ABSTRACT

This chapter explores salient questions relating to young people’s hopes and fears for the future at secondary level. It not only critically reviews research evidence on young people’s images of the future but considers some important educational and cultural implications. Business-as-usual approaches are questioned and a case is put for negotiating futures in education that better respond to young people’s hopes and fears. Particular attention is given to the need for educational approaches that support an explicit futures dimension in the curriculum, encourage critical and socially imaginative literacies, and challenge fatalistic fallacies about ‘trend as destiny’.