Does the Future Need Schools? Space-Time Learning, Part-Time and VR

John Moravec runs Education Futures, a research and advisory practice on learning, technology and educational change. In March 2018 he sent a survey titled Does the Future Need Schools? to a select, deliberately varied group of contacts around the world. The aim was to build an ecology of ideas for future research, not to settle the question. His own framing was that a school in 2018 looks and works much as one did a century earlier, while the future of work looks increasingly uncertain.

One line of argument holds that school settings would change the way creative companies' workspaces have changed over three decades. It leaned on the space-time office, an idea developed by the space planning consultant Andrew Chadwick and the writer Jeremy Melvin. According to the Architects' Journal, Chadwick won a competition judged by Norman Foster in 1982 to design the office of the future, the future being the year 2000, with an entry called the Office in a Briefcase that opened to reveal a screen and keyboard. The idea that followed is summed up in one line: the space you need for the time you need it.

Applied to education, the same logic means students attend a school building part time and learn elsewhere for the rest of the week. Because fewer students are on site at any moment, buildings can be smaller and built to a higher standard. The argument also cited Clark Aldrich's Unschooling Rules and its point that a classroom mostly teaches people how to behave in a classroom.

The second half of the argument concerns what replaces the factory-era classroom. It describes varied learning settings that act as research and experimentation workshops, with the student, not the teacher, at the center of the experience. Educators would then concentrate on creating the opportunities and environments in which students learn, which is the foundation of learner-centric or student-led education.

VR and AR enter as a way to recreate such workshop environments at school or at home, letting students approach a topic from every angle and giving them more agency over their education. Two vendors served as examples: Stambol, a Canadian VR and AR studio whose educational products often come as games or interactive experiences, and VISIONxR, a platform for several users in several places to collaborate and learn together across VR, AR, desktop and mobile devices.

Learning outside the classroom walls became routine during the covid-19 pandemic, and the argument treats that as evidence for the idea.

The Education Futures website is live and describes itself as the research and advisory practice of Dr. John Moravec, working with schools, universities, governments and other organizations. Its featured publications now include Manifesto 25, a set of twenty-five principles challenging education's reliance on compliance and standardization, the book Build a Positive Rebellion, presented in an April 7, 2026 article, and the Global Education Futures Readiness Index. The site lists articles from late 2026, among them one on the problems of edtech.

The Education Futures page that a search engine returns for the 2018 question, a blog post titled Does the future need schools?, no longer loads as of November 2026.