Fragile utopias and dystopias? Governing the future(s) in the OECD youth education policies

ABSTRACT

The OECD has become a notable predictor of the future needs of society and education. In youth education, the OECD spearheads global strategies, initiatives and recommendations about the curriculum and goals for education. By evoking the sense of ‘crisis’ in ‘traditional education’ the OECD functions as a central node of precision education governance, in which so-called best practices of precise, flexible and highly individualised and personalised youth education are disseminated throughout its member states. In the most recent OECD youth strategies and education policy initiatives, we show how the present youth education is governed through evoking various future(s) of youth education. By analysing these predictions and visions discursively, we argue that the future of youth education is approached from both utopian and dystopian predictions by the OECD, and this works as a premise for arranging present and future youth education in a highly targeted and individualised manner. We argue, that the future visions drawn up by the OECD are an example of precision education governance, where the future education is hyper-individualised, arranged by co-operation of public and private sector, and where the goals and contents of education follow global recommendations and ‘best practices’.

KEYWORDS:

• OECD
• future
• youth education policy
• precision education governance
• discourses

Introduction: the making of predictable, calculable and ‘future-proof’ education

‘The future’ holds a special place in global education policy, one in which the future as an imperative has a central role in framing decisions, suggestions and initiatives. According to this imperative, people can be lifted from poverty, global crises are solved and a better new world on a global scale is built through education. This consequentialist view of education upholds a premise, through which it is possible to govern and affect the present and future conditions by the actions taken today. To govern and affect the future outcomes through education policy today, the possible futures of education can be predicted to build up and figure out the best responses for a variety of scenarios, and to fulfil the promises education provides (see Säntti, Hansen, and Saari 2021, 1).

However, the linear view of the future, where certain actions lead to undeniable consequences, can be looked as simplistic or even naïve (Decuypere and Simons 2020). A growing body of literature suggests that this ‘special place’ of the future in education is in the ways in which it creates possibilities and imperatives for governing the present in education policies (Brunila and Nehring, Forthcoming; Popkewitz 2013). This paper participates to the on-going discussion about how global organisations govern the present of education through predicting possible futures for education, and in extension for society. However, we recognise that these futures cannot be seen as inevitable nor clear-cut, but rather as an ambiguous and selected constructions that are both limiting and enabling the possibilities of present actions.

In this article, we focus on the Organisation for Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) education policy’s future depictions for youth education. By youth education, we mean formal and informal education, guidance, counselling and training targeting young people aged between 15 and 25 years. In global and local education policies, young people are repeatedly categorised and recognised as the part of the population in the interim phase between childhood and adulthood and in need of behavioural and economic management (Mertanen 2020; Brunila, Vainio, and Toiviainen 2021; Toiviainen and Brunila 2021). Consequently, education policy targeting young people, or youth education policy is often presented as the ‘last chance’ to affect the future trajectories of both young people and society (Mertanen, Pashby, and Brunila 2020; Lundahl 2011; Brunila and Lundahl 2020)

This study is a part of an on-going research project Interrupting Future Trajectories of Precision Education Governance led by Kristiina Brunila, in which we are exploring the future trajectories of changing global and local education governance towards precision education governance (PEG), including youth education. In our earlier theoretical work, we have built PEG as an umbrella concept which coins some of the central on-going changes in education governance, and refers to (i) global policy networks in governing education, (ii) strengthening the role of behavioural and life sciences (especially psychology, psychiatry and neurosciences) and (iii) marketisation, privatisation and digitalisation of education (Toiviainen and Brunila 2021; Brunila et al. 2018; Mertanen, Vainio, and Brunila 2021). We have shown how PEG is related to the emergence of behavioural and life sciences in youth education (Brunila, Mertanen, and Batista-Costa 2020; Brunila, Vainio, and Toiviainen 2021), and explored marketisation in youth education (Mertanen, Pashby, and Brunila 2020; Mertanen, Mäkelä, and Brunila 2020; Brunila et al. 2018; Mäkelä, Ikävalko, and Brunila 2021; Valkonen, Pesonen, and Brunila 2021). Here, we will extend our focus on changing global governance in order to take a closer look at the OECD youth education policy as a part of PEG to understand the ways in which the future(s) of youth education are governed on a global scale.

