Thinking Policy: Educational Futures in a Time of Edu-Anxiety

The power of education to transform our world is undeniable yet education has for a long time been a prisoner of presentist thinking and policy. Educational futures seeks to disturb this presentism by interrogating the spaces in which education is framed, maintained and articulated. In this lecture the focus will be on how policy acts as a process domain in which the pragmatic interests of states and citizens combine to create edu-anxiety. Such anxiety can lead to reactionary policy or, in the futures context, to exciting policy fragmentation that opens institutional responses to alternatives. Of interest here is how stress causes mutation in social forms and the language employed to think and communicate about the policy futures of education.