The Future of Education: Panel Curated by Rebecca F. Kuang
Author Rebecca F. Kuang curates a panel at Southbank Centre examining threats to higher education and what a genuinely reformed university might look like.
Why we picked this
Kuang spent years inside elite academic institutions while writing fiction that dissects how knowledge gets made, gatekept, and weaponised — this panel puts that experience to work.
Rebecca F. Kuang — whose novels have systematically interrogated the institutions that shape and suppress human knowledge, from translation to academia to power itself — curates this panel on the future of education as part of Southbank Centre’s Letters to the Future weekend. The conversation addresses not just the practical threats to higher education (funding cuts, political interference, adjunct precarity) but asks the harder question: what would a university look like if we rebuilt it from genuine first principles?
Kuang’s fiction has always been drawn to the hidden curriculum — what institutions teach by what they don’t say, who they include and who they quietly exclude. This panel applies that critical lens to real institutions, bringing together thinkers and practitioners who are trying to imagine alternatives rather than simply defend what already exists.
The Letters to the Future framework means this isn’t a lament for a lost golden age of liberal education. It’s a forward-looking interrogation of what education is actually for — in a world where AI can pass exams, credentials are inflating, and the connection between learning and flourishing has never been less certain.