All education is in a sense future-oriented. Students who go to school today will eventually become tomorrows´ citizens, consumers, policy-makers, work-force and parents. The aim of this study is to investigate what young people discuss about the future and how they discuss it. Making students ready for taking personal responsibilities and actively participate in society is a main task of current educational systems. Education should, according to an ESD-agenda, also allow every human being to acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values necessary to shape a sustainable future. If the future is seen as living and existing in the present, interdependency between what happens now and its consequences for the future is created. This transition can either be seen as a part of an ongoing societal development, or the sum of peoples´ behavior today. Together, the two ways of explaining the emergence of the future include interplay between both structural and individual contributions.

An overall goal with most of the education today is to create sustainability for current and future generations. However, whether this agenda becomes successful or not cannot yet be concluded since the future is always ahead of us. If we were able to make a check at a specific time in the future we could find out. If that specific time was set to for example year 2050 the planet would probably be under even more pressure than today. Environmental impacts and demographic and economic challenges would most likely still be present. By this time, many of the students who attend school today will have reached middle-age and carry on their daily lives and routines. According to students themselves their adult life will be lived in hard times. Research about young peoples´ attitudes towards the future carried out in Europe and Australia showed predominantly pessimistic approaches, in which feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness towards the future were expressed. Typical worries concerned the environment, the economy and unemployment. However, participants were more positive towards their own future than to the common future.

In ESD, one of five key competences is anticipatory competence which is an ability to systematically think about the future and future generations in terms of alternatives of sustainable futures. Feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, in the above mentioned studies indicates that the young people did not automatically deliberate on sustainability in the future, which in turn might indicate a low anticipatory competence. Gaps between a personal and a common future might reveal a disconnection between the two, which could be a sign of the participants not thinking of themselves as active in shaping our common future.

Earlier research opens up for further investigating what would happen in a study where the participants mentally placed themselves in 2050 and created a person living at that time while describing not only that person, but also the surrounding world. Would the same approaches and gaps towards the future be shown, and what would that say about the participants´ anticipatory competence? Would that kind of study be able to tell us if we are on a right track in educating responsible citizens who actively participate in society, contributing to shaping a sustainable future?

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