Education has always been considered as one of the fundamental parameters that can help individuals and societies go through complex and transitional periods. Utopias are the parameters that motivate people and societies to go through these transitional stages, to overcome difficulties and to keep trajectories in track. Today, we are challenged to adopt new utopias and to lean on different educational practices in order to cope effectively and efficiently with new contingencies. 

In the field of European education policy, both the ET 2010 program and the Horizon 2020 agenda express the same utopia and support one of EU’s foundational myths: The aim of education is to assure inclusiveness, excellence, quality and relevance of education and training systems in order for EU to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion (Presidency conclusions, Lisbon, 23 and 24 march 2000, DOC/00/8).

However, 18 years after the Lisbon agenda, the wide variance in Member-States policy responses in the field of compulsory and upper secondary education, make the attainment of the above mentioned utopia quite uncertain, at least for the immediate future.  The variation in policy responses is quite significant in three main benchmarks: the reduction of early school leaving (ESL), the reduction of low educational attainment, and the increase of educational system’s capacity to fight social inequality. Although some Member States have achieved high standards of excellence in the reduction of ESL and of low educational attainment, many countries have not been making sufficient progress in reducing the relative percentages (COM(2017)206 final).  Moreover, in many countries, schools tend to reproduce existing patterns of socio-economic advantage, rather than to contribute to a more equitable distribution of learning opportunities and outcomes (European Commission, 10-12 May 2017).

The above variation in Member-States policy responses makes it harder for EU to achieve its foundational utopia, if we take into consideration that the wide variation in the quality and relevance of the available education and training available [contributes] to increasing disparities in the economic and social performance of Member States (SWD(2016) 195 final). Two dystopic characteristics of our era should also be taken into consideration: for the first time since the Second World War, there is a real risk that today’s young adults – the most educated generation we have ever had – may end up less well-off than their parents(COM(2017)206 final). Second, many of today's school children will later work in job types that do not yet exist. It is no longer sufficient to equip young people with a fixed set of skills or knowledge; they need to develop the resilience and ability to adapt to change (COM (2017)248 final).

So the question that needs to be answered is why 17 years after the Lisbon agenda it is still so difficult to achieve convergence in the Member-states’ policy responses in education? 

This presentation attempts to provide new insights to the variations in Member-State’s policy responses drawing on social system’s theory and the concept of utopia. The main argument is that policy responses are communication acts within an environment of systems and that the variation in these policy responses, hide invisible variations in the underlying utopias. The theoretical anchorage of this argument draws on three main pillars: a) the conceptualisation of utopia by Elias (2014), b) the concept of social imaginary significations (Castoriadis, 1977) and c)  and on social systems’ theory (Luhmann,1996).  This theorization will be further completed by modernization, globalization (Beck et al. 2003, Harvey, 2000, Sassen, 2014) and governance studies (Lawn, 2011, Grek and Ozga, 2010, Osga, 2016).

Our research is based on the analysis of official education policy documents concerning primary, secondary and upper secondary education, meaning the levels of education that are responsible for building a strong learning and educational profile of young children and that are relevant to the three benchmarks mentioned above. For our research we proceeded to the comparative analyses of official policy documents of three EU countries: Italy, Greece and France. These countries were selected both because of their structural differences and because of their difficulties in the attainment of the benchmarks in question. This research has a triple objective. First, it seeks to locate the expressed utopias in the official policy discourse of the three participating countries for the period after the Lisbon agenda until 31/12/2017, under the above mentioned theoretical lens. Second, it seeks to explore the relation between these utopias and the EU’s utopia as expressed through the official documents: progress reports, strategic framework documents, council and presidency conclusions. Third, it explores divergences and similarities between these utopias and their educational outcomes based on PISA results and attainment in the above mentioned benchmarks. Two corpuses are used for our analysis: a) a three-part corpus (one per country) composed by the documents of official policy documents for the period 2000-2017; and b) a corpus composed by the documents of European official policy documents for the period 2000-2017. These corpuses are analyzed the with the MAXQDA 2918 edition software. Stoplists and lemmatization are edited for each language, visual tools are used to visualize the relations between codes and concept maps are created for the visual representation of our results. These results are then analyzed under the lens of the adopted theoretical framework. Main aim of this analysis is not to extrapolate a different kind data, that was neglected so far, but mainly to make visible the underlying system of relations that underpin policy choices as materialized forms of engagement and disengagement in the process of European integration. This analysis o results confirms this presentation’s main argument that the situations of interaction and the networks of relations are always articulated to distant and invisible determinations that, in the mean time, make possible and structure this interaction (Elias, 1993, p. iv). In other words, data per se are not of great value if they are not linked to the lines of thinking that lie invisible in the background.

Research results provide valuable insights for the understanding of the variations in Member-States’ policy responses. More specifically, results show: a) that Invisible and unresolved systemic identity issues lie at the heart of these variations, b) that the degree of divergence or similarity between the EU and the national expressed utopias can explain the type and the duration of the liminoid stages towards EU integration and consequently can explain variations in policy responses, c) that we need different and more subtle conceptual tools to interpret raw data as data per se are not of great value. The presentation concludes that actual data repositories and national results loose a big part of their value without the appropriate conceptual tools able to give them meaning and proposes its methodology as a diagnostic tool to be applied in the study of other Member-States’ education policy responses.

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