The Problems with the Future: Educational Futurism and the Figural Child

Abstract

This article contributes to work on temporality in education. Challenging the future‐oriented focus in contemporary education, the authors question how ideas and assumptions regarding the future—centred on the Child—can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman and John Dewey to examine the educational ramifications of the focus on the future, which we call ‘educational futurism’. The argument seeks specifically to explore how educational futurism imposes limits on educational discourse and privileges a certain future—making it unthinkable to imagine ways outside of such a privileged future. Juxtaposing Lee Edelman and John Dewey, we draw out connections and disconnections between their disparate philosophies, illustrating the ways in which educational futurism ignores or overlooks the lived experiences of children. We conclude by briefly noting the queerness of children and the impact of such queerness on broadening discussions of the future of children and their educations.

Language Teaching, Language Learning, and Virtual Exchange in an Age of Complexity

“…Future VE might look to promoting "techno-creativity," which is understood as the ability to generate and apply new ideas in technology-enhanced contexts; to see existing situations in a new way; to identify alternative explanations; and to combine existing resources to form something original (Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014). While this may not seem directly linked to VE, in more recent VE publications, the notion that students must work together to create output and products falls into this domain.…”

Queer communist study: The sinthomostudier against the capital-debt-learning regime

“…Desire guards against jouissance, while the sinthomosexual accedes to it, dissolving the futurity of desire. While Edelman's polemic against the future is not entirely foreign to education (e.g., Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014;Meiners, 2015), no one has yet inquired into the pedagogy at work in his project. True, Edelman doesn't write about education or pedagogy in No Future, but we can feel a pedagogy within its pages, or perhaps, in excess of its pages.…”