In his 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley presents a threatening picture of the future, where machines and rationalization processes dominate every aspect of life. In this technologically advanced world, human beings are subjected to genetic breeding, social indoctrination, and pharmaceutical anesthesia – mechanisms that effectively govern the subject’s relationship to self, to others and to the World State. In this world, education plays a central role in making individuals conform their desires to the needs of the state through carefully engineered psychological conditioning.

When exploring the relationship between utopias and education, Ozmon (1969, p. x) observed that many utopian thinkers, including Huxley, “had a great desire to remake man and society, and found that their most effective instrument for achieving these purposes was education”. Historically, utopias have placed significant emphasis on education, recognizing its dual role: to awaken individuals to the necessity of change and to equip them to adapt to that change. As Levitas (2010) argues, the function of utopia is to educate desire and the ultimate goal of this education is to transform the world and bring the utopian vision into reality.

Extending this framework, the governance of education through future-oriented policies – such as those produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – can be understood as a practice of fabricating utopias. Through its reports and visual (re)presentations, the OECD constructs compelling visions of the future where emerging technologies and individual agency become the “new normal,” where decision-making and responsibilities are shared, and where students actively participate in shaping their own learning trajectories (see, e.g., OECD, 2019). Arguably, such visions are utopian, not in the sense of being fictional, unrealistic or impracticable, but in that they articulate a desire for the perfection of the world (cf. Levitas, 2010). Far from offering mere hopes and fantasies to be admired, they present ideal pictures of the future to be acted upon. Embedded within data-driven frameworks, charts, and visual imagery, they appear rational, achievable and inevitable (Mikhaylova & Pettersson, 2024). From this perspective, the OECD can be seen as a key actor in the governance of the global ‘education of desire’.

In recent years, there has been a significant surge in scholarly interest in the study of utopias and visions of the future, particularly in relation to the role played by international education agencies in shaping these imaginaries (Kim, 2024; Madsen, 2024; Mertanen & Brunila, 2022; Milojevic, 2005; Robertson, 2022; Robertson & Beech, 2024). This growing body of research examines practices of engaging with the futures through mechanisms of control, prediction, and comparison (Pettersson & Nordin, 2023), revealing how discourses of the future – ideas and images of hoped-for or feared worlds – are increasingly mobilized to legitimize educational reforms and reinforce particular (techno-scientific) worldviews. However, only few of these studies focus specifically on the role of visuals, such as infographics, diagrams and videos, in shaping these discourses. This seems remarkable given that futures are often projected in time-charts or presented in pictorial diagrams to guide countries in organizing their thinking of what matters for the world of tomorrow. 

This paper addresses this gap. Drawing on Levitas (2010, 2013) understanding of utopia as the expression of a desire for a better way of being, it sets out to examine how the OECD use visuals to promote, naturalize and stabilize certain futures. In doing so, we also contribute to a broader discussion of how numbers, aesthetics and emotions work together in different kinds of visualizations to educate audiences about what is to be seen, feared or desired.

Drawing on methods from visual studies, in this paper we analyze a selected number of images through which the OECD explains, justifies and circulates its visions of the future. Of particular interest for the purpose of this study are visuals published in documents (position papers, concepts notes, policy reports, outcome documents) related to the Future of Education and Skills 2030 project. Initiated in 2015, this “vision-making” project aimed to help countries to navigate the rapidly changing world and prepare their education systems for the uncertain future (OECD, 2019d). Given our interest to the visuals, we also included videos from the OECD’s official YouTube channel. In addition, we collected visuals from the OECD’s Trends Shaping Education series of reports, produced by the Centre for Education Research and Innovation. Spanning all levels of education, from early childhood to tertiary education, this series translate emerging economic, social, demographic, and technological trends into probable scenarios with the aim to guide policy and practice in navigating the uncertain and unexpected futures. The selected documents position the OECD as a kind of anticipatory laboratory, a site where futures are not merely forecasted but actively constructed, folding the probable and the unexpected into a collectively shared horizon. This laboratory not just analyze; it educates its audience to imagine and aspire to better futures, prefigured and naturalized through calculative and conceptual tools. Visuals, in this laboratory, become tools for translating abstract visions into tangible forms and making the future visible, desirable and actionable. To explore this, we analyzed a variety of visual materials – such as data visualizations, pictorial diagrams, photographs, and videos – extracted from selected OECD documents and the OECS’s website. Following Levitas’s (2010) conception of utopia as the education of desire, our analysis focused on how these visuals articulate the views of “the good society”, “good citizens”, and “good education” to mobilize collective aspirations and guide the educational policies and practices needed to realize these views. Although our main analytical focus was with visuals, in analyzing them we also considered their interplay with the accompanying textual narratives and numerical data. This approach allowed us to examine how visuals, numbers and texts work together to project preferred futures and to cultivate both emotional resonance and intellectual alignment with those visions.

Our preliminary findings indicate that the visuals employed by the OECD consistently portray the future of education as thoroughly intertwined with the development of (digital) technology. The people inhabiting this future, as shown for example in the conceptual framework called Learning Compass 2030 (OECD, 2019a, 2019b) or in the film New Normal (OECD, 2019c), are imagined adaptable agents who can navigate complex, uncertain futures and new values thanks to some “transformative competencies” (OECD, 2019a). Interestingly, individuals are often depicted schematically, almost cartoonish, presumably to suggest universality. However, their lack of personal characteristics, such as race, age or gender, abstracts them into generic symbols of humanity, erasing differences and promoting a desire for a depoliticized future, where diversity is flattened. Unsurprisingly, depictions of conflict or tension, whether at the individual or systemic level, are notably absent. Instead, the future is envisioned as one of shared agency, well-being, and harmony; it is inclusive and consensual. Furthermore, there are no signs of ‘old’ world problems here, such as inequality or ecological challenges. The cityscapes and environments are idealized and depicted as pristine, embodying desires of ‘green growth’. This future, however, can only be achieved if education keeps pace with technology, as other diagrams suggest. The desirability of such a depoliticized techno-scientific future is never questioned – it is portrayed as both inevitable, univocal and good. In general, though, the ‘new normal’ depicted by the OECD’s is not so “brave”: it represents a reconfiguration of long-standing techno-utopian ideologies that have shaped global education discourses for decades. Far from representing a radical break with the past, this vision rearticulates the cybernetic desires for efficiency, individualism and collaborative community.

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