This article is the first time when PEG is applied as an analytical framework to scrutinise a branch of OECD’s education policy. We ask not only what OECD’s recommendations to youth education are in the name of the future, but analyse in tandem who are depicted as part of youth education, and how the OECD visions future education should be implemented. We show how the OECD imagines a variety of future(s) for both young people and education, to govern and shape the present changes in global youth education policy. The futures are presented in terms of a potential utopia made possible through active and flexible young people, who have learned important twenty-first century skills by personalised and flexible education. On the other side of the utopian view is a dystopian imaginary, in which the future is filled with dangers caused by global crisis in sustainability and crashing economics, and where young people are let down by old-fashioned and inadequate education systems. We argue, that, the future visions drawn up by the OECD can be seen as efforts to individualise, manage and target different young people based on their perceived opportunities and capabilities, and the possible consequences of these changes require close examination and critical scrutiny.

The OECD as the future-knowledge-broker in youth education

The current self is constantly being (re)constituted in relation to past and future selves, where one’s performance today is compared with that of yesterday and, importantly, forms the basis for improvement tomorrow. (Lewis 2018, 683)

In the context of analysing PISA for Schools, Lewis notes that the building the possible futures through testing, knowledge production and most importantly, through casting a projection of potential futures to education governance, the OECD has solidified a pertinent position in global governance of education. The organisation is typically held up as a valuable and reliable source of knowledge concerning both the future of education and education policy in both national and international policy-making (Rinne, Kallo, and Hokka 2004). Keywords, such as ‘objective’ and ‘evidence-based’ policy, further elevate the OECD as key source of information for arranging education systems all over the world (Sellar and Lingard 2013; Niemann and Martens 2018).

The OECD thus functions as an arena for policy debates and simultaneously enforces and pushes ‘new’ ways and new technologies for education with the hope of a better future through accumulating human capital (Centeno 2021; Hof and Bürgi 2021). By maintaining constant research, surveys, global comparisons and building new metrics to evaluate education outcomes and concepts such as wellbeing, the OECD has solidified a particular view of education and policy (Williamson 2021b; Williamson and Piattoeva 2019). This particular view builds upon the premise, where through imagining possible futures, and looking past actions and their consequences can be moulded into persuasive governance of present education polices (Lewis 2018; Decuypere and Simons 2020).

In the OECD investing in education (to increase skills and knowledge) has become the essential component in securing future stability (Robertson 2005) and securing the future workforce (Teräs et al. 2020; Hughson and Wood 2020). Although the OECD’s views on education and education policy are under constant internal debate and redefinition, the economic perspectives, and education’s connections to the accumulation of capital and labour markets are undeniable (see, e.g. Seitzer, Niemann, and Martens 2021). The investments to human capital in youth education need to have predictable ‘returns on investment’, and this desire for predictions makes building and ‘knowing’ the future of youth education a valuable (and essential) effort (see Gillies, Edwards, and Horsley 2017).

The ‘future(s)’ of education in the OECD are constructed with the help of so-called future megatrends. For example, the OECD Megatrend Report on Education (2019c) predicts that futures education needs to provide skills and abilities to function in a globalised and networked world, one in which global networks form new connections, markets and power relations between global and local actors (OECD 2019c). Along with other intergovernmental organisations, the OECD not only predicts the future of youth education but is actively building the ways in which youth education will be arranged in the future, and what contents and values should be promoted through education (see Hof and Bürgi 2021). The initiatives, such as Learning Compass 2030, promote changes to the curriculum throughout all OECD member states, in which ‘old-fashioned and inefficient’ schooling needs to shift towards ‘agile and flexible’ education and training (Hughson and Wood 2020; OECD 2019a).

Precision education governance of youth education

Our theoretical starting point is the way in which the ‘futures’ in youth education are utilised in governing the present in the OECD’s youth education policy. We connect ‘knowing’, ‘predicting’ and ‘optimising’ young people’s future as precisely and meticulously as possible in policy to the emergence of precision education governance (PEG). In PEG education governance works through highly personalised and individualised education, where young people are seen as flexible and agile individuals in need of personalised education to match their (perceived) abilities, competencies and skills to ensure that they fulfil their full potential (Brunila et al. 2018; Mertanen, Vainio, and Brunila 2021).

