to posit that they will be in some kind of workforce beyond 2090, maybe 2100, and that they will be alive in 2125. It is not impossible that their children will approach the 23rd century.
School increasingly recognizes that it is no longer fit for its inherited purposes of citizenship and preparation for work. Yet its responses rarely escape its own grammar. What is presented as reform is, in fact, a category mistake: an ontological crisis (what school is for) misread as an epistemological one (how school legitimates learning), which can be addressed through new ways of evidencing learning rather than questioning the conditions and reproductive forces of schooling itself.
School is based on assumptions of predictability and long-term stasis: the world evolves, but the curriculum, assessment, and credentials can be structured and planned to respond to this evolution. Whether it be tweaks in how points are collected toward diplomas (ex: adding a project component), changing the nomenclature but not the logic of achievement (ex: competencies), or adding a unit on sustainability or entrepreneurship but not touching the core curriculum, school spends much of its time patching the building’s cracks rather than looking at the shifting ground on which it stands.
School reform keeps trying to re-form because it exists for predictability.
This is why I believe education must move beyond promising to prepare students for the future by having them acquire a canon of knowledge and skills or stack achievements as if they were portable into other times and places.
This move beyond is at the heart of regenerative education.
Regenerative education is not a tagline, a Venn diagram, or an off-the-shelf program. It does not come with quick fixes or the assumptions that made traditional schooling workable. It is grounded in life’s principles, and life is emergent, not predictable; dynamic, not static. Living systems persist by learning, adapting, and reorganizing, often under pressure, and often without a roadmap.
When predictability collapses, traditional school runs into an unsolvable problem because learning cannot be represented as stacked achievements like reports, diplomas, and competency passports. What served then is no longer valuable.
A regenerative approach to education asks not how learning can be represented with symbols and papers, frozen within existing structures, but how learning itself becomes a mode of co-shaping in a world that is reorganizing faster than ever. Regenerative education treats learning as the process of co-shaping, with others (human and other-than-human) because we can never live as separate: we are interdependent and mutually co-constituted/ive.
Regenerative education emphasizes learning as participation, not acquisition, so that what we do with our learning matters. It refuses the idea that knowledge can be stockpiled in advance for conditions that can be replicated and expected in a world that can do neither. Instead, it teaches us how to adapt to changes in context, as nature does continuously. Regenerative education prepares learners for the “unpreparable,” not by anticipating outcomes, but by cultivating the capacity to respond, reorganize, and participate with others as conditions shift.
When we talk about preparing students to shape regenerative futures, we are not talking about idealism or abstract values. We are talking about young people who will be the ones who can:
- recognize when existing systems are no longer fit to serve life and when they require reorganization rather than repair or reform (re-form),
- recognize when expertise and solutions have reached their limits, rather than mistaking familiarity for relevance,
- learn and do across spaces and differences, without needing uniform agreement,
- and contribute to designing conditions where different members of the community (human and other-than-human) can live well as themselves, without one being made possible only at the expense of another.
For students graduating in 2032, 2035, and beyond, these capacities will matter as much as, if not more than, mastering any single body of content whose relevance may have already expired by the time it is assessed and recorded. The point is not that content stops mattering, it’s that knowledge becomes aliveness-in-relation, not possession, that is situated here and in this moment. Beyond the event horizon, we will need those who can sense change, seek better questions, shape the world with community, and tell and listen to stories that inspire and find coherence.
Regenerative education does not promise to prepare students for a future we can’t predict. It promises to prepare students for the now, whenever and wherever that may be.
Coconut Thinking 