by Enjoying talk to packed house at the Future of Our Children: Identifying the Issues Impacting Children sponsored by The George Foundation, The Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce & Children at Risk, and held at the Texas Safari Ranch. I gave my talk on the Future of Youth Happiness study we did a few years ago for MTV. As I was prepping the talk, I heard a point about how several nations are getting ahead of the US in large part because they are spending more time in the classroom. The point was they were putting more time into learning. Agreed! But, as I was thinking about what I learned during the MTV work, it wasn’t adding up. My dissonance came from the idea that more time in the classroom is the solution. More time yes, but in the classroom? No. One thing we can be pretty sure about is that confining today’s and tomorrow’s kids into classrooms for eight hours a day year round is going to make schools seem more like prisons than places to learn. A key challenge for educators will be coming up with ways to bring learning outside the traditional classroom, to wherever it makes the most sense to take place. Admittedly, this raises a hornet’s nest of issues, but clearly the educated person of tomorrow will be much better served by more hands-on field experience type learning than sitting in classrooms listening to lectures. Andy Hines
About Andy Hines
Dr. Andy Hines is Program Coordinator at the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Foresight, bringing together the experience he earned as an organizational, consulting, and academic futurist. He is also speaking, workshopping, and consulting through his firm Hinesight.
Before that, he was Managing Director of Social Technologies/Innovaro, and served as an Adjunct Professor with the university since 2004. Hines enjoyed earlier careers as a consulting and organizational futurist. He was a partner with Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a think tank and consulting firm that specialized in the study of the future. He was also Futurist & Senior Ideation Leader at Dow Chemical with a mission of using futures tools and knowledge to turn ideas into new business opportunities. Before that, Hines established and ran the Global Trends Program for the Kellogg Company.
Hines is motivated by a professional hunger to make foresight practical and useful, and he believes that foresight can help deliver the insight that is so needed in today’s organizations and the world. His goal, he says, is to infect as many change agents as possible with this message. Thus, he has honed a skill set designed to make foresight more actionable in organizations.
In this pursuit, he has authored five books: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape (No Limits Publishing, 2011); Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (Social Technologies, 2007); 2025: Science and Technology Reshapes US and Global Society (Oak Hill, 1997); and Managing Your Future as an Association (ASAE, 1994) and has another in the hands of publishers: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education. He has also authored dozens of articles, speeches, and workshops, including the 2003 Emerald Literati Awards’ Outstanding Paper accolade for best article published in Foresight for “An Audit for Organizational Futurists” and the 2008 award for “Scenarios: The State of the Art.” He has appeared on several radio and television programs, PBS Houston, KRIV-26 News, and the CBS “Early Show.” He also co-founded and is former Chair of the Association of Professional Futurists.
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