Between possibilities and probabilities: a comparative analysis of education policy futures in the work of UNESCO and OECD

• In Event: Highlighted Session: International Organizations and their Conceptions of Educational Future

Proposal

This paper provides a comparative policy analysis of the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 and UNESCO’s Reimaging our Futures Together. We work with recent theoretical and empirical work on the temporalities of education policies (Auld and Morris, 2019; Webb et al., 2020; Lingard, 2021; Robertson, 2022). In societal imaginations, aspirations, anticipations of and for the future education policy has a central place. Various theorists have suggested ways of thinking about these constructions of the future as cultural fact (Appadurai, 2013). Appadurai, for example, posits a tension between what he refers to as an ‘ethics of possibilities’ and an ‘ethics of probability ‘. Robertson (2022) speaks of a tension between a ‘philosophy of the future’ and a ‘science of the future’, while some time ago Berenskoetter (2011) made a distinction between creative and robust visions of the future, akin to the possibilities/probability, philosophy of/science of the future distinctions of Appadurai and Robertson. Beckert (2020) writes about the ‘exhausted futures of neoliberalism’ and the correlated decline of ‘promissory legitimacy’ for political leaders in respect of the promised future achievements of new policy frames. We seek to work with and extend this work through focusing on the temporalities in the education policy work of the OECD and UNESCO, specifically in respect of the two reports mentioned above. We also acknowledge in this comparative policy analysis Robertson’s (2020, p.190) point that policy struggles over imagining and creating the future emerge episodically at times of crisis and rupture. We would argue that we are at such a moment with the climate crisis, growing inequality, new geo-politics, anti-multilateralism and the rise of ethnonationalisms, all of which challenge neoliberal globalization (Rizvi et al., 2022). UNESCO’s work in education until the development of the SDGs basically focused on Global South nations within a humanistic development framework, while that of the OECD focused on the rich nations of the Global North, augmented more recently with the development of a number of testing siblings of main PISA, which seek influence in the nations of the Global South, specifically PISA for Development. The OECD has also sought to have PISA for Development used as one outcome measure of the success of the SDGs on education. Yet as we will show in our analysis, while the scientism and economism of OECD policy frames remain as does the humanism of UNESCO, each organisation has made concessions to an ethics of possibilities for the OECD and an ethics of probability for UNESCO. Yet again the different future frames are clearly evident in the usage of a singular future in the OECD’s policy title and plural futures being created together in the UNESCO document. Furthermore, the more recent moves to measure global competence and well-being by the OECD probably reflect an attempt to move in a humanistic direction, yet these concepts are ultimately reconstituted as statistical measures, while UNESCO has developed substantial statistical measures in respect of SDG4, but we note the striking absence of statistics in Reimaging our Futures Together.

Authors

• Robert L Lingard, Australian Catholic University

• Jason Beech, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne