Two quotes from this wonderful PhD thesis by Stuart Candy (2010).
This first one is from a talk by Bruce Sterling (who is paraphrasing Warren Ellis):
There's a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is. Between apocalyptic politics and Nerd-vana, is the human dimension. How this stuff is taken on board, by smart people, at street level. ... That's where the story lies... in this spread of possible futures, and the people, on the ground, facing them. The story has to be about people trying to steer, or condemn other people, toward one future or another, using everything in their power. That's a big story.
The second is from Candy himself:
Humanity appears to be caught between two competing visions for society, two kinds of future: one appears to be unthinkably bad, the other unimaginably good. The paradox is that, vague though they are, the diametrically opposed potentials both have an aura of plausibility. Strangely enough, the balance between these competing images of the future seems to shift depending on what evidence you happen to attend to at the moment, and even on your mood as you consider them. It is as if the slider of the probable future moves depending on how you tilt your mind.
We would do well to keep both these ideas in mind we consider the future of education.