Md, Shamsul Islam, Executive Editor, Our Time

Md, Shamsul Islam, Executive Editor, Our Time : While many outdated and irrelevant disciplines and fields of study are dominating our universities and think tanks, future studies or futurology has never been popular in our country – either as an academic discourse or as a separate area of study.
As a nation, our priority is to harp on our past, and not to pay due respect to our future world, which we would leave behind for our posterity.
In many other countries, subjects like future studies or strategic foresight is gaining increased currency in order to comprehend the dramatic social, political and technological changes the present world is undergoing. It focuses on trend, mega-trend and risk analysis as well as managing changes and postulates future directions for the nation and its policymakers. It encompasses many areas – from business trends to social changes, from technological roadmapping to strategic forecasting.
For instance, the Rohingya crisis is one such case. Was there any forecasting from our academia or think tanks about the sudden influx of Rohingyas into our territory? What kind of political engagements did we develop with Myanmar over the years that allowed the country to overlook the existing international laws and regulations? In fact, Myanmar did not figure prominently in our foreign policy agenda as our thinkers and intellectuals had never come up with any such policy propositions.
With regard to our stock market crash or the crisis in banking sector, we have seen that these situations were largely unanticipated and the people were taken aback as there was no policy forecasting. On the other hand, had there been any policy guideline on quota system on the basis of a comparative global survey, the present crisis would have been averted years back. But in every sphere, we prefer ad hoc policies, instead of looking beyond.
A similar concern is the job issue for our future graduates. Are the subjects that our children are being taught nowadays relevant to the future? According to a report published by the Institute for the Future (IFTF), USA, 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 have not been invented yet. Types of industry and industry requirements are changing at an accelerating pace, and it requires continuous and comprehensive research to understand the future job market. But our children are now trapped within the same decades-old curriculum which has already been branded outdated and irrelevant to the potential employers.
What we require now are thinkers, strategists and philosophers who would be engaged in social, political and technological roadmapping for the entire nation. We have seen that by predicting the future events and trends, futurists like Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, Michio Kaku, Nicholas Negroponte or William Gibson have greatly influenced the western thinking and the policy-making process. We also need such thinkers and strategists in this part of the world to identify and predict our issues that would confront our society, polity and economy in the foreseeable future.