The current public education system in Ontario is seen as successful, having raised standardized test scores and improved teacher training over the past 10 years. These measures of success, however, don’t reflect the changes that will need to be adopted to support learning in the future. Learners are missing out on critical experiences, information and interventions that will better enable them to succeed in the future, because the system is highly resistant to change.

Using a poststructural foresight methodology known as Causal Layered Analysis combined with the temporal change model of Three Horizons, this research shows that there are deep myth and metaphor level changes required in the system in order to ensure the future success of learners.

Opportunities for innovation emerge in three areas: including student self-reporting of well-being into quality and learning assessment, developing co-operative, community-owned learning spaces for educational and social development, and infusing dialogic design methods and design-led practices into the facilitation of learning. Finally, a theory of change is proposed over a long term, recognizing the resistance to change in the system and introducing the quality of “bounded temporality”, the idea that we may not be able to make the best decisions for the future because we are limited by our blindness to time-based values and orthodoxies that shape what we believe to be obvious.