The purpose of this paper is to problematize contemporary thought of pedagogy in terms of comparing different discursive and institutional practices (teacher's education, the public health, criminal justice and crime prevention and public library). Our intellectual interest is to understand the fabrication of contemporary educable subjects through a genealogical method that explore shifts in the systems of reason that ordered late19th/ early 20th centuries and turn of the 21st century policy and programmatic discourses. The future is a central regulatory notion that we compare in these different sites. During the period after The Second World War pedagogy was formally concerned with activities in the school and within the educational system. In the beginning of the 21st century the discussion about pedagogy is however, in several respects, based on other and broader definitions. Contemporary educational knowledge and policy programs are preoccupied with the future and the central task seems to be to prepare students, teachers and citizens for a future that is conceived as more unsafe and risky than ever. Interrogating the future in those diverse contexts of writing, however, reveals that future is not a temporal concept, but a spatial one. Instead of viewing education and knowledge as a means to prepare the individuals for the future, we argue, that future is constructed by education and knowledge as a means to fabricate particular and "future-oriented" subjects and to ordering and governing a set of heterogeneous elements, men, things, institutions and discourses to achieve useful ends.The fabrication of a future-oriented subject is also connected to a new attitude toward the subject designed in the discourses about the State presuming development of new knowledge and new techniques to effect the individual. Today, as well as in earlier centuries, we seem to find ourselves in a situation where the issue of the subject is once again being transformed. But the difference between today and yesterday is that more and more institutions are designing their activities as pedagogical or educational. This trend towards "society as school" creates inscriptions of pedagogy and pedagogical technology in different institutional contexts.At the same time as we are witnessing a expansion of the domains of pedagogy into other areas, where increasingly more phenomena become codified as educational, we can also see a trend that makes pedagogy limited and reserved for the individual as an educable subject. The subject that fit this agenda is created in the absence of "society" and it also replaces society as the organizing principle of educational thought. The subject is now the organizer of his and her destiny and the task of education is to empower the subjects to put life into order by themselves. This paradox between the broader tendencies towards a society as a school and the narrowing of the same to an individual commission (often expressed in terms as life-long and life-wide learning, self-regulation, empowerment etc.) seems to be the governmental condition in the early 21st century. The governing of the society, the nation and the future seems to make this detour through the individual (educable) subject.In addition to current empirical sources we draw from historical sources from the mid 1800s and the first part of the 19th century. The paper is a part of a project funded by the Swedish Research Council and runs for a period of three years.