ABSTRACT
In recent years, attempts to envisage future scenarios – ‘foresight initiatives’ – have spread into the education fi eld. Facer and Sandford count in the UK alone and just in the last fi ve years ‘four major educational futures projects, while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s strategic future scenarios have, since the early 2000s, played an infl uential role in shaping international thinking about educational policy’ (Facer and Sandford, 2010, p. 75). Such exercises are important and useful, especially when they critique economic or technological determinism, ‘challenging our assumptions about the inevitability of a single future trajectory’, recognising ‘the coconstruction of society and technology’ and the role for human agency in this process, and acknowledging that ‘thinking about the future always involves values and politics’ (ibid., p. 77). Undertaken in this way, work on future scenarios has the potential to contribute to democratic debate about alternatives and the collective choices facing us.
