Imagine ¿a kids’ game? Thinking about the future with The Lorax

Abstract

This article contains the resulting essay from a proposal made in the subject The Educational Revolutions from the Master’s in Social Change and Educational Professions of the University of Malaga. This proposal consisted of a dissertation in which a dialogue was established between the text Disputar los futuros (Garcés, 2020) and a film that would allow us to deepen our understanding of what was proposed in the reading. In this case, the chosen movie was The Lorax (Renaud, 2012). As a result, we found a text that explores issues such as the future, the imagination and education; three concepts indissolubly linked, co-dependent with each other. The future is constructed consciously by each one of us, in which education plays a fundamental role as it allows us to understand what surrounds us, as well as transmitting to us the past. And this is, at the same time, the basis of the imagination that enables each of us to create our future.
Through all this we discuss about the question we asked ourselves at the beginning of the course: What should be the response of the educational systems to the problems of the future? It is true that it is impossible to give a single answer, but it is also possible that an approximation to this may lie in something simpler than we had thought: it is not a question of focusing on what we do not know, but rather on making what surrounds us understandable.