PEG as a form of governance enhances precision education and teaching, which are legitimated through emerging behavioural and life sciences as economic, psychological, neurological and biological processes, that can be measured, tracked and tailored according to individuals’ current abilities and needs (see also Williamson 2019; Brunila et al. 2018). PEG thus refers not only to the changing ways of arranging education, but also to the way it brings together national and transnational actors in education policy. Promotion of digital learning platforms utilising artificial intelligence and algorithms to monitor and facilitate learning (Williamson 2019) combined with the entanglement of global technology companies, non-governmental organisation, international organisation such as OECD and nation states is an illuminating example of the way in which PEG operates (Ball 2016; Mertanen, Vainio, and Brunila 2021). In our previous research, we have shown how Finnish youth education during the last two decades has overgone through a paradigm shift towards individualised and personalised guidance and counselling (Toiviainen and Brunila 2021; Mertanen, Mäkelä, and Brunila 2020) through the introduction of both international policy recommendations (Mertanen, Pashby, and Brunila 2020) and involvement of private businesses in youth education (Mertanen and Brunila, in review).

In the case of youth education, the OECD is among the more influential power players in relation to PEG in arranging and affecting the future trajectories of education through producing and disseminating knowledge and best practises (Centeno 2021; Sellar and Lingard 2013). Although the OECD claims that the knowledge it produces and disseminates originates from the member states, research and impartial experts, there are signs that private and philanthropic organisations, such as foundations and charities, have both overt, and disguised influence on the issues thought as inevitable and as ‘common sense’ (Robertson 2021). Governance in the OECD thus takes place through various interactions in vast networks, in which some ideas and knowledge gain the position of being ‘right’ and ‘sensible’, and some as ‘impossible’ or ‘unrealistic’ (Ball and Junemann 2012).

Data and analysis

We recognise the urge for understanding and mapping the future vision for youth education in the OECD’s education policies, since they are influencing the present and future global development of education (see Sellar and Lingard 2013). By providing ‘evidence’ and ‘knowledge’ for ‘better’ schooling, education and curriculum, the OECD provides examples and ‘best practises’ around the world, and functions as a persuasive and indirect power on a global scale. Hence, we will ask: (i) What are the future(s) of youth education and to whom are they constructed in the OECD’s education policies? And (ii) What is the youth education called for in these projected future(s)?

In our analysis of the OECD’s future projections, we apply discursive approach, where we scrutinise the ways in which futures are produced the OECD policy documents and how those future projections are connected to emerging precision governance. We refer to the future projections in youth education through and by the OECD as discursive practise following Michel Foucault’s conceptualisation, where discursive practises refer to certain use of language, ideas norms and values given the status of the ‘truth’ (Bacchi and Bonham 2014; Mertanen 2020; Foucault 1982). Scrutinising the use of language related to the OECD’s youth education policy documents enables us to tap into the complex power relations of PEG in a way that it renders some future projections as self-evident, and some as irrational and impossible (see Foucault 1982). PEG provides a fruitful framework, since it enables us to look at how governance in the OECD is not only focused on how to arrange youth education, but also on what youth education in the future ought to be and who should be involved in arranging education.

Our data consists of four policy documents by the OECD concerning the arrangement, contents and goals of youth education. All the documents were retrieved from the OECD’s web pages between 2020 and 2021. Keywords used in searching the web pages and the OECD public library included ‘young people’, ‘youth’, ‘future’ and ‘education’. From the more than 200 results, we decided to focus on the most recent documents (published between 2015 and 2021). Because our main interest in this study was the depicted future(s) of youth education in the OECD, we decided to exclude working papers and research papers, as well as committee minutes and focus on documents that provided predictions for youth education and recommendations about how to arrange youth education based on those predictions. The four documents we analysed are The Updated OECD Action Plan for Youth (OECD 2021); The Future of Education and Skills (OECD 2018); What Students Learn Matters – Towards a 21st Century Curriculum (OECD 2020); and Youth Stocktaking report 2019 (OECD 2019b). Close and thorough analysis of these four core documents enables to analyse in depth how the OECD construct possible futures for youth education both from the side of education and youth policy. However, we are not claiming that our results are a full representation of OECD’s youth education steering, but rather a window through which it is possible to scrutinise how PEG operates in a particular time and context.

