CA Update - Peter Bishop

Over a 30-year career, Peter Bishop developed the Framework Foresight curriculum, established a foresight certificate program, and trained professionals worldwide. In retirement, he founded Teach the Future to bring Futures Studies into education. His mission remains transforming education to prepare students for an uncertain future.

Teach the Future

After high school, I entered a Jesuit seminary, a sheltered existence, to be sure. I was fascinated by the events of the day, and ultimately, they sparked my interest in social change.

I gave up my goal of becoming both a priest and a physicist and instead enrolled at Michigan State University to study sociology and social change. The department didn’t offer a course in that subject, so I carved my own path—writing my theory paper on the nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., surveying students traveling to Washington, D.C., to protest the war for my master’s thesis, and working within a health planning agency to educate and activate citizens on its Board of Directors.

My teaching career began at Georgia Southern College, where I taught sociology. I adopted Gerhard Lenski’s approach, which explored the different forms of society throughout human history rather than the standard cross-sectional method used in most textbooks.. I also taught Social Problems, the closest I could get to my true interest—social change.

Then, an opportunity arose. I was recruited to join the faculty at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, a newly established branch campus next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. My role was to teach research methods and statistics to Behavioral Science students, but what truly captured my interest was something unexpected—the first-ever degree in Futures Studies, established in 1975. Social change and Futures Studies were, in my mind, one and the same. In 1983, I launched the program, began teaching in it, and directing it. That marked the start of my 30-year career as an academic futurist. as an academic futurist.

Over the years, I organized the Framework Foresight curriculum to prepare graduate students for careers as professional futurists and wrote *Teaching about the Future* to document that curriculum. I helped establish the Association of Professional Futurists, which now serves over 500 futurists worldwide. In 2005, we moved the program to the Central Campus of the University of Houston, and by 2006, I had moved the program online—the first such degree at the University of Houston—allowing students to study this emerging field without relocating to Houston.

In 2009, I established a Certificate in Foresight program, which has since served over a hundred working professionals annually. From 2014 to 2022, I had the privilege of teaching over 400 civil servants from 100 different Canadian government agencies.

I wasn’t ready to stop working when I retired from the university in 2013. Instead of stepping away from the field, I founded Teach the Future in 2015. By then, Futures Studies had evolved from its early reputation as speculative fortune-telling into a respected discipline embraced by businesses, governments, and civil society organizations worldwide. But one sector remained notably absent—education. While adults were adopting the insights and methodologies of this forward-looking discipline, young people remained trapped in an outdated paradigm that focused on straight-line forecasting rather than shaping the future. In most schools, there was no instruction on why or how to influence the future. The result? A generation growing increasingly anxious about their personal futures and the world they are inheriting.

Social change is real. It has disrupted lives and transformed societies countless times, and today, it is happening more frequently than ever. Yet, our education system is still focused on the past, failing to prepare students for the uncertainties ahead. History and sociology examine the past and analyze societies in static snapshots rather than as ongoing narratives. Economics and political science are fixated on current empirical data rather than the deeper purposes and consequences of the systems shaping our world. Science and technology continue to drive change without always considering its human impact.

The 2020s, like every era before it, will be studied by future historians. But what will they say about us? One troubling possibility is that education, always looking backward, failed to adapt to a rapidly changing world. My purpose has been to create a better world through education. To truly achieve that goal, we must leverage our influence and resources to transform education—shifting its focus from the past to the future, from certainty to adaptability, from memorization to creativity. I am not the one to single-handedly make this change, but I am leading part of it. It is time for educators to follow suit.

~ Peter Bishop