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Education Policy, Digital Disruption And The Future Of Work: Framing Young People’s Futures In The Present
 3030306747,  9783030306748,  9783030306755

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 5
Contents......Page 7
Chapter 1: Framing Networked ‘Youth’ in the Present: Chasing the Horizon......Page 8
Young People and the (Digital) Present......Page 11
The Problem(s) of Education Policy......Page 13
The Value of a Political Economy Approach......Page 17
Understanding Big and Small Stories of Digital Disruption......Page 19
Stories of Digital Transformation, Policy-making, and Young People’s Lives......Page 21
References......Page 23
Chapter 2: Thinking with the Future......Page 27
Thinking with Time......Page 28
Understanding the Future......Page 32
Digital Disruption as Future-Making......Page 34
A Sociology of the Future......Page 36
Education Futures......Page 39
Conclusions......Page 42
References......Page 43
Chapter 3: Young People and the Disruption of Everything......Page 47
The Cris(es) of Future/Present Youth......Page 49
‘Moving’ in Late Modernity......Page 54
The Promises and Threats of Networked Youth......Page 58
Hacking Lives and Hacked Lives......Page 62
References......Page 64
Chapter 4: The Hard and Soft Networks of Digital Disruption......Page 70
Trends, Opportunities, and the Rise of Management Consulting Think-pieces......Page 72
What Works, and the Threat(s) of Unprepared Youth......Page 75
The Promises, Possibilities, and Problems of Survivor Bias......Page 78
Measure, Personalize, Streamline: Rethinking Young People as Talent......Page 80
New Vision[s] for Education: Technology as Pivot and Possibility in Educational Policy......Page 83
Defining Education as a System of Markets......Page 86
Skills Markets beyond Education for All......Page 88
Conclusions......Page 91
References......Page 92
Chapter 5: The ‘Digital’ as Problem and Purpose in Education Policy......Page 97
Education Policy and the Future as Opportunity and Threat......Page 99
Skills, Innovation, and the ‘Jobs of the Future’......Page 101
A Piece of the (Global) Pie: Youth, Competition, and (Digital) Risk......Page 104
Platform Capitalism and the Economies of the Future......Page 108
Scientific/Technical Innovation and Framing of the Skills Gaps......Page 112
Conclusions......Page 115
References......Page 116
Chapter 6: Digital Disruption, Education Policy, and the Future of Work: Shifting Frames of Reference in Shifting Times......Page 120
Spaces of the Future: Layering the (Digital) Map......Page 123
Bringing Youth Futures into Place(s), and Place(s) into the Future......Page 125
Youth Futures in Time......Page 127
References......Page 130
References......Page 133
Index......Page 151

Citation preview

Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work Framing Young People’s Futures in the Present

Shane B. Duggan

Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work

Shane B. Duggan

Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work Framing Young People’s Futures in the Present

Shane B. Duggan RMIT University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-30674-8    ISBN 978-3-030-30675-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30675-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book is about how young people’s lives are understood within the context of the rise of networked technologies in an increasing number of aspects of learning, living, and labouring. It explores the formal and informal policy mechanisms through which decisions about the impact of networked technologies are made, and their effects on how young people access, and are expected to interact with education and work. It is framed by three questions: first, what kinds of futures are being imagined and promoted in conversations about young people; second, what are the intended and unintended consequences of these framings; and finally, which young people are included and excluded in conversations about the future of living, learning, and labouring? Examining the intersection of digital disruption and education policy with young people’s lives involves bringing together of three sets of problems that organise this book: futurity, future-making and the problem of ‘youth’; understanding education policy as a form of future-making; and the collapsing of labour, learning, and life through the pursuit of technical solutions to complex policy problems. As this book demonstrates, conversations about young people’s futures in the present often privilege digital labour and take (or resist) the fragmentation of that labour, and its undoing through networked technologies as a norm. This manifests in an education policy landscape which seeks to ‘solve’ the problems of the future, often framing young people as simultaneously at risk and positioned to leverage digital disruption as a key site of aspiration and self-making for the future. v

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PREFACE

This book emerges from a program of work conducted since 2015 which examines the value of higher education within the context of digital disruption in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), conducted primarily during a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Education, and later, the UNESCO UNEVOC Centre at RMIT. It brings together three studies, each consisting of focus groups, as well as media and policy analysis. The focus groups involved a series of conversations with policy makers, tech workers, teachers, and parents in London, New York, and Melbourne in 2017–18. The media and policy analysis drew upon Australian Federal Hansard records and official media releases from Federal Ministers between 2013 and 2018. Much of this book was written in the Fall and Winter of 2018 in New York City with the support of NYU Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy and was supported by a Department of Education and Training Endeavour Research Fellowship (Grant number: 6772_2018). I would like to acknowledge Noel Anderson and Ann Marcus at The Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy for their kind support and hospitality during my stay in New York City; and Gregory Wolniak for so generously assisting with facilitating the Visiting Fellowship. I would also like to thank Peter Kelly for his ongoing support and mentorship in helping bring this project to life. Finally, my deepest thanks to Francesca Sykes for being my most supportive and challenging critic, collaborator, and friend. This book is dedicated to the living memory of my late grandmother, Dorothy May Duggan, as everything always is and ever will be. Melbourne, VIC

Shane Duggan

Contents

1 Framing Networked ‘Youth’ in the Present: Chasing the Horizon  1 2 Thinking with the Future 21 3 Young People and the Disruption of Everything 41 4 The Hard and Soft Networks of Digital Disruption 65 5 The ‘Digital’ as Problem and Purpose in Education Policy 93 6 Digital Disruption, Education Policy, and the Future of Work: Shifting Frames of Reference in Shifting Times117 References131 Index149

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CHAPTER 1

Framing Networked ‘Youth’ in the Present: Chasing the Horizon

Abstract  Duggan explores how young people’s lives are framed in popular and policy debates as moving or transitioning toward the future. In this chapter, he frames how an investigation of the youth futures policy environment might progress, and provides a critical outline of education policy around preparing young people to engage with the world of formal education and beyond. Duggan introduces futurity and (digital) disruption as key concepts for thinking about young people’s lives in the present, as well as the political economy perspective which orients the investigation across the book. Keywords  Young people • Futurity • Disruption • Digital “Too often, we find ourselves looking to technology to answer questions we’re asking in the wrong way” Alex and Jeremy whirred past the dining table, debating what kind of structure they would build as they crashed down next to a basket of wooden blocks in the corner of the lounge. Their father, Rob, turned his head toward the boys and continued: “At the school, we’re told that they need to be learning programming, but I can see those skills right here, in how they make whatever structure stand up, how they plan it, how they make different shapes with the blocks that they have. I don’t see why the computer is the heart of it.” © The Author(s) 2019 S. B. Duggan, Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30675-5_1

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The structure collapsed with a roar from each of the boys. Jeremy admonished his brother who was not particularly interested in the older boy’s plan. “Of course, they need to know how to use computers, I get that. They need to know how to use them well, but it can’t be the heart of everything, can it?”

This book is an interrogation of the ways that digital disruption impacts how we understand young people’s lives. The stories it tells take as their focus networked technologies, the rhetoric around their development, implementation, and use, and their effects on everyday life. It explores digital disruption specifically in relation to popular and policy discourse around preparing young people to engage with the world of formal education and beyond. Drawing on examples from Australia and beyond, it interrogates how popular discussions about technology ‘stick’ in formal education policy, their movement and crystallisation in ideas, assumptions, and anxieties about the future. Young people are often framed in popular and policy debates as ‘moving’ or transitioning toward the ‘future,’ both individually and collectively. Within this, I ask: which youth are included or excluded in discussions about the future, how do dominant narratives and market-oriented logics around the ‘needs’ of the future influence policy orientations, and what does the emerging picture of a future predicated on human-computer interface look like in relation to life, labour, and learning? At its heart, this book does not seek to predict what kinds, or what intensities of digital disruption might exist in the future: that work is left to the speculators of blogs, social media, and tech ‘insider’ magazines. Rather, it considers how conjecture, innovation, and organizational intervention circulate to make certain stories about young people’s preparedness for the future tellable, and others not. This book emerges from a series of conversations I had in 2017 with parents like Amy and Rob, introduced above, who were grappling with questions around how much technology, if any, they should incorporate in raising their now six- and nine-year-old sons. Residing in a leafy suburb bordered by national park to the east of Melbourne, Australia, Amy and Rob had enrolled their sons at the local Montessori school, in part because of its close connection to the natural environment, but mostly for its commitment to hands-on, collaborative learning in a predominately digital technology-free environment. In the months between our first and second conversations at their home however, they had moved Jeremy to the local

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Public school, after an exhausting battle over supporting his reading and writing. It was their view that multiple teachers had failed to recognize delays in Jeremy’s progress, and worse, did not seem to have a plan to address it. The new school ran an extensive iPad program and had challenged their existing beliefs around the role of digital technologies in their son’s education, forcing them to negotiate the differences in ideology between their children’s schools. Earlier, Amy, a Drama teacher at a large Secondary School nearby, grappled with the implications of the move: We’ve had to rethink after-school time. Since they started school, the boys have always joined me at work for an hour or two while I wrap up planning or rehearsal. I’d usually have a game or a job around the theatre for them to do which kept them entertained. Now, as Jez is getting older, we have had to deal with homework, which is always on the iPad. That’s meant we have had to get one for Alex too, because he wants to do whatever his brother does. They’re always finding new apps and building things on them, but we’ve had to learn to monitor and make sure what they are doing isn’t mindless.

A few moments later, the boys had relocated to opposite ends of the sofa, iPads in hand, with Minecraft, a popular block-based open-world game flashing on the screens. Rob returned to his seat: It feels like we are constantly walking that line between entertainment and learning. That’s not to say that is a bad thing necessarily, but it raises the constant question in my mind as to what these kids will expect learning to be like. Are they going to care about persisting with the less entertaining stuff when so much of what they are being asked to do by their teacher is focused on bright colours and quick rewards?

There is significant anxiety for how young people are being prepared to participate in a world of work that increasingly relies on digital platforms and networked technologies. Over the last decade, policy makers have given significant attention to understanding the emerging conditions of the future and the ‘new’ within the digital information economy. There is little consensus on the nature or extent of these changes. However, it is generally agreed that networked technologies have deep implications for how young people make a life. The world of work, the future into which young people will graduate, is changing—or so it is said. For well over three decades, parents and young people have been told in various ways that around three-quarters of

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the jobs they will undertake once they graduate haven’t been invented yet (see Kelly 2018). This statistic, however and by whoever tells it, both creates and defines an orientation to the future that this book explores. So it goes: young people, the vanguard of our collective future, are also the most at risk from being left behind by advances in technologies that are increasingly networked, autonomous, and encompass ever more human practices. As I have explored elsewhere (Duggan 2018, 2019), there is a good deal of research into the embedding of digital technologies in school-based curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and systems. Similarly, scholarly work in sociological subfields such as in the Journal of Youth Studies has maintained close attention to young people’s social, cultural, and political activities. However, there is a striking absence between these diverse fields which brings broader perspectives around the political economy of young people’s lives to bear on how their lives are understood in anticipation of an increasingly technologically-mediated future. This investigation seeks to understand how networked technologies and digital disruption shape understandings of young people’s lives. These changes increasingly operate transnationally in classed, gendered, and racialised ways, yet have local valences that are felt differentially across spaces and communities. Throughout, I am concerned with the interplay between the big and small, the fast and slow, the global and local. The examples in this book draw from the Australian context, however, each has an eye to the broader and contingent global effects of networked life in the first decades of the new millennium. The remainder of this chapter positions this book within the context of the rise of networked technologies, and their embedding in education policy. I introduce futurity and (digital) disruption as key concepts for thinking about young people’s lives in the present, as well as the political economy perspective which orients the text. Each is taken up in more detail in subsequent chapters.

Young People and the (Digital) Present Concern for young people’s relationship to the digital information economy is not a new phenomenon. A wealth of recent literature has examined the embedding of networked technologies and specifically, computing in educational curriculum (Corneliussen and Prøitz 2016; Vivian et  al. 2014), and there is growing attention to the rise of major tech corporations influencing educational policy making (Hogan et al. 2015; Tawfik

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et al. 2016). What is common in critical accounts of this space is a call to situate discussions about educational policy-making, curriculum, access and equity within a broader understanding of how organisations, political agendas, and networked technologies are impacting young people’s lives. This book responds to recent calls for a more critical examination of the social, political, and economic impacts of networked technologies in young people’s lives (Selwyn 2015). It takes education, broadly defined, as a key site of policy, social, and market intervention for advancing ideologies about, and resources for, imagining possible and probable futures. The march of disruption is framed as a problem of the future—a space for colonisation with solutions—designed by an ever-increasing churn of problem solvers, visionaries, and market makers. It is framed by an anticipated threat that is both omnipresent, yet realised retrospectively. Today, young people find themselves at the forefront—the producers and consumers of ‘future’ as it is worked up, embedded, and subsequently disrupted within existing circuits of capital. Future practices are both problem and potential amid the market-oriented flows of money, digital software and hardware, and people. Just as the first industrial revolution sought to control and automate bodies, and the second the flow of capital between its constituent parts, the networked present is imagined within the generation of knowledge, its exchange, and—looking toward the future—its automation. These are distinct things which this book explores. The ways in which we speak about the future often sediments as an extension of the past with all of the latent problems, consolidations, and confluences that drive the present state of affairs. In this sense, the future offers both the promise and the threat of addressing these in/equities, rendering them visible and manageable in new, yet often familiar ways. The questions guiding this project arise within a context of continued and rapid shifts in technology, global connectedness, as well as physical and virtual mobility. Assumptions about the ubiquity of networked technologies are at once true for an ever-increasing majority on a global scale, yet also often conceal the deep inequalities for those lacking access. Nearly two decades ago, Facer and Furlong (2001, 452) asserted “young people’s access to and use of new technologies is frequently conceptualized by both politicians and the press as unproblematic”. As the “digital generation of cyber kids,” young people were at “ground zero” for the impending information revolution (2001, 452). In the time since however, technological innovation and almost constant anxiety around young people’s online practices in popular and policy circles has led to significant

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scholarship seeking to unpack and trouble implicit assumptions around their technology use. More recent understandings such as Gardner and Davis’ (2013) ‘app generation’ tend to focus on the ways in which young people engage in meaning-making in and through the use of digital technologies. For Gardner and Davis (2013), young people view their environments as an ‘app,’ through which they find short term, discrete solutions to problems rather than engaging in holistic planning and critical thought. In their view, this has implications for the composition of social relationships, learning, and engagement with notions of citizenship and civic participation. Boyd (2014), more optimistically, suggests that the rise of social and digital media amplifies, rather than displaces the kinds of ‘networked publics’ within which young people inhabit, and imagine new possibilities. Both positions warrant closer interrogation.

