Education for sustainable development (ESD) is a field that is closely linked to a political rationality of education based on individual responsibility and action, including moral responsibilities for social and intergenerational justice. As a part of a larger project on subject positions of the child in policy documents and teaching materials, this paper focuses on the role of undecidables in the fabrication of the ‘good child’ in the Swedish curriculum for the compulsory school, as well as the dilemma of undecidability for teaching ESD according to the same curriculum.

Over the last decades, the conditions for research have gradually changed towards a greater dependence on external review of research priorities, commercialization of research and a major shift in the accountability of science (Nowotny et al 2003), leading to a new set of rules and criteria for evaluation and assessment of research. This has also implications for evaluation and assessment within the school system. A critical point is the number of control stations and the new hierarchies of assessment, suggesting that the ‘Knowledge Society’ has also become an ‘Audit Society’ (Power 1997). Hargreaves (2003) characterizes this as “the tunnel vision of test scores, achievement targets, and league tables of accountability” (ibid:1).

In the case of education for sustainable development, it is therefore unclear in which context and under which circumstances such education can be implemented, shared and, not least, assessed. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that environmental issues – a field defined by risk and uncertainty – are a prime mover for designing ‘a better future’. The intrinsic assumptions about the society in the future do also imply a risk of being trapped in a complex epistemology, expressed by its own idiom (Rose and Miller 2010). This idiom (language) is a mix of rational scientific statements, moral judgments and vague predictions about a ‘common future’.

Within a framework of governmentality (Foucault 1991, Rose and Miller 2010), the curriculum represents technologies of government, providing an undecidable terrain open for interpretation and decisions by subjects. Based on previous studies, the subject positions of the good child (Popkewitz 2007) emerges from: (1) science-based categorization, (2) the lifelong learner, (3) the informed consumer, and (4) celebration of diversity. These four features represent a political rationale characterised by a contradictory amalgamation of cosmopolitanism and value pluralism. In combination with a growing culture of measurement and assessment in Swedish education, this reinforces abjection processes in school.

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