Futurity is central to social life (Adam, 2010). We live in a time where the powerful story of progress is breaking down (Nowotny, 2015) and the future is perceived as a threat rather than as something positive. At the same time, OECD and other organisations make it an  obligation for young people to be ‘enterprising’ and ‘aspirational’ in the context of multiple crises (Goring et al., 2023). Aspiration for the future can be seen as an unequally distributed future-oriented cultural capacity  (Appadurai, 2004). In complex neoliberal socio-ecologies,  young people’s aspirations should be reimagined as complex and ambiguous, according to recent research on education and aspiration (Goring et al., 2023: Froerer et al., 2022).

This paper investigates how the future is anticipated and enacted at a newly established upper secondary school in Sweden. The school’s vision and slogans, clearly inspired by neoliberal ideas (entrepreneurship, challenge-based pedagogy, etc.) short-circuit the future by claiming that “we solve the problems of the future now”. The future is clearly used as a commodity/resource in the school’s marketing, positioning the students as “predecessors” and the school as the “school of the future”. The school’s entrepreneurial approach and “challenge-driven” pedagogy resonate well with ideas of transnational organisations, such as OECD (21st Century Skills and Competencies, Ananiadou & Claro, 2009) and the EU, whose eight key competences include entrepreneurship competence (Halász & Michael, 2011). This also attests to how globalisation influences national and local policies (Lingard & Rawolle, 2011).

Inspired by sociology of the future, we strive to capture aspects of time as fluid, rather than divided into stable entities as past-present-future. To do this, we use a multidirectional time perspective through the concepts future present and present future (Adam & Groves, 2007; Adam, 2010). 

The two concepts signal different standpoints in relation to the future:

Present future means that the future is approached from the standpoint of the present. The future is projected as empty and open to colonisation: it is predicted, controlled and transformed in and for the present. Thus, the future is enacted in the present.

In the perspective of future present, people are responsible for the effects of their actions and failure to act. This standpoint makes it possible to follow actions to their potential impacts on future generations. This standpoint acknowledges that there is a future present that is affected by our actions and decisions.

Importantly, our present situation is our ancestors’ present future. Expectations of the future could be individual, but also collective. The collective expectations of the future may turn into taken-for-granted ideas, and importantly, they are performative, and thus guide actions (cf., Borup et al., 2006; Konrad, 2006). 

The school aspires to solve future societal challenges now, which creates a complex relation between present future and future present. In relation to the school’s aspiration, the students are beings, with responsibility and power to change. But it is also the schools’ mission on a more general level to educate the workforce/citizens that are needed in the future. In relation to that task, the students are becomings, not-yets.

We have studied this particular school since its launch in 2018 as a single case study, approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. A case study can be useful to answer how- and why- questions when examining current, new and complex events that lie outside of the control of the researcher (Yin, 2014). A particular benefit of the case study is the possibility to investigate a phenomenon in its context (p. 16). Further, a strength of case study research is its ability to trace changes over time (p. 151), which is of great value in a study following the establishment of a school over the course of several years. The establishment of the school has been investigated through interviews with key stakeholders in the municipality and at the school, as well as through document studies, observations of both day-to-day activities and special events at the school. We have followed the school at its different temporary premises, reviewed various internal working documents and also used questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers.

The future is enacted at the school in the vision, the marketing and thematic, interdisciplinary “project weeks”. In this process, the future is commodified and filled with the school’s (and OECD’s) desires. The students are positioned by the school as future makers and moral agents of change, which lays on them much responsibility in relation to future takers, the people who will have our future as their present. At the same time the students are the future takers, the ones who will have to endure or deal with the consequences. There is a clear tension in the material between the school’s aspirations and enactment of the future and the students’ aspirations and enactment of the future. When the first generation of students arrived, the student group was not the expected one. According to the teachers, they needed much support, owing to a lack of study habits and motivation, as well as neurodevelopmental disorders. Instead of the entrepreneurial subjects eager to solve the problems of tomorrow, the teachers met students not too keen on challenge-based education; many were there because that was what their grades admitted. These students resist the school’s positioning of them as moral agents of change. In the data we can trace anger at being positioned as responsible for solving problems that the adult generation has caused. The students also use humour (comedy) as resistance, for instance making jokes about them being positioned as “predecessors” when they are at the same time seen as low-achieving, low motivated and disruptive.

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