The Problem(s) of Education Policy Education policy has been taken in many ways, to include or preclude certain things and thus, it is worth noting how ‘policy’ is framed in this book. Throughout, I primarily follow the growing body of scholarship, often drawing on the work of Stephen J. Ball and his collaborators over the last three decades (for brief example, Ball et al. 2012, 2017; Maguire et al. 2017; Ball and Thawer 2018), who suggest that what we often bundle up as ‘policy’ is a constellation of texts, practices, discourses, and technologies (Ball and Thawer 2018). I argue that education policy makes visible certain practices and disavows others with the intention of crystalizing—through a set of instrumental logics—the conditions under which desirable practices can be isolated, measured, improved, or eradicated. Put another way, as Ball argues, policy discourses are not something we do, but rather, something that does us (2015). These discourses operate with varying levels of intensity over different bodies, times, locations, ideas, and objects. Ball suggests, “[p]olicy discourses provide us with ways of thinking and talking about our institutional selves, to ourselves and to others” (2015, 306). This allows for a privileging of ‘what works’ that is preserved in terms of ‘effective’ or ‘good’ practices that “are productive and in many circumstances enable us to bathe in the afterglow of ‘successful’ practices and ‘what works’” (2015, 306). Policy discourses have embedded within them a logic of effectiveness which ensures that the absolute goal of a given policy, and its perfect implementation are always out of reach, and thus, enable a cycle of continuous improvement and aspiration.

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As Bacchi (2009, ix) argues, public policy is predicated on the notion of ‘fixing’. Education policy is perhaps a particularly pertinent example of this. Following Bacchi, and as I argue particularly in Chap. 5, digital disruption is positioned as a problem of the present, for which a solution or fix is required. This creates multiple problems that form a logic chain: the ‘future’ economy requires more innovation to ‘remain competitive’; employers find it difficult to hire people who can readily deploy that innovation, curriculum is not focused enough on teaching computer coding, teachers that are not qualified enough to teach it, and so on. As Bacchi (2009, ix) put it: “The notion of ‘fixing’ carries with it an understanding that something needs to be ‘fixed’, that there is a problem” (emphasis in original). Bacchi’s approach, which she dubs ‘what policy is represented to be?’ or WPR is predicated on the notion that within many public policy discourses, residual assumptions and presumptions in how ‘problems’ are framed close down certain ways of thinking and “leave the impression that it is possible to think of a situation in only one way” (2009, 40). This can be seen in Rob’s reflection which opened this chapter, where he searches to find a way of thinking about technologically-mediated learning in which it is not nothing, or “the heart of everything”. To borrow Bacchi’s term, the problematisations of digital disruption frame up what is in and out of scope for both posing, and solving the problems of the future. In short, the purpose of this book is to open up the problematisations of digital disruption for interrogation. Public policy operates in an increasingly globalised context whereby both the politics and their operations are mobile, exceeding national borders. As Gulson et al. (2017, 225–26) argue, “influence is being exerted in the policy cycle in new ways” which blunts traditional approaches of understanding both the spaces across which polic(ies) operate, and their mobility within and between “local contexts and agents to inflect, appropriate, or even resist such global flows” (Gulson et al. 2017, 226). Over the last decade, this scholarship has been heavily informed by Peck and Theodore’s (2010) notion of ‘policy mobility,’ which aims to explore the multiple ways that policy moves across and within borders, systems, and contexts. For Peck and Theodore (2010, 170) “the governing metaphors in critical policy studies are not those of transit and transaction, but of mobility and mutation”. The emphasis on mobilities is a reimagining of previous approaches which emphasised policy transfer as operating across a realitively unstructured policy environment. Indeed, the shift away from understanding the movement of policy as transfer is particularly pertinent

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in relation to education technologies, not only due to the myriad private and public organisations operating across national borders, but also to their interface and embedding across multiple facets of economic and political life. Peck and Theodore’s policy mobility lens involves five key elements that are critical for examining the young people’s lives in the context of digital disruption. (1) policy formation and transformation are seen as socially constructed processes rather than the movement of pre-­ packaged ideas; (2) they involve the formation of connections across and between policy actors and sites which incorporate advocacy for specific kinds of solutions to pre-determined ‘problems’; (3) the policy field is constituted of diverse individuals and communities within and beyond those that are traditionally associated with that policy sphere; (4) policies always travel in process, rather than as complete or packaged solutions; and (5) policy movement occurs “in terms of a three-dimensional mosaic of increasingly reflexive forms of governance, shaped by multi-directional forms of cross- scalar and interlocal policy mobility” (2010, 170). In Australia as well as globally, education policy is often considered as in tension between logics of access and inclusion on the one hand, and market-oriented practices and principles on the other. Savage et al. (2013) suggest that this tension plays out in particular around concepts of equity, where both those who emphasise notions of education for all, and those who privilege educational choice interpret their position as pursuing a policy apparatus predicated on ‘equity’. Savage et al. (2013, 164), note that equity is defined in multiple and sometimes competing ways across the policy landscape, and that this manifests in “differing implications for new forms of educational governance”. Notions of equity are central to these discourses, either explicitly in terms of defining what a given educational policy is ‘for,’ or implicitly in how policies unfold unevenly across difference demographics in practice. This rendering of the tensions inherent within policies and their subjects is useful for considering the relationship of policy to their artefacts, and is one that I hold up throughout this book in considering how networked technologies are positioned and deployed in young people’s lives in the present and orientation toward the future. It is possible to think about education policy as operating across four related sets of activities noted here in no specific order: first, as the texts that set out desired or expected behaviours in sometimes broad and sometimes very specific ways; second, as discourses and practices that operationalize those expectations; third, through regulations which govern the

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practices of policy in the everyday; and finally and perhaps most productively, as networks which codify and transmit resources, practices, and discourses across and between local, and sometimes global contexts. Each of these activities is itself a field that warrants its own consideration, however, this book is particularly interested in the flows between each set of activities, their direction and qualit(ies). Following Gerrard et  al. (2017, 506), I conceptualise “policy and media as discourses in and of the public sphere”. It is for this reason that throughout this book I include reports made by management consulting firms, and interviews with prominent technologists and venture capitalists alongside official media releases by politicians and official parliamentary records. The goal of this project is to examine, as Gerrard et al. (2017, 506) suggest, “the inter-relationship between media and policy in the construction of meanings and practices in education”. Central to this analysis is the assumption that policies do not emerge as complete or neat, nor that they are ever wholly ‘new’ or ‘different,’ but rather reflect both formal and informal groupings, underlying logics, and communities of practice (W. W. Au and Ferrare 2015). It is within this definition that this book proceeds. Rather than any given document or announcement indicating either the beginning or end of policy, the artefacts which make up this archive form a conduit—among many—along which discourses around networked technologies are taken up, travel, and sediment. Relations between policy actors, their congealing around specific initiatives, and how those inform their increasingly global work and reach offers a valuable means of examining how particular perspectives come to dominate in conversations about young people’s lives. As Gulson et al. (2017, 226) note, the turn to ‘mobilities’ has the capacity to show “how global discourses and processes can help to inform, enable and, at times, even constrain more local policy processes”. Transnational commercial actors increasingly contribute to this imaginary: consulting giant McKinsey & Company have released six major reports over the last 10 years on topics ranging from replicating the practices of high-growth education systems to rethinking first-year College—a trend followed by each of the ‘big 4’ management consulting firms. Global education resource behemoth Pearson released a highly influential report The Learning Curve; and almost all major tech and business consulting companies have either a growing education arm, or are directly involved in advocating for tech-­ focused policy in school systems on a global scale. Resisting the temptation to identify an ‘origin’ of policy (Rizvi and Lingard 2009), a policy

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mobilities focus affords deeper interrogation of what Allen (2011, 284) suggests is a contemporary landscape where policies are “not so much positioned in space or extended across it, as they compose the spaces of which they are a part”. This approach, coupled with Bacchi’s focus on problematisations forms a powerful lens for doing the complex policy work of digital disruption.

The Value of a Political Economy Approach Digital disruption and the future of work are necessarily bound up in the political economy of technological developments, their uneven distribution, and their embedding in day-to-day life. Political economy is a contested term and there is reason to elaborate my application of it briefly here. Broadly, political economy perspectives differ with regard to the influence of political aspects on economic policy and practice, or put another way, the extent to which the ‘political’ accounts for the functioning of the market. Klees (2017b, 411) usefully divides these into three broad approaches: the neoliberal, liberal, and progressive; with the former focused on efficiency and effectiveness, and more progressive perspectives taking account of “the reproductive nature of both the market and the state under current world system structures”. The political economy perspective has a long tradition, and the varying application of the term has been cause for debate for some time (Selwyn 2013). Mansell’s (2004, 96) suggestion that there exists “only a fragmentary picture of how our experience of technological mediation is being produced and reproduced” looms large here. Subsequent analysis has taken the political economy perspective up in relation to education (Klees 2017b), urbanism (McFarlane 2011), new media (Samuels 2010), and technology studies (Tsatsou 2014). In youth studies, arguments calling for reconsideration of the political economy perspective by Côté have been well explored from a cultural perspective by France and Threadgold (2016), a rejoinder by Côté (2016), an analysis of the emerging tensions in youth activism by Sukarieh and Tannock (2016), and an exposition of the relationship of this debate to broader conversations in youth studies by Kelly (2018). Two claims regarding the efficacy of a political economy perspective underpin the proceeding analysis. First, in popular and policy discourse, there remains a tendency to emphasize market-oriented forms of governance as the ‘norm’ in talking about the present. This has stymied deeper engagement with the differential effects of young people’s political, economic, social, and cultural lives. Second, debates around the political economy of

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young people’s lives is often positioned within the real and imagined practices of networked technologies with little regard for how these technologies enable or constrain young people’s engagement with the present and possible/probable futures. I explored this in some detail in a recent contribution to the Kelly et al. edited collection Young People and the Politics of Outrage and Hope in relation to McKenzie Wark’s (2004) hacker-class (Duggan 2018). I employ a similar approach throughout this book in considering stories of digital disruption from above and below, in how problems are formed up, maintained, or left aside. The benefit of a political economy approach for this book is its potential for more nuanced consideration of the role of increasingly inter/ national economic and political actors in young people’s lives. As Sukarieh and Tannock (2016, 1283) note, one key concern of the political economy approach is to understand how certain policies and practices are “are constituted and reconstituted within a broad and ever-changing set of social, cultural, political and economic relationships”. This both orients the ‘political’ within networks of social and cultural relations and positions the economic as a lever within that political orientation. More than this though, a political economy perspective is useful for its emphasis on who gets access to what, when, and by which mechanisms that access is controlled. Mansell’s outline of the political economy of media at the turn of the millennium remains pertinent: …a political economy of new media would enquire into what gives rise to newly-emergent power structures. It would ask about the consequences for the capacity of new media to mediate people’s lives in ways that recreate social and economic inequality. (2004, 99)

As Selwyn (2013) notes, a political economy perspective emphasises the historical as well as contemporary circumstances through which specific phenomena emerge and are reinforced, or dismantled. For Selwyn (2013, 32), this has the benefit of tracing “the continuities and the discontinuities between old and new forms” of technology and education, and also the intersections of youth and networked technologies in their compound effects on living, labouring, and learning in the present. With well over three decades of sustained interest in young people’s digital and networked lives, this is particularly relevant. I explore the utility of the political economy approach further in the chapters that follow with specific regard to networked technologies, education, the future of work and their coalescence in conversations about young people’s lives.