The Updated OECD Action Plan for Youth replaces The OECD Action Plan for Youth written in 2013. The preparatory document prepared by the OECD Council of Ministers in spring 2021 focuses mainly on mitigation of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemics on young people’s education, training and employment. The Future of Education and Skills and What Students Learn Matters are both publications from the OECD Education 2030 initiative, through which the goal is to build a comprehensive and applicable framework for curriculum for all OECD member states (see Hughson and Wood 2020). Youth Stocktaking Report reports on the current situation and future needs of young people in the OECD member states and makes practical policy suggestions about issues such as education, employment, and sustainability policies.

The analysis of these four documents was initially done with the help of the Atlas. TI software, through which we marked all paragraphs discussing the future of youth education. We attached codes such as ‘youth’, ‘education’ and ‘future’ to the excerpts. After this first analysis stage, we examined the passages in more detail, taking notes and connecting the issues produced as ‘future(s)’ to both our previous research results, and other literature. During the first phase, the dichotomous manner of different futurities projected in documents caught our attention, and we decided to follow that dichotomy further. The second phase of the analysis included in-depth reading of the selected data-excerpts and interpretation of the projected futures with the help of PEG as a conceptualisation. In practise, we first examined what kind of discursive formations were in the analysed texts (i.e. text excerpts producing future as insecure), then loosely categorised these formations based on which type of future(s) they represented, and finally interpreted the formations as a part of PEG. In following section, we have divided our results based on the dichotomy mentioned above. This division is not clear-cut, nor are the future visions mutually exclusive, and we recognise that there are overlaps in the utopian and dystopian elements throughout the data.

Wavering between hope and fear – governing the future(s) in the OECD youth policies

Building fragile utopias – sustainable, flexible and prosperous hopes for all

The opening words of the What Students Learn Matters describe sense of urgency, opportunities and fears that are attached to the future of education:

Globalisation and rapid changes in technology are accelerating social, economic, and environmental challenges worldwide. Many of these changes are also opportunities for human advancement, but citizens must be equipped to handle them via a high quality and appropriately designed education. Current predictions around novel industries due to changes in technology and demands from a changing environment will certainly shift the skills required by future graduates. (OECD 2020, 7)

In the document, the making of the future society is connected to globalisation and the development of technology. Both these changes are depicted not only as good or even admirable, but as things that pose challenges to all aspects of human life. However, the key tone in the excerpt is a hopeful one in which these changes are considered to be opportunities that can provide positive things in case people are equipped to handle them adequately. Education is given a crucial role, and the quote implies in the phrasing ‘high quality and appropriately designed education’ that the current education system is lacking in both quality and design. The clarification, that according to predictions there is a certainty in some degree that the future world will ‘obviously’ affect the skills called for in the future, and thus implies that these predicted skills must become the focus of education, or otherwise the opportunities will be lost. This excerpt evokes the calls for youth education, that is tailored and designed towards enhancing skills needed in the future (see Toiviainen and Brunila 2021). The evoking of need for technological prowess as a requirement for success also legitimates the introduction and integration of digital technology as an essential part of education (see Mertanen, Vainio, and Brunila 2021; Williamson 2016a).

Also, economic proficiency and growth of PEG can be detected as an undertone in the previous excerpt. However, the following excerpt describes multiple ways in which current education systems and curriculum are lagging in implementing vital and needed changes for our future. In this way, the threat of (economic) failure is written into the sentiment of building the future, now. The skills and ways of future education are described as follows:

In recent years, countries and schools are making a significant shift towards a 21st century curriculum: e.g., 1) Digital curriculum; 2) Personalised curriculum; 3) Cross-curricular content and competency-based curriculum; and 4) Flexible curriculum. However, changes are made more slowly than expected or desired. (OECD 2020, 11, original emphasis)

In this excerpt, the suggested and needed changes and shifts especially in the contents of education are clearly put, albeit the pace at which changes are implemented is deemed as being too slow. The new content, conveniently named twenty-first century curriculum, implies that there is a fundamental need for something that is apparently absent from current, ‘old-fashioned’ education. The characteristics of the twenty-first century contents of education are outlined in this excerpt, calling for highly personalised, digital, competency-based and flexible contents for education, in accordance with PEG (see Brunila et al., 2019). These implications for the contents of curriculum have been analysed in more detail elsewhere (see Hughson and Wood 2020), but in the context of our analysis it is noteworthy how they are all attached to the hyper-individualised and personalised thinking about education in general (Mertanen, Vainio, and Brunila 2021). This theme of renewing and changing education for young people also emphasise new flexibility, new skills and new co-operation between education and private sector:

Young people have never stayed longer in education and training – around 85% of young people complete upper secondary education in the OECD on average – and financial support mechanisms have helped making tertiary education more accessible to more young people – 44% of 25-34 year-olds held a tertiary degree in 2018. Educational institutions are evolving to meet changing job market demands by promoting flexible pathways into tertiary education, balancing academic and vocational skills, and working more closely with employers and industry and training organisations. (OECD 2021, 2)

This excerpt from The Updated Action Plan for Youth starts by stating how young people are more educated than ever before. Tertiary degrees or higher education are elevated to the ‘most wanted’ level of education. Tertiary education is made available to more people due to financial aid, suggesting the inherent structural issues making roadblocks to people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The flexible and individualised education is suggested as a remedy for disadvantages, starting from vocational and remedial education and continuing to higher education. What is especially noteworthy in this excerpt is the way in which individualised and flexible education is described as a prerequisite to the success in labour markets (Nikunen 2021; see Masoud, Kurki, and Brunila 2020)

According to our analysis, PEG of youth education in the OECD evokes hope through building and fostering skills that lead to individuals’ adaptability not only in the labour markets, but in the midst of uncertain conditions, such as environmental and technological changes. These possible future changes in education are presented as a way to prepare young people to mitigate the effects uncertainties through education:

We are facing unprecedented challenges – social, economic and environmental – driven by accelerating globalisation and a faster rate of technological developments. At the same time, those forces are providing us with myriad new opportunities for human advancement. The future is uncertain and we cannot predict it; but we need to be open and ready for it. The children entering education in 2018 will be young adults in 2030. Schools can prepare them for jobs that have not yet been created, for technologies that have not yet been invented, to solve problems that have not yet been anticipated. It will be a shared responsibility to seize opportunities and find solutions. (OECD 2018, 2)

The excerpt above from The Future of Education and Skills also chimes in with the sense of urgency by declaring this moment in history as the precipice for social, economic and environmental challenges. Just as the What Students Learn Matter, the familiar premise of future as the great opportunity provider is pushed forward. The role of education is to prepare young people for the future opportunities by fostering skills to adapt to any situation or to solve any problem in the future. ‘Seizing opportunity’ is presented as a communal, ethical stance one must take to flourish in the unknown future. Also, the scope of education is widened from skills and knowledge towards emotions, attitudes and values:

Education has a vital role to play in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that enable people to contribute to and benefit from an inclusive and sustainable future. Learning to form clear and purposeful goals, work with others with different perspectives, find untapped opportunities and identify multiple solutions to big problems will be essential in the coming years. Education needs to aim to do more than prepare young people for the world of work; it needs to equip students with the skills they need to become active, responsible and engaged citizens. (OECD 2018, 4)

PEG not only governs youth education towards specific economic outcomes, but toward behaviours, emotions and attitudes beneficial in the future (see Brunila 2020). These desired values and attitudes called for ‘contribute and benefit to’ the future, with a wish to equip students with specific skills needed to become ‘active, responsible, and engaged’ citizens, who can create ‘inclusive and sustainable’ future. What makes this excerpt an outlier in our data is the outspoken declaration that education is not only to serve work and economy. However, the engaged citizenship described in the document can also be interpreted as learning and mastering individual skills such as goal setting, problem solving and co-operation with others. Some indications of this can be read in the following excerpt:

101. Today’s digital transformation of all aspects of life, including the sphere of participation in public life, is providing new opportunities while, at the same time, challenging established models of civic and citizenship education. The increasing interconnectedness through new technologies requires schools and teachers to equip young people with a totally new set of skills to navigate and participate both online and offline as active and informed citizens and new skills in the fields of media literacy, enabling youth to critically assess information. In the same vein, it highlights that public officials need to acquire new skills to effectively communicate and interact with the generation of digital natives. (OECD 2019b, 41)

The Youth Stocktaking Report describes advancements in digital technology as being the main game-changers in young people’s world. Notable is the way in which the report mentions participation in public life as one of the transformed spheres due to digitalisation. Interesting to note here is the affliction it causes to civic and citizenship education, which above is claimed to be ‘challenged’ due to digitalisation. Consequently, these new technologies require completely new skills from not only young people, but from teachers as professionals and schools as institutions. When looked through the framework of PEG, this digital turn can be interpreted as a way to introduce new actors, such as technology companies, EdTech-businesses and software developers to (re)define what education for young people means now, and in the future (see Ideland 2020; Williamson 2021a). To bring this argument further, digital technology will not only transform curriculum and schooling, but it will also transform civic participation and will make possible ineffable and unforeseen ways for both education and participation. Whatever the future outcome is, individuals’ media literacy and critical thinking are named as the ‘new’ skills needed to participate and survive future world. Not only young people, but also the governing institutions must become more ‘agile’ and prepared to communicate with the ‘digital natives’.

