Recently there is a growing interest in anticipatory regimes and imaginaries in education (Ramiel & Dishon, 2023; Morris, Couture & Phelan, 2023; Webb, Sellar & Gulson, 2020; Amsler & Faser, 2017). These contributions bring together questions about how anticipation as a discursive practice narrows down the future imaginaries that are possible in relation to education. The future when turned into an object of educational policy making loses its open-ended character often over-emphasizing certain aspects of the present social world, for example human capital (Webb, Sellar & Gulson, 2020) as central aspects to thinking about the future of education. Thus uncertainty about an open future is progressively turned into performative certainty. 

The proposed paper seeks to contribute to the debate surrounding the limits of this performative certainty through a historical- sociological analysis of the ways in which sociologists of education, futurologists and related scholars and intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s in state socialist Romania envisioned the future in relation to education. The time frame was chosen as between the publication of the UNESCO Faure report (1972) Learning to be: the world of education today and tomorrow, as a hallmark for the discursive materialization of a global response to the crisis of education (Elfert, 2015) and the events of 1989 as the end of state socialism in large parts of the world and temporarily of the legitimacy of the corresponding social imaginaries of the future. Moreover, this period allows the inclusion of a perspective on the relationship between imaginaries of the future and education from within late state socialism and thus has the potential to balance out the dominance of capitalist-centric reconstructions of this relationship and its impact on present imaginaries. 

The investigation builds on archival and library material, primarily academic journal articles and books. In a first step, the inquiry will be focused on the intellectual productions of actors based in Romania that circulated in both Romanian, English, French and German language sources. The analysis will look at the ways in which influential international theories of education of the future, and of the relationship between the future and education, were taken up and responded to in the Romanian context, as well as the interrelationship between conceptual, empirical and political realities. Through this, the project will contribute to a situated and nuanced understanding of the social imaginaries of the future, the roles of education, and the understandings of youth. It will shed light on the ways in which the state socialist system was imagined from within, as a prospectively lasting and continuous future, going well into the 21^st century, and the relations that this had with conceptualizing the roles of education. It will shed light both on the limits of anticipatory regimes based on the assumption of continuity, crafted within one political system, thus exposing the fragility of anticipatory practices and the limitations this imposes on prescriptive practices of the roles of education. Moreover, it will help uncover the intellectual traditions of the sociology of education and futurology in Central and Eastern Europe through a Romanian case study, and thus help balance the mostly Western European historic accounts of the European sociology of education. Finally, through a focus on the relationship between socio-cultural reproduction and political-economic system, it will shed lights on the subtle historic differences between educational traditions in Europe.  

The proposed paper is built on archival and library research in Romanian, English, German and French language sources. First the libraries of major universities in Romania were searched (University of Bucharest Library, Babeș Bolyai University Cluj, West University of Timișoara etc). Unavailable editions were also searched through websites of antiquarian bookstores. At the same time, an initial archival research was conducted in the digitized archives available through the virtual sociological library (https://bibliotecadesociologie.ro), a digitization project that affords access to contemporary as well as historic sociological literature in Romania. Initial research uncovered several relevant authors (Pavel Apostol, Mircea Herivan, Fred Mahler, Emil Păun, etc) that were then followed through their research careers and publications from that time, as well as a number of edited volumes (Viitorul Comun al Oamenilor, 1976/ The common future of mankind) – an edited collection printed after Bucharest hosted the World Futures Conference in 1972 (World Futures Studies Federation, N.N.) and relevant journals (Viitorul Social / the Social Future). In a next step, the debates were mapped out in relation to the conceptualization of the future, the crisis of education, the role of education, the construction of youth and the political, labor related, but also everyday life oriented importance of education. The footnotes and bibliographies of these works were studied in order to reconstruct the debates and these were followed up enlarging the basis for analysis. In a next step, archival research is planned to be conducted in digital (arcanum adt, etc) and physical archives (Open Society Archives in Budapest) holding professional educational journals, as well as general newspapers and other forms of media archives focused on the ways in which the relationship between future and education was constructed.

The analysis is still in process. However, the following sub-questions will serve as a preliminary guide to the analysis: which aspects of the crisis of education were seen as central to understanding and justifying the transformation of educational practices in Romania in terms of better preparing ‘the youth’ for the future? How was social-cultural reproduction of class privileges through the state socialist educational system addressed, denied or contextualized? What imaginaries of individual and collective futures underlined the ways in which social reproduction was addressed? How was the increased technologization of society and its relationship to education brought into debates about the future of education? How was the right to access knowledge and technology linked to the roles ascribed to education? How was life-long learning conceptualized in relation to these rights and processes? Finally, what were the particularities of the drives to find a humanistic and socialist response to the crisis of education? The responses to these questions will help inform an understanding of the limits of thinking the future of education through anticipatory practices routed in a present time and how performative certainties can act to render invisible potentialities and uncertainties without precluding their socio-material effects.

Amsler, S., & Facer, K. (2017). Contesting anticipatory regimes in education: exploring alternative educational orientations to the future. Futures, 94, 6-14. Elfert, M. (2015). UNESCO, the Faure report, the Delors report, and the political utopia of lifelong learning. European Journal of Education, 50(1), 88-100. Faure, E. (1972). Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow. Unesco. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000223222 Morris, J., Couture, J. C., & Phelan, A. M. (2023). Riding Fences: Anticipatory Governance, Curriculum Policy, and Teacher Subjectivity. Canadian Journal of Education, 46(3), 517-544. Ramiel, H., & Dishon, G. (2023). Future uncertainty and the production of anticipatory policy knowledge: the case of the Israeli future-oriented pedagogy project. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(1), 30-44. Webb, P. T., Sellar, S., & Gulson, K. N. (2020). Anticipating education: Governing habits, memories and policy-futures. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(3), 284-297. World Future Studies Federation (N.N.) History. https://wfsf.org/history/