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Understanding Big and Small Stories of Digital Disruption At the turn of the millennium, a significant amount of scholarship tended to describe young people as needing to ‘skill up’ and “infuse themselves with self-confidence” in order to overcome the decline in labour market conditions (Edwards and Weller 2010, 125; see also, Woodman and Wyn 2015). Popular commentators valorised young, IT savvy ‘self-starters’ who successfully navigated ‘new economies’ and found new markets in which to sell their products (Walkerdine 2011). As Edwards and Weller (2010, 126) show however, this optimism has long since evaporated amidst the global economic crisis of 2007–08 and uneven subsequent recovery, with youth scholarship returning to a focus on the “effects of economic circumstances on young people’s sense of the opportunities available to them” and the replacement of a “smooth trajectory of resourceful optimism with a fractured turn into demoralisation”. There is a growing sense among youth researchers that the increase in market-oriented mechanisms surrounding young people foregrounds an ‘institutional narrative’ at the expense of a more dynamic conception of their lives. Many theorists have considered the far-reaching implications of the ‘neoliberal imaginary’ in which economic imperatives attempting to control the future are manifest in performative orientations and practices in the present (Ball and Olmedo 2013; Rizvi and Lingard 2009). In this sense, self-worth and self-realization involve partitioning and conditioning one’s activities in the present such that “the future is thought of as resonant with possibilities, yet not left open to the full play of contingency” (Giddens 1991, 77). This plays out in both formal and informal ways, as Keating et al. (2013) argue in their suggestion that ‘institutional narratives’ fail to account for the broad scale shifts that young people face in their engagement with secondary and tertiary educational systems in particular. Put slightly differently, Brown et al. (2013) note how mechanisms that favor educational enactment as the core of youth identities seem to background the active self-making practices that young people engage in outside of ‘normal’ experiences of completing compulsory education and transitioning to adulthood. For Brown (2015), the market-oriented logics which dominate present day policy making operate as a political rationality rather than a form of which privilege the “conditions of possibility and legitimacy of [their] instruments, the field of normative reason from which

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governing is forged”. Within this, “[n]eoliberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct,’ and a scheme of valuation” (Brown 2015, 21). I follow Brown in understanding policy as operating as a rationality: a ‘doing’ of social, cultural, and economic life in practice, and one that brings together whole sets of logics about who people are, what they do in the everyday, and what they ought to orient toward. This book does not go so far as to offer a theory of the political subject of neoliberalism, and I use the term sparingly throughout the text. Like many, I am uneasy with how the term has come to represent all things evil in young people’s lives, and the ways in which it papers over, as Klees (2017a) puts it, how capitalism has always been, and remains a key issue in how education is framed in policy and practice. However, as Apple (2017, 249) reminds us, “neoliberalism continues to act as something like a religion in that it seems to be largely impervious to empirical evidence, even as the crisis that it has created in the economy and in communities constantly documents its failures”. For this reason, and perhaps especially since this book is concerned with the intersection of intensified modes of digital capital flows and their effects on human capital formation, it remains a useful descriptor. This book extends and concentrates the conceptualization of political rationalities onto the socio-political push toward the technologization of young people’s lives. That these rationalities operate across multiple spheres through the extension, intensification, and deepening of familiar processes is illuminating for their efficiency at replication, repetition, and standardization. They create opportunities for the most privileged, and facilitate gatekeeping behaviours limiting access for others. Moreover, networked technologies illustrate the spread of the neoliberal rationality especially well: not through attempts at the reduction to a single standard per se (anyone with a drawer full of non-compatible cables and connectors can attest this), but rather, through the progressive migration toward open standards, proliferation of network effects, and preference toward technologized ‘solutions’ to sticky, often wicked problems. In this book, I want to move away from the dominant understanding that the key shifts in relation to young people’s lives and their embedding in educational policy are sped up or intensified by networked technologies, and instead show how networked technologies and digital disruption mobilize those intensifications in specific ways, and for specific purposes. I remain cautious around the deployment of ‘neoliberalism’ as a catch-all for the totality of capitalist activity in the present, as its diverse application

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across uncommon fields of inquiry and life has tended to blunt its analytic utility. As I show in the next chapter, it is not useful to merely account for networked technologies and the ‘digital’ broadly in economic terms. Indeed, their proliferation and substantiation in this social, cultural, and political moment is dominated by that charge, however, the two need not be conflated.

Stories of Digital Transformation, Policy-making, and Young People’s Lives Digital disruption and networked technologies are often positioned as a logic of the present. As this book argues, conversations about young people’s futures in the present often privilege digital labour and take (or resist) the fragmentation of that labour, and its undoing through networked technologies as a norm. This manifests in an education policy landscape which seeks to ‘solve’ the problems of the future, often framing young people as simultaneously at risk and also as keenly positioned to leverage digital disruption as a site of aspiration and self-making for the future. This book brings together data from a program of work undertaken between 2015 and 2018 consisting focus groups, and media and policy analysis. The focus groups involved a series of conversations with policy makers, tech workers, teachers, and parents in London, New  York, and Melbourne in 2018, which included Rob and Amy’s narrative which opened this Chapter. Participants reflected on provocations around preparing young people for a future that will be dominated by technological intrusions into their social, cultural, and economic lives. The media and policy analysis which is the focus of Chap. 5 drew upon Australian Federal Hansard records and official media releases from Federal Ministers between 2013 and 2018. It examined conversations around ‘coding in schools’ in parliamentary debates, media releases, and engagements by Government and Opposition Federal Ministers to consider the extent to which the re/articulation and embedding of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education reflects an idealised notion of the future as tech-enabled and in need of policy response to ‘the new’. This study was expanded in 2018 to include reports from management and consulting firms after the analysis found that these reports represented a key information vector for both politicians, as well as those who participated in the focus groups. The coalescence around these thinktank narratives informs, in a significant way, the orientation of this book.

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Examining the intersection of digital disruption and education policy with young people’s lives involves bringing together of three sets of problems that organise this book: (1) futurity and ‘youth’; (2) education policy as future-making; and (3) the collapsing of labour, learning, and life. For the first, Chap. 2 focuses on how notions of futurity and temporality are taken up and deployed in conversations about young people’s lives, and following on, Chap. 3 positions digital disruption and networked technologies within the broader context of youth scholarship. Here, examining the New South Wales Government’s recent Youth Employment Innovation Challenge, I explore how assumptions around young people’s possible and probable futures tend to portray young people as technologically savvy, self-starters whose practices break with the present. These assumptions have emerged in popular and policy discourses around young people’s lives in the first two decades of the new millennium both by way of convenience for framing young people’s practices within a market logic, and fear for how those practices potentially disrupt long-standing beliefs around work and life. Considering education policy as a form of market- and future-making, Chap. 4 interrogates the claim that young people are underprepared for the so-named ‘digital revolution’. It examines how digital disruption has been mobilised in ways that render young people’s lives visible to technical, instrumental, and economic intervention by both domestic, and increasingly, global actors. Here, I draw together an archive of reports and initiatives emerging within the context of the post-2015 global agenda by global accounting and management consulting firms. Across each, I show how the logic of digital disruption is instrumental—and instrumentalised—through its marriage with a market-oriented understanding of education and training. The rise of ‘coding in schools’ discourse has emerged within this broader global environment, and in Chap. 5, I trace its deployment in the Australian context in 2015 to illustrate the positioning of young people’s futures over time in relation to the promise(s) and threat(s) of digital transformation in the present. Rather than concentrating on curriculum and learning outcomes as has been the focus of significant scholarship over the last decade, it considers how education policy emerges in anticipation of, and response to particular substantiations of ‘the future,’ realised in and through their articulation in broader debates around digital transformation, life, and labour on an increasingly global scale.

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Thinking more broadly about the ‘future of work,’ Chap. 6 brings these lines of thinking together to consider how forms of future- policymaking are implicated and taken up within what I term the speculative capacity of aspirations for the future. The accounts across this book are informed by a political economy approach and in closing, Chap. 6 questions how young people’s lives are implicated in discussions about the future that take—as a key logic—the embedding of networked technologies, digital transformation, and their contingent effects on learning, labouring, and life.

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Corneliussen, Hilde G., and Lin Prøitz. 2016. Kids Code in a Rural Village in Norway: Could Code Clubs Be a New Arena for Increasing Girls’ Digital Interest and Competence? Information, Communication & Society 19 (1): 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1093529. Côté, James E. 2016. A New Political Economy of Youth Reprised: Rejoinder to France and Threadgold. Journal of Youth Studies 19 (6): 852–868. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1136058. Duggan, Shane. 2018. Hacking the Future: Youth, Digital Disruption and the Promise of the New. In Young People and the Politics of Outrage and Hope, ed. Peter Kelly, Perri Campbell, Lyn Harrison, and Chris Hickey. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004387492. ———. 2019. Examining Digital Disruption as Problem and Purpose in Australian Education Policy. The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 18 (1): 111–127. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/ index.php/IEJ. Edwards, Rosalind, and Susie Weller. 2010. Trajectories from Youth to Adulthood: Choice and Structure for Young People before and during Recession. Twenty-­ First Century Society 5 (2): 125–136. https://doi. org/10.1080/17450141003783298. Facer, Keri, and Ruth Furlong. 2001. Beyond the Myth of the ‘Cyberkid’: Young People at the Margins of the Information Revolution. Journal of Youth Studies 4 (4): 451–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260120101905. France, Alan, and Steven Threadgold. 2016. Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach. Journal of Youth Studies 19 (5): 612–628. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1098779. Gardner, Howard, and Katie Davis. 2013. The App Generation: How Todays Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gerrard, Jessica, Glenn C. Savage, and Kate O’Connor. 2017. Searching for the Public: School Funding and Shifting Meanings of ‘the Public’ in Australian Education. Journal of Education Policy 32 (4): 503–519. https://doi.org/10. 1080/02680939.2016.1274787. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gulson, Kalervo N., Steven Lewis, Bob Lingard, Christopher Lubienski, Keita Takayama, and P. Taylor Webb. 2017. Policy Mobilities and Methodology: A Proposition for Inventive Methods in Education Policy Studies. Critical Studies in Education 58 (2): 224–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2 017.1288150. Hogan, Anna, Sam Sellar, and Bob Lingard. 2015. Commercialising Comparison: Pearson Puts the TLC in Soft Capitalism. Journal of Education Policy 0939 (Dec.): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.1112922.

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Keating, Jack, Glenn C. Savage, and John Polesel. 2013. Letting Schools off the Hook? Exploring the Role of Australian Secondary Schools in the COAG Year 12 Attainment Agenda. Journal of Education Policy 28 (2): 268–286. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.730628. Kelly, Peter. 2018. Three Notes on a Political Economy of Youth. Journal of Youth Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2018.1463432. Klees, Steven J. 2017a. Beyond Neoliberalism: Reflections on Capitalism and Education. Policy Futures in Education, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1478210317715814. ———. 2017b. The Political Economy of Education and Inequality: Reflections on Piketty. Globalisation, Societies and Education 15 (4): 410–424. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2016.1195731. Maguire, Meg, Kate Hoskins, Stephen J. Ball, and Annette Braun. 2017. Policy Discourses in School Texts. Education Policy: Major Themes in Education 6306 (July). https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.601556. Mansell, Robin. 2004. Political Economy, Power and New Media. New Media and Society 6 (1): 96–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444804039910. McFarlane, Colin. 2011. One Assemblage and Critical Urbanism. City 15 (2): 204–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.568715. Peck, Jamie, and Nik Theodore. 2010. Mobilizing Policy: Models, Methods, and Mutations. Geoforum 41 (2): 169–174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum. 2010.01.002. Rizvi, Fazal, and Bob Lingard. 2009. Globalizing Education Policy. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Samuels, Robert. 2010. New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9780230104181. Savage, Glenn C., Sam Sellar, and Radhika Gorur. 2013. Equity and Marketisation: Emerging Policies and Practices in Australian Education. Discourse 34 (2): 161–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013.770244. Selwyn, Neil. 2013. Education in a Digital World: Global Perspectives on Technology and Education. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. Minding Our Language: Why Education and Technology Is Full of Bullshit... and What Might Be Done about It. Digital Innovation, Creativity & Knowledge in Education Conference 41 (3): 437–443. https://doi.org/10.10 80/17439884.2015.1012523. Sukarieh, Mayssoun, and Stuart Tannock. 2016. On the Political Economy of Youth: A Comment. Journal of Youth Studies 19 (9): 1281–1289. https://doi. org/10.1080/13676261.2016.1206869. Tawfik, Andrew A., Todd D.  Reeves, and Amy Stich. 2016. Intended and Unintended Consequences of Educational Technology on Social Inequality. TechTrends 60 (6): 598–605. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0109-5.

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Tsatsou, Panayiota. 2014. Internet Studies: Past, Present and Future Directions. Farnham: Routledge. Vivian, Rebecca, Katrina Falkner, and Nickolas Falkner. 2014. Addressing the Challenges of a New Digital Technologies Curriculum: MOOCs as a Scalable Solution for Teacher Professional Development. Research in Learning Technology 22 (September 2017). https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.24691. Walkerdine, Valerie. 2011. Neoliberalism, Working-Class Subjects and Higher Education. Contemporary Social Science 6 (2): 255–271. https://doi.org/10. 1080/21582041.2011.580621. Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woodman, Dan, and Johanna Wyn. 2015. Class, Gender and Generation Matter: Using the Concept of Social Generation to Study Inequality and Social Change. Journal of Youth Studies 18 (10): 1402–1410. https://doi.org/10.1080/136 76261.2015.1048206.

CHAPTER 2

Thinking with the Future

Abstract  In this chapter, Duggan considers how future(s) have been taken up in relation to education, technology, and youth, acknowledging the slippages between time and temporality in thinking about young people’s lives. This work is framed both by the longer traditions of political and sociological interest in time and futurity, and the more recent reinvigoration of the sociology of the future and expectations in educational policy and science and technology studies (STS) over the last decade. Duggan argues for an expanded understanding of the relationship of the future to the present, and also how futures might be considered as multiple, contingent, and consistently unfolding in-action. Keywords  Futures • STS • Present • Technology In her pioneering 1962 work Silent Spring, Rachel Carson writes: We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by—offers our last, our only, chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. (Carson 1962, 277)

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To Carson’s observations we could add, by way of example, any measure of complex systems that have become of the staple of strategic planning on a global scale such as those which predominate conversations around the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and global philanthropic and State actors. The predominance of cultures of measurement, rationality, and consumerism sit both in tension and conversation with deeper understandings of the future in terms of humanity, humility, and the complexity that these necessarily involve. This tension is both future-making and future-taking in ways that this chapter explores, first in how complex systems are reduced to the ways that we have always done things, and second for how those forms are disrupted in their implementation and intervention across lived experiences. Here, the future is explored through engaging with what Adam (2003) suggests is the increasing commodification, compression, and control of time in the present. The future is, either explicitly or implicitly, a key feature of conversations about digital disruption, networked technologies, education policy, and young people’s social, cultural, and economic aspirations. These conversations have different valences and draw upon a complex and sometimes interrelated history of scholarship; however, they have in common a concern for the connections between the past, present, and future. Thus, to consider the ‘future’ necessitates a nuanced understanding of how time is made up and understood as “projectively oriented toward the ‘not yet’” (Adam 2010, 47). This requires elaboration of two related yet distinctive aspects of time, futurity, and temporality, which are the focus of this chapter. Here, I consider how future(s) have been taken up in relation to youth, technology, and education, acknowledging the slippages between time and temporality in thinking about young people’s lives. This work is framed both by the longer traditions of political and sociological interest in time and futurity, and the more recent reinvigoration of the sociology of the future and expectations in educational policy and science and technology studies (STS) over the last decade.

