Education is an inherently future-oriented activity. A key function of education is to support emerging generations in facing challenges of the future; another is to impact those futures through knowledge, skills and attitudes. Discourses about the future are more and more prominent in our uncertain and accelerating times. The current Finnish curriculum, for example, uses the word “future” over 600 times, whereas the 2004 curriculum mentions the future only 30 times. This mirrors a more global sentiment that the future permeates education: how we see the future has deep educational implications in terms of sustainability, emerging technology, skills needs, values, and so on.

In this presentation, I will argue that the complex relationship between education and the future is significant for sustainability education, for educational policy, and for the content, scope and purpose of education in general. This connection is rarely explored in other than vague or implicit terms (Facer, 2021; Slaughter, 1993; Poli, 2021). This has been the impetus for the work presented.

In this theoretical presentation based on an argumentative literature review, I propose a taxonomy that differentiates between four key orientations education and educational discourse may take towards the future. These orientations are motivated, presented and compared using a purposefully selected sample of educational policy and research literature. 

As two focal points, I discuss issues around sustainability and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. The perspectives of sociotechnical transformations and sustainability challenges are used to illustrate the crucial role of the concept of futures in education. To theoretically ground these arguments, I use the concepts of qualifying, socialising and subjectifying functions of education (Biesta, 2009).

In the presentation I present a simple framework for understanding the relationship between education and the future. I begin by outlining the need for such tools and reviewing earlier contributions on this front. I argue that while a minimally complex taxonomy, this framework can easily be adapted to various contexts, such as comparing how images of the future are constructed and utilised in sustainability and technology education. I conclude with some recommendations for making the concept of the future a more active and explicit resource in educational discourse and practice, especially around sustainability and technology.

The role of the future in education is quite multifaceted. Yet, these facets have been very rarely analysed. Seeking to address this gap, the study this presentation is based on began with the a priori identification of ways the future and education can interrelate. These were defined further by examining a wide, nonsystematically selected sample of 60 research and policy papers explicitly focused on examining the future in some educational sense. This resulted in the identification of four categories. These were then compared to the only two frameworks of similar focus that could be identified, both outside traditional research literature: the framework by Facer (2021), presented in a programme-commissioned report on education and the future, and that by Bolstad (2011), a working paper analysing the meanings of ‘the future’ in New Zealand’s curriculum. Comparison with these frameworks provided additional validity, but also suggested limitations for the new framework. The focus of my presentation is the examination of the framework, which distinguishes between “Educational futures”, “Education to adapt to the future, “Education to change the future”, and “Education about futures”, and the results of the argumentative review that examined the characteristics and interrelations of these four orientations.

“Educational futures” are examinations of how education itself changes. These futures range from rhetorical and reactive to visionary and speculative, and are concerned with issues such as educational technology (Säntti et al., 2021). Typical discourses within this orientation regard projected megatrends and their impact on educational systems; example include the “knowledge economy” (see Young & Muller, 2010), digitalisation (Säntti et al., 2021), or AI (UNESCO, 2024). “Education to adapt to the future” is concerned with how education prepares young people to navigate projected or unknown conditions, and is focused on issues like employability, basic civic skills and productivity (Høydal & Haldar, 2022). Digital literacy, AI literacy and similar concepts correspond to this orientation in the sense of the qualifying function of education (Biesta, 2009). However, this involves a tension, because preparing and adapting to a specific future can itself bring about that future (Rahm & Rahm-Skågeby, 2023, p. 1149). “Education to change the future” sees learners as having influence on the future, and relates to issues such as sustainability, societal change and civic action. In sustainability education, education is often seen as not preparing for a future, but creating or shaping it (Zamora-Polo & Sánchez-Martín, 2019). This favours the subjectifying-socialising functions of education over qualification (see Biesta, 2009). Technology education can also promote students’ ownership of technological futures over mere preparation (Facer, 2015). “Education about futures” involves bringing the potential and unpredictability of the future in the classroom, and building students’ futures literacy (Lloyd & Wallace, 2004; Miller, 2018). This orientation emphasises the concept of the future as relevant to students and society, such as how people grow to think about the future in less or more useful ways. For example, the GreenComp framework situates futures thinking as a sustainability skill area (Bianchi et al., 2022; Laherto et al., 2023).

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