Educational Futures

This book provides an overview and analysis of current tensions, debates and key issues within OECD nations, particularly Australia, the USA, Canada and the UK, with regard to where education is and should be going. Using a broad historical analysis, it investigates ideas and visions about the future that are increasingly evoked to support arguments about the imminent demise of the dominant modern educational model. Focusing neither on prediction nor prescription, this text suggests the goal is an analysis of the ways in which the notion of the future circulates in contemporary discourse. Five specific discourses are explored: globalisation; new information and communications technologies; feminist; indigenous; and spiritual. The book demonstrates the connections between particular approaches to time, visions of the future, and educational visions and practices. The author asserts that every approach to educational change is inherently based on an underlying image of the future.

Introduction Part 1. Historical Futures Discourses in Education 1. Future, Time and Education: Contexts and connections 2. Using Time and the Future to Colonize and Educate the Other 3. Turn of the Spiral: Alternative histories Part 2. Destabilizing Dominant Narratives 4. The Colonization of the Future 5. Visions I: Globalisation 6. Visions II: Cyberia -the information age 7. Contextualizing Global Dreams and Nightmares Part 3. Searching for Social and Educational Alternatives 8. Visions III: Feminist alternatives 9. Visions IV: Indigenous alternatives 10. Visions V: Spiritual alternatives Part 4. Towards Educational Eutopias and Heterotopias 11. Postmodern Visions, Costs and Multi-temporalities 12. Epistemic Change and the Transformation of Education