Thinking with Time Within the social and institutional conditions of late modernity, dominant framings of time are often understood primarily as an ordering of social life through the division of activities into fragments, such as in the timetabling of schools, pay cycles, and social activities such as dining and entertainment. This understanding, what Adam (2004) calls ‘clock’ time,

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chunks time into distinctive segments that organises daily life and also works to produce larger, distinctive periods which must be successfully navigated or passed through in making a life. For young people, the clock both literally and figuratively divides days into periods of instruction, labour, and social interaction, and often rationalizes those interactions in terms of their utility toward the future. At a larger level, the calendar organises activities into terms, semesters, and seasons; marking off key events such that they can be rendered in terms of growth, maturation, and development. This marking off is mirrored and often generated at the level of educational policy making. For example, recent educational debates around school curriculum in Australia posit the moniker of “at least one year’s growth in learning for every student every year” (Gonski et  al. 2018, xii). Thus, young people’s orientation in the present is formed up and regulated in ways that encourage particular activities; and discourages others. In this, time is parsed out into distinctive units, from the breaking up of the school day into periods for specific forms of instruction (Math, Language, Art, etc.), interaction (collaborative or ‘quiet’ work, etc.), or play (‘free’ time or organised sport, etc.), to larger phases of development (for example, early-years through tertiary education, or perhaps ‘juniors’ to ‘seniors’ in organised sport). For Adam, alongside the clock, two contrasting conceptions are useful for understanding how time is experienced in the world, as well as in academic discourses; first, bodily and biological understandings of maturation and natural processes, and second, the processual elements of daily life in which time is considered irreversible, contextual, and contingent. As noted above, these framings sit in tension with those which privilege the social ordering of time. Bjerrum Nielsen acknowledges this: The temporal dimension is reduced to processes of negotiations and resignifications in the space of the immediate present, which means that the temporal dimension connected to biographical experience and future development is dismissed. We may have processes, but not development; meanings, but not subjects; movements, but not biographies. (2016, 3)

Following McLeod (2017, 13), I understand temporality not simply as “a fancier word for time, but as signifying the messy, moving relations between past, present and future”. How past, present, and future are drawn up in the present, to what ends, and by whom, are critical for understanding people’s orientations toward the future. For Urry and

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­ thers who encourage a time-sensitive approach to sociological inquiry, o “the past is not simply back there but comes to be incorporated into that present, as well as embodying certain expectations of the future” (2016, 65). As I argue in Chap. 5, how particular policy instruments understand the historical circumstances that have led to the conditions of the present do critical work in bracketing possible and probable opportunities for the future within and upon different communities. Put another way, how a given present is seen as contemporaneous or breaking with the past works to orient, in a significant way, the landscape of, following Michael (2017): possible, probable, or preferable futures. The temporal dimension is often deployed along the various markers of transition that young people are said to pass through in the passage from ‘youth’ to ‘adulthood’ as well as how they—and the institutional and cultural frameworks with which they engage—make sense of, and understand their orientations toward the future (Uprichard 2011; Gerrard 2015). As Woodman (2011, 112) notes, there is a “certain family resemblance” in much of the contemporary sociological interest in time, “a stretching of the present, or forcing more action into the same duration, and a loss of the ability to plan into the future due to a sense of uncertainty”. Indeed, it is common within youth scholarship to suggest that the speed of change is accelerating in modern times, due both to shifts in the youth labour market hastened by digital innovation, along with a significant decline in the certainty of day-to-day life (Leccardi 2005; McLeod 2014; Edwards and Weller 2010). In this, it is posited, young people have a decreased capacity to meaningfully plan for the future due to factors around its uncertainty, availability, and distribution. Along with an unprecedented acceleration of technological and social change, there has been a parallel and paradoxical increase in the ‘pace of life’. That is, despite innovations designed to lower the amount of time taken on mundane tasks, time has become scarcer, and there is a growing urgency and anxiety around decision-making and forward planning within a global climate that makes that planning increasingly difficult. McLeod and Thomson (2009, 166) support this, arguing that the tension between clock and social time (or objective and subjective in their words) in social science research “paradoxically … speak[s] to the impossibility of locating the [subject]—demanding that [one] attend[s] to both the spatiality of the temporal and the temporality of the spatial”. Consideration of both positions along with the refusal to separate them out in social science

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research is generative for “pointing to questions of synchronization as well as sequence; and understanding continuity and change as integral to each other” (2009, 166). As Coffey and Farrugia (2014) note, such conceptions of time permeate in dichotomous debates in youth studies around structure and agency, knowledge and practice, subjectivity and object. As they argue, “the on-going relationship between structures, habitus and the ‘structured improvisation’ of practice contribut[es] a kind of forward looking temporality” which informs the composition of subjectivities in the present (2014, 470). The precariousness of the category of ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’ in modern times has led many to suggest that young people’s experience of transitions have become non-linear, changeable, and potentially reversible. This commonly produces an image of the future that is not only uncertain, but also fraught with danger, and requires responsible dispositions in the present to successfully overcome. In an Australian context, te Riele (2004, 245) has reflected on these shifts, arguing that many tools of analysis for examining young people’s lives specifically around the notion of ‘transitions’ and ‘pathways’ are “too linear, instrumental, and individualistic”. In her view, notions of “non-linear transitions do not contradict … adult status, but do challenge the idea that adulthood is a stage one ‘arrives’ at” (2004, 254). For te Riele (2004, 254), “the reversibility and impermanence of ‘markers’ of adulthood” is evident not only for teenagers, but also for older students. There exists in the present significant evidence to challenge linear notions of time as it relates to young people. McLeod (2014) usefully expands on this, suggesting that research into young people’s lives must consider how young people are experiencing temporality differently, and how this affects their conditions of life. This means understanding the different histories, cultures, and understandings of institutions such as school and tertiary educational providers that young people bring to conversations about digital disruption, and their capture, or not, in policy. It also means understanding the orientation toward and of the future differently, as simultaneously reflective and productive of young people’s conditions of life. Put another way, there are inequalities in young people’s experiences based on gender, race, and class lines, yet the challenges that these young people face are not only structural or categorical; they also involve particular expectations and stereotypes around what it means to achieve ‘success,’ orient proactively in time, and make sense of the future (see, for example, Kehily and Nayak 2013; Matthews 2002).

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Understanding the Future The promise of the future has been a preoccupation of much sociological thought since its inception. Returning to Urry (2016, 6), “that different social futures are fateful for people’s lives in the present” both animates the field of critical inquiry, and orients scholars across the sciences to questions around preferable, possible, and potential futures as they unfold in the present. For Urry, discussions about the future are pulled into tense relationships in which economic, industrial, political, cultural, and social ideas play out simultaneously in asymmetric and uneven ways. He notes, “[p]owerful social institutions and thinkers are developing various kinds of anticipatory discourses and techniques…[that] …have performative consequences” on an increasingly global scale (2016, 1–2). These relationships are implicated in the rise in notions of innovation, change, and growth in ways that have real effects in the day to day realities of young people. This resonates in youth studies scholarship powerfully, echoing the rise of what Kelly (2006) and others have called the ‘entrepreneurial self’ who make themselves in the present within the image of probable and possible futures. Returning to Adam (2010, 2), stories about the future can be divided into four conceptions that carry different assumptions and code events of the present in particular ways: fate, fortune, fiction, and fact. The distinction between each is useful for the analysis that follows in the second half of this book. For Adam, approaching the future as fate can be clearly seen in early mythology: where “the temporal domain belongs to the gods” or ancestors, and where “prophecies and divinations … aid people’s efforts to be prepared and ready for what is to be and come about” (2010, 2). In the second conception, rising in popularity around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notions of the future shifted such that rather than a pre-­ determined reality yet to be experienced, “the future becomes ours to shape, make and take” (2010, 3). Here, the future is rendered quantifiable in ways that mark it open to exploitation, colonisation, and domination. The rise in global mercantile trading and exchange helped render the future a “task for planning, holding out the promise that it can be what we want it to be” (2010, 3). This shift emerged alongside the development of scientific methods for measuring, mapping, and predicting from past patterns, and refining models that even today both open up and limit possible future actions. For Adam (2010, 3) “expert knowledge of this future is no longer intended to assist people to adapt to their fate but to aid i­ ntervention

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and social engineering on the one hand and the pursuit of progress, innovation and growth on the other”. To illustrate, she suggests a distinction between future presents and present futures, the former more aligned with earlier conceptions guiding our anticipation for change, and the latter taking up the everyday tasks of prediction and enactment as a scientific practice. Future orientation becomes a necessary precondition for participation in many aspects of social, cultural, and civic life associated with modernity—with both our anticipations and anxieties, as well as the power of prediction and yearning for certainty—making up in a large manner, our ability to meaningfully plan and act in the everyday. The movement from fate to fortune, and a conceptualisation of the future as a product of the scientific method of knowledge breaks down as the pace of innovation increases, requiring two further moves: the future as fiction, and as fact. In the former—and critical to the central thesis of this book—the pursuit of progress is predicated on the notion of “instability rather than stability being the inherent goal” (2010, 4). As Sellar (2015, 202) notes, there exists a “trade in imaginary things that operates by connecting promises about the future with feelings of potentiality in the present”. These promises are inherently unstable: they rely on the potential of change from a current state of affairs, one that almost always involves the displacement of the activities of the present to the ‘new’. Whilst some promises may appear banal, such as email or text message parcel tracking, others reconfigure the field of practices for particular individuals and communities, such as the rise in online deliveries and the displacement of bricks and mortar retail. Citing examples of potentially world-ending nuclear weapons and genetic engineering, for Adam, the pursuit of continual innovation results in a breakdown of continuity such that “humanity has to learn to live with the potential end in the present” (2010, 5). Managing this new reality requires a systems thinking approach, with an emphasis on complexity and interdependence, or, as she puts it: “[o]nly systems thinking can handle these interdependencies and mutual implications and theorize their consequences” (2010, 5). Understanding the future as a dystopian fiction requiring a systems-­ based analytic gives way to Adam’s final turn: the future as fact. Drawing on the rise in social theory perspectives which seek to examine the impact of past future presents on specific populations, future making “not only send[s] ripples through the entire system across space and time, it also inevitably involves future taking: it prefigures, shapes and forecloses” (emphasis in original, 2010, 6). As Tutton (2017, 488) puts it, ­“sociologists

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and others need to adopt the standpoint of a future present in order to figure the potential impact on future generations of processes set in train now”. This isn’t merely an act of imagination, but also implicates practices reinforced in the past and mobilised in the present as an event captured as ‘fact’. He argues, “taking the standpoint of a future present…absolutely require[s] imaginative figurations—replete with metaphor, visual images, and stories—to bring that future present into being and to connect it to what is in process today” (2017, 489). The tensions between these conceptualisations of the future resonates powerfully in the study of young people lives. In popular media, Adam’s (2010) future present often takes the form of catastrophising the predispositions and activities of young people, expressed as a loss of the ‘proper’ means that ‘should’ make up the future. Such an understanding of the future present resonates with Miller and Rose’s (2008) account of governmentality. For Miller and Rose (2008, 7), expressions of the loss of ‘proper means’ arise out of an assemblage of “aims methods, targets, techniques and criteria” upon which popular culture, organisations, and individuals “judge and evaluate themselves and their lives” as well as to seek to “master, steer, control, save or improve themselves”. Importantly, these ‘aims’ and ‘targets’ are designed to remake the present in the future, and to condition young people’s desires such that they produce a ‘good’ life.

Digital Disruption as Future-Making The distinction between bodily, clock, and processual time are important for thinking about the future, foregrounding the relationship between maturational expectations, regulatory frameworks around school and work, and orientations of success and aspiration. Adam (2010, 47) argues that “[c]ontemporary daily life is conducted in the temporal domain of open pasts and futures … [which are] … projectively oriented toward the ‘not yet’”. For Adam, future orientation is a necessary precondition for participation in many aspects of social, cultural, and civic life, with both our anticipations and anxieties, as well as our predictions and yearning for certainty, making up, in a large manner, our ability to meaningfully plan and act in the everyday. Foregrounding neo-liberal practices in the present can be understood as a means of addressing uncertainty about the changing conditions of the future amid increased precarity in relation to labour market volatility and increasing social and environmental change.

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Digital disruption brings together a whole series of logic(s) around the present and the future. It is a question of both the present and the future, and it is this duality that gives it both its generality and its power for describing the conditions of the present, and anticipation of what might be in the future. At its heart, digital disruption is a rationality, a constellation which brings into orbit questions about time, the ever-increasing complexity of technologies, their proliferation around the globe (and beyond), and their compound effects on established cultural, social, political, and economic practices. It is, by definition, a slippery term, designating whole fields of digital, networked, and technical practices, yet signifying none of them in any great or particularly useful detail. For this reason, it has entered the worlds of living, learning, and work unevenly, persuasively, and by design, opaquely. The final reflection in McLuhan’s ([1964] 2013) much cited Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man illuminates this in relation to the rise in automation: Automation is information and it not only ends jobs in the world of work, it ends subjects in the world of learning. It does not end the world of learning. The future of work consists of learning a living in the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in general. It ends the old dichotomies between culture and technology, between art and commerce, and between work and leisure. (2013, 346)

For McLuhan, the network mirrors human bodies in that it provides a ‘unified experience’ of the world, bringing it closer together through the processes of aggregating and storing information. Mirroring this, Mansell (2015, 628) notes how the economies of the present are framed around what she terms the ‘disruptive character of innovation’ which, in her analysis, achieve prominence as they ‘become embedded in all sectors of the economy’. These disruptions are framed both as the embedding of a global informational network; and as an acceleration of the capabilities of technological hardware and its accompanying programs and systems. Both have relevance for how young people’s futures are imagined as more technical and digitally disrupted. Ryan (2011, 764) reminds us: ‘[i]t is worth remembering something that nineteenth century social reformers were acutely aware of: childhood is the terrain upon which the battle for the future is won and lost’. Futures are at once governed by economic forces in terms of the development of new technologies by market and ­non-­market

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actors, and reflect technologized forms of governance over social, cultural, economic, and political life. In 1995, Bower and Christensen (1995) wrote what would become a seminal piece Harvard Business Review titled ‘Disruptive Technologies: Catching the wave’. In it, they outlined how managers and executives could identify new upstart businesses seeking to capture segments of traditional markets, develop disruptive technologies that unseat whole industries, and reinterpret regulations through rapid iterations and small, agile operations. Fifteen years later, the logic of disruptive technologies had solidified in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) with Eric Reis’ (2011) highly successful book for Startup entrepreneurs and managers: The Lean Startup. Reis, a frustrated technology worker-cum-business consultant outlined a method for thinking about rapid iteration, focusing on creating meaningful growth, and building rapid scale-up businesses. Where Bower and Christensen’s article reflected a defensive playbook, Reis emphasises the channelling of human and technological potential such that new markets, technologies, and practices can reshape the landscape of almost any field of human activity. As I show in the chapters that follow, we can see both orientations playing out in the incursions, hesitations, and reflections of the diverse range of Edu-businesses, consultancies, and policy discourses of the present.