Dismantling brittle dystopias – risks, dangers and problems of the future

Although the young people are identified as the future hopes and builders of a better and brighter society, the overall prospects of the young people are also seen as dangerous, risky and filled with peril. In all the documents analysed, the sentiment regarding young people’s future and education mentioned risks due to climate change, possible financial crisis and inequalities in society. For example, the Youth Stocktaking Report formulated these challenges as follows:

3. Youth are exposed to the increasingly complex global challenges of our times including climate change, rising inequality and high levels of public debts. In a context in which political positions are dominated by older age cohorts and existing channels for youth to shape policy outcomes perceived by many as outdated or inefficient […], these challenges have raised questions about inter-generational justice and the future young people will be faced with. (OECD 2019b, 3)

The report notes multiple risks to a prosperous future. Climate crisis, fiscal problems and inequalities are mentioned specifically, as well as the gap in positions of power. Although inequalities are mentioned and the lack of young people around policy tables is noted, the problem in this quote is again located in an ‘outdated’ and ‘inefficient’ education system. This is notable, since this framing makes questions about inter-generational justice and young people’s future into questions of proficiency and modern/updated processes and systems, rather than ethical, moral or societal questions. This is in line with the hyper-individualisation on PEG, where societal questions become individually optimisable and solvable ‘problems’, which individualised and tailored education can alleviate (see Mertanen, Vainio, and Brunila 2021; Ideland, Jobér, and Axelsson 2020)

When discussing the support systems, services and education targeted specifically at young people, the Stocktaking Report is repeating the familiar path already shown in our previous research, where young people’s education and other support systems are mentioned when it is assumed that there are problems such as early school leaving, substance abuse, social exclusion and poverty (Mertanen, Mäkelä, and Brunila 2020; Mertanen 2020; see Brunila et al. 2018). In our previous research, we have analysed in detail youth support systems with conclusions, that the young people’s social and emotional vulnerability act as a basis for intensifying psycho-emotional and economic governing and control (see Brunila 2020; Mertanen 2020; Brunila, Mertanen, and Batista-Costa 2020).

When it comes to the risks affecting the ‘most vulnerable’ young people, PEG connects the assumed vulnerability to the possible dangers waiting for young people in the future. In the Youth Stocktaking Report PEG can be seen in the ways in which individualised evaluation and control of young people is necessary to mitigate those dangers:

Many indicators used by the OECD to evaluate the quality of life show that today’s generation of children, adolescents and young adults is worse-off than middle-aged adults. Despite unprecedented opportunities to access information, education and training, high unemployment rates and informal and insecure job arrangements risk slowing down youth’s transition to full autonomy and adult life. (OECD 2019b, 3)

Collecting disaggregated information on the situation of young people and the challenges they are facing is crucial to establish effective monitoring and evaluation systems. (OECD 2019b, 13)

The hopes assigned to information technology to allow and promote access to education and information is recognised as not sufficient in securing prosperity and wellbeing. To capture and understand the situations and issues forming risks for the transitions to ‘autonomous adulthood’, the OECD Youth Stocktaking Report suggests careful monitoring of ‘vulnerable young people’ through collecting detailed information and data. We interpret the qualifier ‘disaggregated’ as a sign of a will to know not only the situations and conditions of young people, but to know young people themselves as meticulously as possible, in the name of preventing future peril. To take our interpretation further, the analysis and evaluation of this disaggregated data are connected to the global effort by the OECD to monitor and evaluate not only data from education attainments such as PISA, but to create ways to increase surveillance of young people in the name of future risks (see Auld and Morris 2016; Hof and Bürgi 2021; Martens and Wolf 2009).

The next excerpt from the Future of Education and Skills is particularly interesting when looked through the framework of PEG, illuminating how the relations between young people, the future and education are understood by the OECD:

In the face of an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, education can make the difference as to whether people embrace the challenges they are confronted with or whether they are defeated by them. And in an era characterised by a new explosion of scientific knowledge and a growing array of complex societal problems, it is appropriate that curricula should continue to evolve, perhaps in radical ways. (OECD 2018, 3)

The premise laid out in this excerpt describing the challenges young people will face in the future is that tomorrow’s world is filled with uncertainties and dangers. The passage of time is described as a continuous escalation of both problems and innovations created through technology. Gravitas of the future dangers is underlined through mentioning that without adequate education, these challenges could eventually ‘defeat’ young people. Evolving the curricula to match and respond to future risks, according to our interpretation, suggests education, that not only emphasise knowledge and skills, but also individual young people’s abilities to either ‘embrace or be defeated’ by future dangers. This connects the calls for future education tightly to the behavioural governance at the heart of PEG, where managing attitudes and emotions take the central stage alongside with knowledge and skills (see Brunila et al. 2018)

Conclusion

In this article, we have analysed how the OECD youth education policies frame young people’s education and future. We have argued that within a wider context of precision education governance, the policy documents analysed legitimise governing youth education by envisioning different future(s) for different young people. Our results show how the governance of youth education policy is aimed at upholding and disseminating the taken-for-granted presumptions about continuous economic growth, promise of education and the world-shifting abilities of digital technology. The calls for intertwining of technology, personalised and individualised learning, evolving curriculum, and fostering and cultivating desirable emotions and attitudes while discouraging unwanted behaviour shows how PEG operates on a global scale in the analysed documents.

As shown in our results, the future predicted for young people, although seemingly ‘unknown’, is based on and holds both promises and threats. To ensure the best possible results for the future, education must cater to the future economy and future labour markets, and thus work as an investment for the future (see also McGimpsey 2018). Since these needs are not (yet) fully known, the best estimate for new curriculum is fostering transferrable skills, such as flexibility, technology and IT skills, problem solving, leadership, and so on (see also Teräs et al. 2020). Educating young people to have these so-called 2030 skills becomes a moral and civic obligation which ensures that young people of today can solve the global problems, such as climate and economic crises (Wheelahan, Moodie, and Doughney 2022; see Ball and Grimaldi 2021). To ensure the utopian predictions of the future, youth education at this very moment must become personalised, individualised, and must strive towards digital and technological competency (see Williamson 2016b; Perrotta et al. 2021; Ideland 2020).

However, according to our analysis, this utopian picture is fragile. In one sense, the hope of a better future is held as a mirror through which problems, risks and issues of today’s education are reflected towards the present. The current situation of education is deemed to be both overtly and covertly failed, old-fashioned and insufficient to meet future needs (see Saari 2021). According to the OECD’s depictions, if education remains as it is: low quality and designed under par, as a global society, we risk a dystopia in which we will lose the possible benefits and opportunities future changes in technology and globalisation will bring (see Säntti, Hansen, and Saari 2021; Decuypere and Simons 2020).

Neither the utopias nor dystopias predicted by the OECD are clear-cut or monolithic – rather they meld together forming a strong foundation to calls for action in the name of the future. What is common in these predictions is the emphasis on the role of education of young people as a lynchpin, a keystone that holds both the threat and promises for the future. We connect this urgency and calls for action to PEG, where youth education according to the OECD requires agile and individualised learning, new technology, and new behaviour and attitudes. (see Mertanen, Vainio, and Brunila 2021; Toiviainen and Brunila 2021; Brunila, Vainio, and Toiviainen 2021).

In conclusion, precision education governance of the future(s) of youth education in the OECD masks the values and ideologies promoted by the OECD while staying rather silent about multiple issues. These issues include the ethics of AI and algorithms posing a question about individualised education turning into a tool for further segregation and pathologisation on societal inequalities (see Williamson 2020; Ong and Collier 2008); the ever-increasing role of the OECD and other global institutions possibly narrowing local actors abilities to discern local education’s aims, goals and tools (see Candido 2020; Candido, Granskog, and Tung 2020); and the rise of private edu-markets where students ameliorate between the roles of the customers and raw material for sellable personal data (see Ideland and Serder 2022; Ideland, Jobér, and Axelsson 2020). If the youth education becomes individualised and precise management of young people’s future(s) mainly through the lenses of human capital and young people’s market value, what happens to other aspects of education, such as civic participation, good life and democracy?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).