Uncertainty as Ignorance? Governing Futures of Education

Abstract

At what point does a humble and/or realistic acknowledgment of unknowing tip over into ignorance-making of a misleading or dangerous sort? This article tackles this question by examining invocations of “uncertainty” that circulate in educational futures literature. Through a critical reading of a selected set of education futures publications from leading global actors (e.g., OECD and UNESCO) it aims to unpack the ways that certainty/uncertainty govern the future by installing norms and disabling certain possibilities while enabling others. The paper finds that not-knowing plays an important role in education futures work, with significant consequences that demand thoughtful, critical analysis of each concrete situation. Calculating certainty and taming chance has had a long (if checkered) career in educational planning. This is well recognized in the literature. However, less attention has been paid to “calculations of uncertainty,” specifically to the ontologies of indeterminacy that are generated through educational planning and policy that pretends to account for what is “known” and “unknown” about the future—which is the intellectual project of this article.