A Sociology of the Future The recent uptick in critical interest in future-oriented discourses has accompanied the conditions of the political, technological, and environmental present, particularly in their intersection around the global consequences of anthropogenic climate change on people’s lives. In December 2015, leaders from 195 countries assembled in Le Bourget to agree on the language for what would come to be known as the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The agreement’s seemingly modest target, to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5 degrees celsius in order to reduce the risks associated with human-influenced climate change, represented a moment of cautious optimism. At the time of writing this book, the hopefulness that accompanied the rise of much ‘progressive’ politics at the end of the first decade of the new millennium has long since evaporated. Multiple governments have walked back their commitments, or in the case of the United States, outright sought to exit the agreement. Many countries,

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including Australia, now look likely to fail to meet the modest carbon reduction targets. In the second half of 2018, a report released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change signalled that 2030 represents a critical ‘tipping point’ in terms of preserving the world’s climate. It was met with both disdain and despair: the former from those who have long accused climate scientists of hyperbole and exaggeration; and the latter, those who are losing hope that political and business leaders are willing or able to work toward positive climate outcomes for future generations. Young people and digital disruption are implicated in discussions of the hopefulness and the looming catastrophe(s) of the future and have emerged as a key focus of the sociology of the future in recent times. Coleman and Tutton (2017) note that amid dystopian narratives and the ever-present ‘promise’ of technologies for mediating their effects, engagement with and interrogation of ‘the future’ is especially timely. They identify four main trajectories along which this work has progressed: probability and risk/uncertainty, technologies/data, environment(s), and youth. These are necessarily connected and often mutually implicated. In a separate paper, Tutton takes this further, highlighting the recent turn to a sociology of expectations. For him, “expectations are words that do things: expectations consist of statements which might contain scripts of particular roles to be played by various actors” (2017, 482). Futures here are taken to be a form of prediction and are in this sense self-fulfilling. Social futures shape, in a significant way, the future(s) of social space. Michael captures this in framing the rhetorical structure of discussions around the future: …for example, closeness/farness of the future; the speed with which we are heading toward those futures; whether we are heading toward the future, or the future is heading toward us; the character of the ‘we’ that is moving toward the future—specific groups, humanity, the biosphere; the certainty with which the future is specified. (2017, 513)

In Michael, futures ‘move’ but ‘we’ also move toward, away, and alongside them. These calls to directionality echo that of spatiality in Adam and Groves as considered above, yet for Michael, this also has ecological qualities. Futures operate at multiple levels, paces, and on multiple spaces and people(s) simultaneously. Others have grappled with the nature of the future in similar ways. For Urry (2016, vi), “[f]utures are now everywhere”. Slaughter (1998, 993) expands this, suggesting that futures are

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often characterised in one of two ways: as “technophilic and naively optimistic” or as “a bleak future in which the dreams of progress and unending economic development fall back into a chasm of entropy, violence and despair”. In his view, the former offers an enthusiastically unbounded view akin to the narrative underpinning Star Trek: that humans come together in the pursuit of human progress, where the latter more closely reflects Terminator 2: a desolate world where humanity fights for its survival against exterminators of its own design. For Slaughter (1998, 993), “the human tendency toward a polar choice between optimism on the one hand and pessimism on the other” operates both as a contextual frame for much of what has been written on the future, and conditions the imaginative possibilities of how those futures might be conceived. Urry (2016), extends this, elaborating three primary orientations of the sociology of the future which frame this book and are mirrored in the study of youth and educational policy: a focus on individualism; an emphasis on economic and social structures; and more recently, a turn to complexity. I expand each in the remainder of this section. In thinking about individualised framings of the future Urry suggests, “futures are best changed through modifying how each individual behaves by altering the basket of rewards and punishments relating to different kinds of activities” (2016, 54). Berardi (2011) goes further, suggesting that the rise of what he calls the net-economy has created new forms of cognitive capital that render the future and solutions to its problems an individualised pursuit. This change is both technical: inscribed in code as a new form of capital-generation; and transformative, in that it shifts the focus from the production of material goods to that of ‘semiotic goods’ (2011, 73). Pessimistically, in Berardi, the future “no more appears as the object of a choice, and of collective conscious action, but is a kind of unavoidable catastrophe that we cannot oppose in any way” (2011, 97). This resonates with the long line of critique in youth studies around how, as Kelly (2018, 5) puts it, “all that can be is commodified and subjected to a competitive, market logic, where individuals and communities are made responsible for aspects of a life that completely elude limited capacities for what some call ‘agency’”. For young people making a life in the years following the Global Financial Crisis this results in questioning a perpetual becoming: “becoming an adult, becoming a citizen, becoming independent, becoming autonomous, becoming mature, becoming responsible” (Kelly 2015a, 63) (emphasis in original). In this framing, the best solution in managing the continuously unfolding crises of the future is to encourage, prescribe, and incentivise behaviours of individuals.

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In the second framing, social and economic life is taken as forming relatively robust structures that tend to self-correct over time. Here, as with Adam’s present future, acts of prediction and anticipation are formed up as a primarily scientific practice, with existing structures seen as extending out and colonising both possible and probable futures. This approach, which he considers socio-structural in orientation tends to privilege the ways in which futures are set in motion by and through systems, and how those systems collect up or shut down alternative constructs. In youth research, this approach resonates with the large battery of scholarship drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and much like in debates in that field, socio-structural approaches, for Urry, tend to “neglect internal sources of change which over time undermine a system’s persistence” (2016, 57). Finally, as is relevant in the discussion of management consulting firms in Chap. 4, the complexity turn emphasises “the importance of positive feedbacks that move systems away from equilibrium” (Urry 2016, 58). This is the space where consulting firms purport to add the most value in anticipating how small effects might accumulate in rapid system-wide shifts to be managed from a risk and uncertainty standpoint, and capitalised upon from an arbitrage perspective. Complexity theory encourages “studying the consequences of the dynamic and partially unpredictable interactions between elements making up any system” (Urry 2016, 59), and has become particularly popular in the study of education and other aspects of social life (for example, Ell et al. 2017; Srnicek 2007).

Education Futures There is a prevailing assumption in popular and policy discourse that takes-as-given that the future will be, more scientific, more technological, and thus the prudential position for a young person to take is that of arming themselves with scientific and mathematical knowledge in order to interface with the ‘new’. As Facer (2016, 65) puts it, “[t]he ‘smart’ learner in this context is the one who is aware of the increased future demands for science and maths…and makes intelligent choices accordingly”. Alongside and sometimes counter to this, the looming opportunities and threats that accompany a future where technologies will develop and manufacture themselves, there are calls for young people to maximise their ­humanness— those distinctive, hard to automate qualities such as empathy, emotional labour, or oft labelled ‘soft skills’ as a defensive moat against the absolute technologisation of daily life. Drawing on the work of Margaret Archer,

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Facer rejects both orientations, suggesting that “such autonomous reflexivity premised upon cost-benefit analyses, makes sense only if the landscape to be navigated can be assumed to be relatively stable, institutions relatively persistent and knowledge of the future relatively accurate” (2016, 65). Such an orientation, in effect, relies on the overriding logic that emerged in the financial markets of the 1980s and 1990s through the use of predictive tools such as scenario modelling, Delphi, and statistical modelling. The extension of these into thinking about how young people should best mitigate the forecasted crises and ‘risks’ of the future, for Facer, produces “[e]ducation as arms race,” where families and communities seek to produce a relative advantage in the absence of predictable knowledge about the future. Anxieties about what kinds of future(s) young people will graduate into also produces a reversal of Facer’s assertion: that where the future will involve more technology, it will also require less: less workers, less certainty in life, knowledge, and work, and for some, less available futures in less available spaces. Gibbons and Snake-Beings (2018, 28) argue that future-­ less may be a reasonable metaphor for framing up young people’s educational futures, “inviting the learner to engage with mutable visions of what the future may entail”. In response, and in relation to the turn to complexity considered by Urry above, they propose a “focus on the contemporary experiences of education in relationship to the creative acts of individuals and communities that impact on shared futures” (2018, 30). To do this, they channel Arendt’s (1961) interrogation of the tension between conservation and progress, noting that “a major educational theme in this concern for the future, is the precarious nature of employment … and the ability of education systems to prepare students for the transience of fluctuations in employment opportunities and requirements” (2018, 30). Sellar (2015, 202) puts this slightly differently in his suggestion that “contemporary education policy makes promises to people about the relationship between education, economic growth and social mobility”. This usefully encourages a form of ‘potential’ arising through the connecting up of questions around educational investment with a form of future-focused optimism that is animated in many political and business discussions about young people’s futures. The embedding of economic values as a kind of ‘politics of expectation’ has forged a powerful platform of aspiration-focused policy initiatives in secondary and higher education, contributing to what some have termed a ‘neoliberal imaginary’ of social mobility for both young people and their

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families (Ball and Olmedo 2013; Rizvi and Lingard 2011; Sellar 2013). Within this paradigm, discussions of stress, aspiration, and young people interacting diligently with the ‘systems’ of high stakes curriculum have increasingly come to be positioned alongside examinations of social and political agendas within senior secondary policy. These issues have been studied at length with an emphasis on multiculturalism (Keddie 2014; Machart 2016), educational outcomes (Schnepf 2007; Sellar et al. 2011), mobility (Rizvi 2013; Waters and Brooks 2011), and learner identities (Matthews 2002; Modood 2004). A common concern across these varied approaches and perspectives are the ways in which young people’s movement across geographic and temporal boundaries intersect with issues of ethnicity, gender, and class. For example, Machart (2016, 60) reflects on the transcultural experiences of Asian migrants by interrogating the “intercultural… identifying processes whereby individuals adopt strategies in order to negotiate the self in relation to the other”. For Machart (2016), the emphasis on cultural stereotypes privileges particular forms of identification and socialisation, yet operates to close down others. How different futures operate in different cultural, social, and economic spaces and places here is critical for thinking about the differential effects of digital disruption. Two final points regarding the current trend in thinking about young people’s futures within an aspirations lens are worth elaborating here. First, embedded in narratives surrounding the importance of participation in higher education, there exists a set of normative assumptions that assume a particular kind of ‘youth’ subject who must ‘arrive’ successfully at adulthood on the one hand (Kelly 2006), and define that arrival in terms of an economic ‘value’ on the other (Côté 2014; Miller and Rose 2008). The implication of this for market ideology is not only in positioning higher and higher forms of education as the preferred pathway par excellence, but also in privileging a subject who orients toward high-status pathways and universities as key indicators of successful participation in life itself. Second, an economic focus on aspirations has been shown to refigure inequalities in access to, and support for engaging with education as being a lack of individual capacity, rather than that of the differing resources that are available to young people (for example, Kelly 2015b; Reay 2013). As Reay et al. (2005, 163) argue, “[b]ehind the very simple idea of a mass system of higher education we have to recognise a very complex institutional hierarchy and the continued reproduction of racialised and classed inequalities”. Similarly, in Australia, te Riele (2012) has shown that recent

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efforts to set targets for increased school completion are superfluous unless efforts are also made to address not only the ‘economic benefits, but also the social and personal ones’ through an emphasis on elevating the minimum required educational level for entry into adult life. Thus, whilst educational participation is taken as a ‘rational behaviour’ in popular discourses, the reality is that for many young people, significant structural and social barriers make participation more, or less valuable. How particular images of success stick, and become entangled with narratives of possible and probable futures is fundamental to interrogating how discourses of aspiration and optimism circulate in contemporary times. As Zipin et al. (2015) suggests, this understanding of educational futures is crucial for rationalizing continued educational participation as a manifest practice for young people.

Conclusions In this chapter, I considered how future(s) have been taken up in relation to education, technology, and youth, acknowledging the slippages between time and temporality in thinking about young people’s lives. I argued for an expanded understanding of the relationship of the future to the present, and also how futures might be considered as multiple, contingent, and consistently unfolding in-action. As Michael (2017, 510) argues, thinking about the future is complicated work that is often overlooked: “there does not appear to be much focus on how we might go about addressing the variety and assortment of futures”. Appadurai takes this slightly differently in his linking of possible and probable futures as a form of navigational capacity that structures, in a significant way, the fields of future action that people can engage with in the conditions of the present. In this, “economics has become the science of the future” (Appadurai 2013, 180). As Appadurai (2013, 180) continues, the comingling of “wants, needs, expectations, [and] calculations” with an economic rationale means that there is a need for an explicit means of critiquing what is rendered (in)visible in the discussion of the future, how those futures are framed temporally, and for whom. The anticipation and anxieties that frame up discussions about young people’s futures operate in and on both those activities that are expected of them, such as willing participation in formal education; and those they are discouraged from, such as unmonitored social interaction in online environments. This has deep implications in relation to their ability to

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meaningfully plan and orient toward the future, and in broader imaginings of young people, particularly in relation to popular ‘moral panics’ around their activities and identities. As Tutton (2017, 488) puts it, “[d]iscursive constructions of the future are not simply imaginative in the traditional sense but are thoroughly social practices”. In the next chapter, I consider this, by outlining four key framings for thinking about young people’s lives.

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Ryan, Kevin. 2011. Governing the Future: Citizenship as Technology, Empowerment as Technique. Critical Sociology 37 (6): 763–778. https://doi. org/10.1177/0896920510379445. Schnepf, Sylke Viola. 2007. Immigrants’ Educational Disadvantage: An Examination across Ten Countries and Three Surveys. Journal of Population Economics 20 (3): 527–545. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-006-0102-y. Sellar, Sam. 2013. Equity, Markets and the Politics of Aspiration in Australian Higher Education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 34 (2): 245–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013.770250. ———. 2015. ‘Unleashing Aspiration’: The Concept of Potential in Education Policy. Australian Educational Researcher 42 (2): 201–215. https://doi. org/10.1007/s13384-015-0170-7. Sellar, Sam, Trevor Gale, and Stephen Parker. 2011. Appreciating Aspirations in Australian Higher Education. Cambridge Journal of Education 41 (1): 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2010.549457. Slaughter, Richard A. 1998. Futures Beyond Dystopia. Futures 30 (10): 993– 1002. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-3287(98)00101-3. Srnicek, Nick. 2007. Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze. Politics, 127. Tutton, Richard. 2017. Wicked Futures: Meaning, Matter and the Sociology of the Future. The Sociological Review 65 (3): 733–742. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1467-954X.12443. Uprichard, Emma. 2011. Narratives of the Future: Complexity, Time and Temporality. In The SAGE Handbook of Innovation in Social Research Methods, ed. Malcolm Williams and W. Paul Vogt, 113–119. London: SAGE. https:// doi.org/10.4135/9781446268261.n8. Urry, John. 2016. What Is the Future? Cambridge: Polity Press. Waters, Johanna, and Rachel Brooks. 2011. International/Transnational Spaces of Education. Globalisation, Societies and Education 9 (2): 155–160. https://doi. org/10.1080/14767724.2011.576933. Woodman, Dan. 2011. Young People and the Future: Multiple Temporal Orientations Shaped in Interaction with Significant Others. Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research 19 (2): 111–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 110330881001900201. Zipin, Lew, Sam Sellar, Marie Brennan, and Trevor Gale. 2015. Educating for Futures in Marginalized Regions: A Sociological Framework for Rethinking and Researching Aspirations. Educational Philosophy and Theory 47 (3): 227– 246. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.839376.

CHAPTER 3

Young People and the Disruption of Everything

Abstract  This chapter examines how young people’s identities have been theorised within the changing economic and social conditions in Australia and internationally. It provides a timely reflection on how theories of ‘youth’ have taken up questions of mobility and digital transformation in the conditions of late modernity. It also examines conversations around the experiences and processes of youth transition, risk, individualisation, and ‘future-making’ within the context of the present Drawing on the example of the New South Wales State Government’s Youth Employment and Innovation Challenge, Duggan explores how shifts in young people’s conditions have been felt unevenly, resulting in the privileging of highly mobile biographies that take high aspirations and educational attainment as implicit. Keywords  Youth • Risk • Mobility • Society In 2014, the Victorian State Government committed to a “first of its kind” program aimed at supporting young people between 16 and 25 with “a passion for enterprise” (Sadler 2018). The program, Getting Down to Business provided training and expertise to ‘young entrepreneurs,’ and by the end of its funding cycle four years later, it boasted that the 160 young people who had worked through its incubator had generated over

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$10 million in annual revenue and employed over 500 people.1 In 2018, the New South Wales State Government launched a youth-focused program, the Youth Employment Innovation Challenge, aimed at mobilising service providers to come up with innovative ways of addressing youth un- and underemployment in the state. The twelve initiatives funded to date range from developing “job readiness skills and an entrepreneurial mindset,” to game design and animation courses, to employing “local young people to do neighbourhood jobs such as mowing, cleaning, green waste removal and maintenance of social housing and private premises”.2 Similar programs currently exist in all of the states and territories across Australia, and indeed, these mirror established and emerging projects globally. There are significant differences in the scope, funding, and focus of these kinds of ‘youth innovation’ projects. However, what is common, and indeed, what is the focus of this chapter, are the ways in which young people’s lives are opened up to intervention as sites for innovation and entrepreneurship—simultaneously as problem (as failing to successfully ‘transition’ into the world of productive life and work), and possibility (for generating new businesses or solutions, or solving entry level ‘gaps’ in the labour market) for making the future. Furlong et  al. (2017) show that new forms of labour precarity have emerged and been reinforced by the digitalization of services, and their abstraction within the networked economies. Precarity has a long tradition, and whilst it may have intensified in the post dot-com boom and Global Financial Crisis, “these trends have deep roots” that intersect with multiple other class-based enablers and constraints (2017, 99). Importantly, in pointing to access to post-secondary education as a key driver of the extended period of transition from youth to adulthood, Furlong et  al. (2017, 100) acknowledge how young people’s positioning remains steeped in deficit terms in relation to their ability to participate meaningfully in social and economic life. Currid-Halkett (2017) echoes this in her discussion of conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption and their relation to aspirational identities in the United States. Young people from poorer backgrounds are able to mobilise less resources: educational, technological, or cultural, in their pursuit of stable work and life outcomes; differences which compound over time. This is significant both in terms of depreciating returns on temporal and economic investment in massified  http://www.gettingdowntobusiness.com.au/, accessed 25 July 2019.  https://launch.innovation.nsw.gov.au/youthemployment, accessed 25 July 2019.

1 2

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higher education for the majority of the youth segment, and for how young people are positioned as at ‘threat’ from the future as I argued in the previous chapter (see also, Duggan 2016). This chapter draws on Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to consider how young people’s lives are framed in the present. There is not space here to consider the full WPR approach, however, this chapter and those that follow seek to unpick the assumptions about young people’s lives from the interventions into them in hard and soft policy terms. This chapter examines the landing pages from initiatives funded under the New South Wales Government’s Youth Employment Innovation Challenge policy initiative to argue that young people’s positioning in relation to the future by policy makers and industry has manifest in a climate which promises an expanded universe of opportunities to the most willing, yet also individualises processes of scrutiny and blame on those who fail to successfully mobilise in response to challenges. To do this, I note three ‘movements’ in understandings of young people’s lives: first, the need to mediate or control the ‘risks’ of unand underemployment across the youth cohort; second, the push to ‘solve’ the youth-future problem through encouraging an ‘entrepreneurial’ skill- and mindset; and finally, the emergence of new forms of doing youth through the ‘hacking’ of established practices and pathways.

The Cris(es) of Future/Present Youth The New South Wales Government’s Youth Employment Innovation Challenge (the Challenge) is an initiative of the NSW Department of Industry, launched in March 2018 as a response to the high levels of unand underemployment among young people across the state. In New South Wales, and similarly in other states and territories around the country, young people between the ages of 15–24 face an unemployment rate more than double the national average, currently sitting just above twelve per cent (ABS 2019). The Challenge seeks to “develop projects that investigate, design and implement better ways of helping young people aged 15–24 years old with multiple and complex barriers to find work” (NSW Department of Industry 2019), by sourcing initiatives using a ‘pitch’ and ‘incubation’ model in order to become ‘business ready’. The ‘pitch’ and ‘incubator’ models are drawn from a popular format used across the startup ecosystem and represents a relatively new way for governments to source innovative initiatives. It also represents an attempt

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to rethink the persistence of the youth unemployment ‘problem’. The ‘problem’ here, following Bacchi (2009), is represented to be a lack of opportunities for young people to enter into paid work, and asking the WPR question over again, as Bacchi encourages, would suggest that young people are not equipped with the skills that employers require. A third level follows: the skills themselves are changing due to the effects of digital disruption, which has reduced the amount of low-skilled and entry-level positions traditionally filled by young people entering the labour market for the first time. Indeed, the youth literature supports this thesis. The increasingly precarious and uncertain future that young people are said to face as they move out of secondary education presupposes that they become flexible, and entrepreneurial learners who are able to successfully sell their ‘product’ whilst negotiating the risks of a neo-liberal market economy (Furlong and Cartmel 2007). In Australia, Wyn and Woodman (2006, 505) argue that successive policy reforms in Australia since the 1990s have been an “explicit move to position education as a private investment by individuals who seek to make rational choices about the services they require to secure their future positions in an educational marketplace”. A focus on tertiary entrance in Australia can be seen as a political response to the intensification of labour market challenges and the desire for a framework through which patterns of youth to adulthood could be judged and accounted for (Clarke 2018). One implicit assumption is that success can be measured through sets of normative markers which correspond to particular age-brackets, reflect the desires of young people themselves, and give equal opportunity for those young people who are willing to construct themselves in response to cognitive, emotional, and cultural demands (Furlong and Cartmel 2007). For the vast majority of its participants, late-capitalism is a fairly nasty arrangement. This counts perhaps especially for young people. Changes in how young people move through education, plan for, and make a life socially, economically, and politically are well documented (for example, Furlong et al. 2011), as are the counter-narratives which posit that these conditions have significantly more in common with previous generations than not (Côté 2014b). For Côté (2014b, 39), there is benefit in addressing ‘the growing marginalization of the whole age group…and in…seeing the entire youth segment as a special form of class’. Within this, he notes that there is a need to examine how young people as a segment might be imagined as analogous with or breaking from the experiences of previous generations. This perspective emphasises the economic and material

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c­ onditions facing young people as distinctive to those that adults face, and sits within the substantive contribution of Côté and others who have sought to interrogate how that division has shifted—or not—over time (Côté and Bynner 2008; Arnett 2006; Bynner 2005). What emerges across this literature is a need to situate any analysis of young people’s experience of the present within the context of a decline in secure waged labour, housing, and familial networks and their effects across social, economic, and political lived realities. Returning to the initiatives funded under the Challenge, we can see these initiatives emerge in response to the shifts explored above. BackTrack Works, Skillsroad, and batyr’s Being Herd pathway program each seek to provide mentorship and skill development to create pathways into employment. The landing page of BackTrack Works, for example, suggests that their programme enables “young people who have lost their way to reconnect with education and training, become work ready and secure meaningful employment”.3 BackTrack focus on addressing the multiple factors of disadvantage that young people face, with the goal of preventing a worsening of outcomes, including decreasing negative interactions with the health and criminal justice systems. The ‘problem’ for BackTrack is the consequences of disengagement among young people—a question I return to with regard to McKinsey & Company’s Education to Employment: Designing a system that works in the next chapter. Skillsroad, by contrast, is focused on the career ‘journey,’ offering career advice, linking young people with skills and training options, and providing a jobs platform for searching, and applying for work. Here, the ‘problem’ is less about remediating the effects of disengagement, and more assisting young people to find the right path for their ‘journey’. Finally, batyr’s Being Herd aims to give “voice to the elephant in the room”: poor mental health among young people as a barrier for entry into meaningful work.4 The program focuses on young people not in education, employment, or training (commonly, NEETs), addressing issues around mental health stigma, mentorship, and pathways to employment. Across each example we can see three movements that are echoed in youth literature over the last three decades: addressing risk and poor outcomes, assisting young people to ‘transition’ successfully, and unlocking the ‘potential’ of youth.

3 4

 https://backtrack.org.au/, accessed 28 July 2019.  https://www.batyr.com.au/being-herd/pathways/, accessed 28 July 2019.

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There is evidence suggesting an overall erosion of young people’s conditions of life in the present, and lack of opportunity for addressing that deterioration over time (for example, Bradley and Devadason 2008; McDowell et  al. 2014; Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). This analysis has often relied on a description of the present global conditions as operating within a neo-liberal or more recently, post-Fordist paradigm (for example, Farrugia 2017). An analysis of the erosion of traditional forms of full-time waged labour as a catch-all for forms of economic marginalisation risks the reduction of labour market participation to that of an appreciating or depreciating return on all forms of labour as a tradeable ‘asset,’ and neglect for how those labour forms interact differentially with the ‘marketplace’ as they are remade within and by the networked economies. There is a risk that these critiques encourage two unintentional orientations: the over-­ representation of young people’s experiences as evidence of a breakdown of the system of regulations and the steady erosion of unionised labour and full-time employment; or, as leveraging that breakdown in increasingly abstracted, entrepreneurial forms. Each of these has the limitation of failing to recognize shifts in waged labour as evidence of a potential emergence of alternative forms of capital-production and control alongside their more quotidian effects. In this sense, the political economy moniker of ‘follow the money’ may allow for a less nuanced framework for analysis than one that is able to account for the relationship between different forms of capital-generating activities, and their coalescence in this particular present around these particular digital technologies, such as in Rosenblat’s (2018) Uberland, which provides a detailed examination of communities of practice among ride-share drivers in North America. Over the last three decades, spatial metaphors around ‘transitions’ and challenges to normative markers of adulthood have emerged as a key way of understanding key moments in young people’s lives, such as gaining independence, moving out of the family home, and engaging in civic responsibilities (Woodman and Wyn 2015). Within this, Beck’s (1992) suggestion of the rise in social-structural conditions of the “risk society” remains a central contribution (Woodman 2009). Though his ‘risk’ thesis has been contested in the youth studies space, including in a protracted debate in this journal (at least partially, Roberts 2010; Wyn and Woodman 2007; Roberts 2012; Woodman 2009, 2010), it continues to have salience in conversations about young people’s engagement with the conditions of the present. Beck (2013) noted that the emergence of catastrophes operating both inter- and intra- nationally that

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widen inequity within nations requires thinking beyond ‘class conflicts in the class society’ (2013, 64). The global effects of what he terms “major risk events” ‘were not only envisaged in the paradigm of the reproduction of the social and political (class) system’ (2013, 64). For Beck, this represents a missed opportunity for properly recognising the “cosmopolitization” of both the poor and middle classes, and indeed their increasingly ‘multi-ethnic, multi-religious, transnational life forms and identities’ (2013, 66). Beck’s analysis has important implications for current considerations of youth-as-class. First, by updating the category of risk to include manifest differences in gender, race, and the ongoing effects of cosmopolitanism, he is able to modulate how both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ risk(s) are distributed in ways that reinforce and transform within rather than between existing classes. Drawing favourably on Curran’s (2013) critique of class-based analysis, Beck suggests that the notion of a ‘risk-class’ opens up consideration of ‘who will able to occupy areas less exposed to risk and who will have little choice but to occupy areas that are exposed to the brunt of the fact of the risk society’ (2013, 68). Bringing this to bear on calls for a political economy of youth perspective, as Beck (2013, 68) notes, suggests that ‘the distribution of risk is subsumed under the category of class,’ but not the other way around. The study of young people’s lives is mediated by the difficult job of ‘placing’ youth culturally, socially, as well as temporally and spatially. For Valentine (2003, 49), there is a resistance at play in the category of youth, which scholarship has hitherto marginalized, in that oftentimes adult measures are used as an ‘audit’ of young people’s activities. Always classed, racialised, and gendered, young people’s identities have increasingly become trajectories to be managed and regulated, with an implicit and outmoded ‘panic’ about the existing state of affairs which results in a “naive conception within policy of the centrality of education and work to the lives and identities of all young people” (Ball 2004, in Talburt and Lesko 2012, 53). As Nancy Lesko (2001) wrote at the turn of the millennium, the ‘confident characterisations’ of young people’s lives are born of attempts to manage the youth ‘problem’ which came, first as a response to increased participation of youth in formal education and more recently, as a result of youth under-employment in modern times. Similarly, Arnot and Dillabough (2000, 3) suggest that “collective and individual male and female identities are shaped by a variety of official, educational and academic discourses”. These discourses sediment for young people within the

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various ways that they can be said to ‘transition’ to adulthood and also through the ways that the processes they undertake to do so are rendered visible, problematic, and open to intervention.

‘Moving’ in Late Modernity In their reflection upon the types of knowledge and claims which underpin the rise in notions of ‘choice,’ young people as ‘consumers,’ and the entrepreneurial ideal of the self, Miller and Rose (2008) highlight how the conduct of individuals and groups comes to be seen in popular and institutional terms as ‘problematic’ and requiring ‘intervention’ through policy and policing. They suggest that “if the conduct of individuals appeared to require conducting, this was because something in it appeared problematic to someone” (2008, 15). To Miller and Rose (2008), this is productive of two processes which are of particular relevance for this book. First, it signifies the rise in what Kelly (2006, 24) terms the rise of the ‘Do-it-yourself’ project, mobilizing a raft of self-evidencing claims around defining, and measuring, the proper ends and means of young people’s engagement with education and culture. In educational and youth policy, this has involved the intensification of psychological explanations of young people’s ‘transitions’ on the one hand, as well as holding young people responsible for the success or failure of their trajectories in economic, and social terms (Ecclestone and Goodley 2016). Second, through processes of psychologisation, economistic measures are ‘intrinsically linked to devising ways to seek to remedy’ the ‘problems of transition’ (Miller and Rose 2008, 15). These ‘diagnoses’ and ‘tools,’ as they put it, are enshrined in the types of practices that ‘solve’ the ‘problem,’ or in this case, produce a ‘successful’ transition according to psychological and economic measures. Returning to the Challenge, we can see examples of the assumptions underpinning interventions into young people’s lives. Yep Careers’ My Career Passport is an ‘idea incubator’ aimed at helping young people define their ‘passions,’ and learn from mentors. Like the programmes mentioned above, it is aimed at the 15–24 cohort, providing ‘job ready’ skills and mentorship to ‘sell their skills’. Slightly differently, JobGetter invites young people to “discover the jobs that suit you best,” “connect with companies you want to work with,” and “get the feedback you need (but no one ever gives)”.5 JobGetter use the language of ‘talent’ rather 5

 https://www.jobgetter.com/, accessed 28 July 2019.

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than ‘employees’—as is popular in technology and entrepreneurial ­communities—aiming to build a jobs ‘network’ for employers and young people. In this example the ‘problem’ is not one of a skills gap, or of disengagement, but rather of connecting up opportunities with ‘talent’. For both My Career Passport and JobGetter, we can see the transition from thinking about young people as needing support in finding ‘pathways’ to one which is more focused on unlocking their potential for harnessing and driving disruption through an entrepreneurial mindset. The processes for generating policy and capturing the movement from youth to adulthood are themselves contested spaces in youth and educational research. In Cohen and Ainley’s (2000) influential paper framing the study of ‘youth,’ they argue that many contemporary theories of young people have been ineffective in adequately conceptualising dimensions of their lived experiences and identities. Through a genealogy of contemporary youth research, they note an overwhelmingly ‘narrow empiricism’ in which young people are disavowed both the conditions, and the frameworks from which to produce meaningful lives. By the mid-­ 90’s, they assert, sustained and narrow conceptions of youth as “problems” and “potential threat[s] to the equilibrium of governance” had produced a scholarship which problematically positioned educational qualifications as proxies for a rise in economism with a lack of regard for shifts in social processes (2000, 80). Cohen and Ainley’s thesis is important as it highlights the bifurcation of the field into economistic and culturalist explanations of young people’s lives and foregrounds the resulting blind spots around how those facets are lived concurrently and in dialogue. Young people—locked between an increasing marketization of their life styles, structural unemployment, and decreasing certainty in their movement from youth to legal and cultural markers of adulthood—are still living productive lives socially, economically; and increasingly, politically (see Sukarieh and Tannock 2015). Standing (2016) suggests that the conditions of late capitalism—an increase in global flows of capital, people, and goods; the rise of managerialism across all sectors; and the decline of secure waged labour in the global north—have spurned the emergence of a new precarious ‘class’ of predominately young people. For Standing, the role of educational systems and policy have been critical to the emergence of this class. He suggests “[t]he drive by the education system to improve ‘human capital’ has not produced better job prospects” (2016, 78). Rather, “[t]he neo-liberal state has been transforming school systems to make them a consistent part

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of the market society, pushing education in the direction of ‘human c­ apital’ formation and job preparation” (2016, 79). The power of Standing’s analysis is in thinking about young people as emerging within a shared set of material and symbolic conditions as they anticipate, and make a life. There is, despite a sustained policy push, a depreciating return on educational capital for making young people more attractive within a global job market that offers decreased opportunities for meaningful and dignified work. There are two related dimensions to Standing’s argument that are important for thinking about disruption and young people’s lives. One the one hand, the dominance of ‘human capital’ modes of debate in educational policy, particularly in the vocational sector, has resonances with the rise of senior secondary policies that insist on a post-secondary ‘plan,’ such as in Chicago Public Schools’ Learn. Plan. Succeed (see Duggan 2019). Paired with the longer history across the global north through which education has been positioned as a way of enabling class mobility, this has strong resonances with scholarship highlighting the persistence of meritocratic ideas around ‘working hard’ within the emerging knowledge, rather than Fordist economies (for example, Farrugia 2017). On the other, technological advances within the so-called knowledge and networked economies have helped cement the view that increased educational attainment is a necessary precondition for entry into dignified work at all (Kelly 2015). Each has resonance when considered within the context of an increasingly individualized social, political, and economic aspirational landscape. In describing the figure of the ‘self-as-enterprise,’ Kelly (2015, 1–2), suggests that the various programs enacted within and around young people do work to “imagine that we, as individuals, are responsible for the always in-process, always provisional, always precarious state of our Do It Yourself (DIY) project of the self.” For Kelly, the process requires individuals to “practise [their] freedom in particular, always limited, ways, and, in the end, to carry responsibilities for more and more aspects of [their] lives” (2015, 2). This ‘project’ operates at multiple legislative, cultural, and social levels, as Kelly notes in framing up the “self as enterprise” in an earlier text. These transformations “have changed the nature and meanings of work and the sorts of behaviours and dispositions imagined as being necessary for ongoing participation in paid labour” (2013, 2). The result is that the individual, and for Kelly the conditions of young people in particular, have to be “made up—encouraged, incited, directed, educated, trained—via the mobilisation of diverse techniques, as the active, autonomous, responsible entrepreneur” (2013, 93). Young people

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carry a particularly heavy burden for the remaking of the economy, and are positioned increasingly precariously within it. Anxieties around the ‘new’ are embedded in discussions about young people’s lives both in terms of policymaking around specific initiatives like coding as I consider in Chap. 5, as well as in broader conversations in popular discourse. Here, shifts in the senior secondary and tertiary education landscape are worth noting in particular. In discussing young people’s desire to succeed within post-compulsory education, Morrison (2010, 78) asserts that the complex relation of media, social and structural components of many current systems orients young people toward an understanding that “being ‘somebody’ can only be achieved through educational credentials and labour market success”. Much research into senior secondary and tertiary education has examined broader shifts in the structural, cultural and political conditions that combine to influence young people’s participation in formal educational settings and their transition to post-­ school work pathways (Morrison 2010; Reay et  al. 2001; Sellar et  al. 2011; Walkerdine 2011). As Keating et al. (2013) argue, large-scale shifts in labour market opportunity and credentialism in senior school curriculum mean that more young people are orienting toward university pathways without a clear path to future work opportunities and outcomes. Yet these experiences are themselves class differentiated. For example, drawing upon notions of social capital and informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Snee and Devine (2014) consider that for those ‘in the middle,’ a complex network of resources, expectations, and familial support helps young people to successfully negotiate senior secondary and further education. However, whilst these circumstances might help to enable relatively low-risk transitions, they argue that for many, these supports work to facilitate certain kinds of “‘reasonable and acceptable’ aspirations for ‘people like us’” (Snee and Devine 2014, 4). Similarly, James et al. (2010) note that the aspirations of middle-class young people are often tied to notions of what is an acceptable minimum achievement—especially with regard to pursuing further education and engaging in skilled, usually professional labour. For young people from working-class and disadvantaged backgrounds however, aspiration and optimism do not necessarily produce the same positive effects as for those in the middle-class. In this, Zipin et al. (2015, 228) have argued that “discursive incitements to overcome obstacles through ‘raising aspirations’ actually increase rather than attenuate obstacles by operating ideologically to simplify the c­ omplexities” through which young people imagine and produce themselves and their future lives.

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For many young people and their families, there is an enduring “optimism and an espousal of meritocratic values” that has formed up around engaging in the education and entering the world of work (Morrison 2008, 350). As Walther et al. (2015, 367) note, recognition of the precariousness in social and economic resources tends to reinforce an ‘institutional logic’ through which “cautious way(s) of decision-making and progressing through education” sits in line with a “logic of education and training” as a way of mitigating the risks of the future. Significantly for these researchers, institutional logics are visible not only in policies and individual decision-making, but also in the broader constellation of interactions young people have with parents, teachers, and education counsellors. Finally, underpinning the ‘solution’ of the entrepreneurial mindset are processes of economic and social transformation that are implicated within an aspirational frame. For Appadurai (2013, 188), aspirations are a capacity—one which is not evenly distributed, and of which “the relatively rich and powerful invariably have a more fully developed” sense. In this view, a relative lack of capacity is both strategic and experiential, and “tends to create a binary relationship to core cultural values, negative and sceptical at one pole, and over-attached at the other” (2013, 189). What Appadurai terms the ‘capacity to aspire’ acts as a mediator which reinforces and inculcates the relationship between certain pathways and specific populations. This has significance for thinking about the youth segment overall, but more specifically undergirds how certain populations are considered as enterprising or not in their efforts at responding to disruption. Examples around the rise in game streaming, and ‘influencer’ behaviours on social media platforms particularly illustrate this point. Beyond the deeply racialised and classed conditions that make up, in large part, these kinds of refusals, there exists in parallel, a reclassification of aspirational artefacts, particularly in relation to conspicuous consumption (see Currid-­ Halkett 2017).

The Promises and Threats of Networked Youth The pivot toward understanding young people as both the product and beneficiary of digital disruption is predicated on the abstraction of production and information across traditional and new forms of labour. These forms necessarily displace whole categories of both workers and non-­

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workers in ways that render them open to exploitation by the capture and coding of their activities. Williamson’s (2016) analysis of policy networks and ‘learning to code’ programs illustrates this point particularly well, as does Duffy’s (2017) examination of gendered social media practices. In both, forms of information once designated as non-labour, such as social media interactions, playspaces, and leisure activities have been reformed and channelled through ‘forms of information, whether of a qualitative sort, such as brands and corporate superheroes or a quantitative sort, such as metrics and big data and the algorithm and so on’ (Wark 2017, 64). As Barbrook and Cameron’s Californian Ideology illustrates, beyond the usual emphasis on forms of digital labour and leisure, the technologically literate young person is also intrinsically imagined as an idealized economic subject who makes, unmakes, and remakes the present within a form of techno-centric capitalism. This idealized form especially resonates with current conversations about how young people ought to orient themselves through education and labour-making practices toward science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) focused careers in that it tends to flatten out the lived experience of structuralised precarity in ways that render it a problem of an individualised economic subject, in an digitally disrupted, individualised context. Examples around the deployment and control of ‘threats’ in early hacker studies (Skibell 2002) resonate with debates around the democratic positioning of young people in the networked era (Sukarieh and Tannock 2015; Tufecki 2017; Scholz 2013). Tracing the emergence of the hacker of the 1980s within this mythology, Skibell (2002) draws on popularized accounts of the damage done to financial instruments from computer crime, particularly with relation to the movement of money to support a ‘drug-based lifestyle’. Here, the hacker is one who breaks apart the logics and practices of the present by drawing upon available resources in new and novel ways that are not easily understood by bystanders. These imaginings are in many ways cyclic, and resonate in current discussions around the emergence of blockchain technologies, and their alleged connection to drug-related crime, international money laundering, and terrorist organisations (Reuters 2018). One final example from the Challenge is worth considering here alongside those above. Hactivate provides an online platform and micro-­ credentials aimed at helping young people develop their skills for participating in the digital economy. Its landing page focuses on leveraging young people’s interest in computer gaming and online activities to

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participate in the digital economy of the future.6 Using the language of gamification, young people create a ‘character’ and are ‘assigned’ an Artificial Intelligence driven ‘digital careers counsellor’ which recommends online courses based on their interests. Participants ‘level up’ and earn points for completing micro credentials. ‘Career points’ automatically unlock ‘gigs’ for which participants get paid, and earn further points—which in turn unlock more advanced opportunities. It is worth considering the image of the hacker as analogous of ‘disruptive youth’ and as a way of breaking down Hactivate’s model here. As Coleman (2013, 20) notes, “[t]he world of hacking, as is the case with many cultural worlds, is one of reckless blossoming”. Tracing the life histories of over seventy self-proclaimed hackers, she shows how their lives, ethics, and practices were transformed by the discovery of computer source code, and their early attempts at cracking and creating in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In these accounts, expressions of youth are implicated in conversations around technologically-mediated practices. As she reflects: A hacker may say he (and I use “he,” because most hackers are male) first hacked as an unsuspecting toddler when he took apart every electric appliance in the kitchen (much to his mother’s horror). By the age of six or seven, his actions ripened, becoming volitional. He taught himself how to program in BASIC, and the parental unit expressed joyous approval with aplomb (“look, look our little Fred is sooo smart”). When a little older, perhaps during adolescence, he may have sequestered himself in his bedroom…The parents, confusing locked doors and nocturnal living with preteen angst and isolation, wondered whether they should send their son to a psychologist. (E. G. Coleman 2013, 25–26)

Through their stories, Coleman’s hackers chart an almost accidental movement into technology, one that is at times celebrated and other times discouraged by their peers, care-givers, and the broader community. Often overlapping with ‘geek’ subcultural narratives of youth practice that dominated scholarship in the 80s and 90s,7 for Coleman, hackers here sought out their learning primarily for personal and non-commercial purposes, that later provided valuable and powerful knowledge in the networked economies of the present. For McKenzie Wark (2004), this leads to the rise of what he terms the ‘hacker class,’ who he sees as emerging as a 6 7

 http://hactivate.io/, accessed 28 July 2019.  For a useful summary of the ‘geek’ in cultural studies, see (McArthur 2009).

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­ istinct historical unit in the early days of the new millennium with their d own impulses, tools, and relations to neighbouring or competing classes. Whilst not exclusively ‘youth,’ the hacker class in Wark exists within the social and political conditions of the networked economy such that new kinds of information objects and subjects are formed. The productive capacity of the networked economy is constantly captured and abstracted in these new commodity forms, and by extension, individuals are bound up in new relations to each other, the product of their labour, and the economy. The key element of this shift is worth quoting at length: At one point, it looked like the capacity for information to be the commons, to be shared, would undermine private property in information, and indeed we see ever more restrictive and punitive legal and technical means to enforce it. And yet there is also another and more effective way of generating a surplus out of control of information. This is to let it circulate freely but to control the access points to it or to control the whole aggregate of information generated. (Wark 2017, 63)

Wark’s hacker brings together a blending of industrial and scientific labour, a subset which ‘includes all kinds of non-routine scientific, technical and intellectual labour, whose object is not determined in advance’ (2015, 21). This expands his earlier definition in A Hacker Manifesto that ‘the knowledge most useful for the hacker class is of how abstractions are themselves produced’ (2004, para. 7). What is most valuable in defining the collective work of hackers as an emerging class, for Wark, and as implicated in discussions of networked youth for this book, is their positioning within discourses around the continuous making of the new. In Wark, it is the processes of abstraction, rather than the production and consumption of information that organise, to a large extent, the economic and social conditions of the networked economy in which people live, work, and learn. This is a significant turn in thinking about the youth segment, as it places an accent on how processes of abstraction, automation, cracking, reconfiguration, etc. are reified in what kind of ‘future’ a young person ought to orient toward at a social, cultural, and policy level. Hactivate’s claim that “you won’t learn this stuff at school, so let’s hack to the future” echoes the rendering of the hacker presented here: one who pursues the use of digital technologies at the fringes of established social and labour practices, who is then captured (and indeed captures) circuits of capital in order to unlock the potential of the future.

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Hacking Lives and Hacked Lives The expansion of techno-centric discourses over the last three decades involves two key activities: the edification of security discourses around intellectual property concerns for large corporations, and a broadening of these ideas to other social practices (Jordan 2017, 538). In this, the interplay between technological advancements within an extension of intellectual property practices, and the ‘hacking’ of existing practices, products, and services is put into sharp relief. Both of these positions contribute to the allure of the hacker as they are reified in startup culture, with an increasing number of tertiary-educated young people indicating a desire to join a disruptive startup, rather than to take roles at established companies, especially in fields such as finance, tech, and health (for example, Smith et al. 2016). The hacker as considered above opens up discussion of how established forms of labour and capital have shifted within different populations, on both traditional forms of education (Ames and Rosner 2014), and on markers of adulthood as a whole (Davies 2018). The evolution of ‘hacking’ from manipulation of computer source code, to an attempt to understand the impact of distractions and multitasking on high tech work efficacy (see Thompson 2005) and optimising all aspects of social and technical life illustrates the shift post-dot-com shift in ‘hacking’. As Ross examines, what is ‘hacked’ in this shift are the practices of work itself: segmented, dis-located, and increasingly, individualised. These practices are then reconstructed in ways that they are suggested as ‘preferred’ for young people entering the workforce. He argues: In the case of the new generation of work technologies, especially the mobile ones, the living labor is also allowed to range freely, choosing when and where to clock in, and whether to play along the way. In return for this rare permission, though not exactly out of gratitude, we seem to be offering up more and more of our work for free, or at a tidy discount. (Ross 2013, 59)

For Ross, networked technologies have facilitated and enlarged whole new categories of nonstandard work arrangements, especially in the creation, measurement, and manipulation of content; particularly targeting young people’s social practices. As he notes, within the context of the massification of networked technologies, established theories require careful reconfiguration in “accommodating or explaining the exploitative use of

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donated or passionate effort that is part and parcel of immaterial labor” (2013, 52). Analytically, the hacker has both productive and disruptive effects. Productively, it allows for an interrogation of how problems of the future are made knowable by communities of practice who seek to reimagine them in the present. However, it also shows how these communities are open to exploitation by those who seek to control the circulation of social, cultural, political, and economic information flows. The challenges facing Amazon ‘pickers’ is a powerful example of this (González 2016). Disruption operates both in terms of the capture of young people’s activities in forms of (non)waged labour, and the partitioning from or targeting of that information onto particular communities (for example, Duffy 2017). Conversely, consideration of the hacker’s disruptive effects makes knowable how networked technologies construct the activities of particular communities as open to intervention without proper regard for their detrimental effects, as has been seen in the rise of ride-sharing services such as Uber or Lyft and the pressures this has placed on established taxi services (Cramer and Krueger 2016), the emergence of technologies seeking to displace the urban corner store or ‘bodega’ (Segran 2017), or the creation of ‘rent gaps’ in neighbourhoods through the density of listings on short-term lodging platforms such as Airbnb (Wachsmuth and Weisler 2017). Finally, as  Wark  suggests, it is less a question of what form of neo-, post-, or altered politics might predominate, but how the present condition might emerge as something to be interrogated on and through its own terms, with its own ethics, goals, and orientations. What emerges across the renewed interest in the PEOY perspective is the recognition that within the conditions of late capitalism new forms of class relations cut across traditional markers such as wealth, occupation, and location. Crucially, these forms are embedded within a distributed consciousness where those within a given class may or may not immediately recognise their own conditions as commensurate with those who they could be said to constitute a class with. This is not a negation of long-standing debates around class consciousness (for example, Roberts 2012), but its reversal. Wark makes two final observations that are pertinent in illustrating this: first, that ‘[c]lass is implicated in struggles around the development of the mode of production whether the participants in it are conscious of it or not’ (2016, 152); and second, that ‘a class is not the same as its representation … one must beware of representations held out to be classes, which

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represent only a fraction of a class and do not express its multiple interests’ (Wark 2004, para. 45). In part, Wark’s hacker offers a way of thinking the relationship between young people’s lives and networked technologies that adds value to existing analyses of the rise of educational attainment and extension of youth as a life-stage that has accompanied post-Fordist economies.

Conclusions This chapter has examined recent debates around the crisis of youth, and sought to connect these up with the emerging ways that young people are conceived within the networked economies as digitally savvy, and simultaneously at risk from being ‘hacked’. As I have argued, the political economy of youth perspective rightly places emphasis on how young people’s interactions with capitalist economies are mediated within the conditions of the present. In this regard, it has advantages in its ability to render visible the influence of macroeconomic trends around the decline in dignified work, shortage of affordable housing across the global north, and compound effects of the massification of post-primary education. Côté’s (2014a, 538) provocation certainly opens up a way to examine how young people are constructed in ways that, in his words, “ideologically justify their exploitation as producers and consumers”. However, questions remain around how well this framing is able to incorporate the subjectivities of youth as they make a life in the early decades of the new millennium. It is these processes and subjectivities which animate my discussion of management consulting firms and their influence in education policy making in the next chapter.

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Davies, Sarah R. 2018. Characterizing Hacking: Mundane Engagement in US Hacker and Makerspaces∗. Science Technology and Human Values 43 (2): 171– 197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243917703464. Duffy, Brooke Erin. 2017. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. New Haven: Yale University Press. Duggan, Shane. 2016. Understanding Temporality and Future Orientation for Young Women in the Senior Year. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 38 (6): 795–806. ———. 2019. Examining Digital Disruption as Problem and Purpose in Australian Education Policy. The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 18 (1): 111–127. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/ index.php/IEJ. Ecclestone, Kathryn, and Daniel Goodley. 2016. Political and Educational Springboard or Straitjacket? Theorising Post/Human Subjects in an Age of Vulnerability. Discourse 37 (2): 175–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630 6.2014.927112. Farrugia, David. 2017. Youthfulness and Immaterial Labour in the New Economy. The Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026117731657. Furlong, Andy, and Fred Cartmel. 2007. Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives. 2nd ed. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press. Furlong, Andy, John Goodwin, Henrietta O’Connor, Sarah Hadfield, Stuart Hall, Kevin Lowden, and Réka Plugor. 2017. Young People in the Labour Market: Past, Present, Future. London: Routledge. Furlong, Andy, Dan Woodman, and Johanna Wyn. 2011. Changing Times, Changing Perspectives: Reconciling ‘Transition’ and ‘Cultural’ Perspectives on Youth and Young Adulthood. Journal of Sociology 47 (4): 355–370. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1440783311420787. González, Ángel. 2016. Amazon on Pace to Boast Fortune 500’s Second-Largest Workforce. The Seattle Times, February 20, 2016. https://www.seattletimes. com/business/amazon/amazon-on-pace-to-boast-fortune-500s-second-largestworkforce/. James, David, Diane Reay, Gill Crozier, Phoebe Beedell, Sumi Hollingworth, Fiona Jamieson, and Katya Williams. 2010. Neoliberal Policy and the Meaning of Counterintuitive Middle-Class School Choices. Current Sociology 58 (4): 623–641. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392110368003. Jordan, Tim. 2017. A Genealogy of Hacking. Convergence 23 (5): 528–544. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516640710. Keating, Jack, Glenn C. Savage, and John Polesel. 2013. Letting Schools off the Hook? Exploring the Role of Australian Secondary Schools in the COAG Year 12 Attainment Agenda. Journal of Education Policy 28 (2): 268–286. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.730628.

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Rosenblat, Alex. 2018. Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Ross, Andrew. 2013. In Search of the Lost Paycheck. In Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz, 28–66. New  York: Routledge. Sadler, Denham. 2018. Youth Startup Program De-Funded. InnovationAus.Com. https://www.innovationaus.com/2018/11/Youth-startup-program-defunded. Scholz, Trebor. 2013. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Edited by Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 9518398.2013.816888. Segran, Elizabeth. 2017. Two Ex-Googlers Want to Make Bodegas and Mom-­ and-­Pop Corner Stores Obsolete. Fast Company, September 13, 2017. https:// www.fastcompany.com/40466047/two-ex-googlers-want-to-makebodegas-and-mom-and-pop-corner-stores-obsolete. Sellar, Sam, Trevor Gale, and Stephen Parker. 2011. Appreciating Aspirations in Australian Higher Education. Cambridge Journal of Education 41 (1): 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2010.549457. Skibell, Reid. 2002. The Myth of the Computer Hacker. Information, Communication & Society 5 (3): 457–459. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13691180210159292. Smith, David, Katherine LaVelle, Mary Lyons, and Yaarit Silverstone. 2016. The Gig Experience: Insights from the Accenture Strategy 2016 U.S.  College Graduate Employment Study. Snee, Helene, and Fiona Devine. 2014. Taking the Next Step: Class, Resources and Educational Choice across the Generations. Journal of Youth Studies 17 (8): 998–1013. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2014.881987. Standing, Guy. 2016. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. 2nd ed. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Sukarieh, Mayssoun, and Stuart Tannock. 2015. Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy. London: Routledge. Talburt, Susan, and Nancy Lesko. 2012. An Introduction to Seven Technologies of Youth Studies. In Keywords in Youth Studies Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges, ed. Susan Talburt and Nancy Lesko, 1–10. New York: Routledge.  Thompson, Clive. 2005. Meet the Life Hackers. The New York Times Magazine, October 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/meetthe-life-hackers.html. Tufecki, Zeynep. 2017. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven: Yale University Press. Valentine, Gill. 2003. Boundary Crossings: Transitions from Childhood to Adulthood. Children’s Geographies 1 (1): 37–52. Wachsmuth, David, and Alexander Weisler. 2017. Airbnb and the Rent Gap: Gentrification Through the Sharing Economy. Environment and Planning A:

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CHAPTER 4

The Hard and Soft Networks of Digital Disruption

Abstract  Duggan interrogates the claim that young people are underprepared for the so-named ‘digital revolution’. He examines how digital disruption has been mobilised in ways that render their lives visible to technical, instrumental, and economic intervention by both domestic, and increasingly, global actors. Duggan offers a novel reading of how technology is positioned within discussions about what are considered ‘desirable’ educational futures, and by whom. It draws together an archive of key reports and initiatives by the World Economic Forum (WEF), global management consulting firms McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) emerging in the wake of the global financial crisis. A key contribution of this chapter is in investigating the knowledge-­ producing and knowledge-positioning practices these firms engage in with particular concern to how they frame the ‘future’. Keywords  Digital revolution • Digital disruption • Educational futures

This chapter interrogates the claim that young people are underprepared for the so-named ