Beyond shallow time: Reimagining education through deep temporalities

Education is widely seen as a key solution to the environmental multi-crisis, yet contemporary systems have done little to prevent ecological breakdown. This article argues that the gap between education's promise and its actual impact is not merely a matter of implementation but of temporality. Dominant models of education operate within ‘shallow time’, structured by short-term economic rationales and individualised notions of progress, as seen in frameworks like ‘twenty-first-century skills’. These temporal imaginaries align education with market logics, reproducing the extractivist systems that underpin ecological collapse. This article deploys the concept of ‘deep time’ as a diagnostic lens through which the contingency and narrowness of shallow-time education come into sharp relief. Yet deep time, when instrumentalised, carries its own dangers, as the philosophy of strong longtermism demonstrates. The article proposes that the attempt to embody deep time within the necessarily finite frame of a human lifespan — to hold what cannot be held — generates complexity, nonlinearity, and multiple layered temporalities, stimulating the ‘temporal imagination’. Rather than a deficit, uncertainty thus becomes central to education's ethical orientation — one that resists the pursuit of predictable outcomes while remaining firmly committed to social and environmental justice. By foregrounding temporality as a site of political and ethical struggle, this paper contributes to broader debates about time, agency, and the purpose of education in the environmental multi-crisis.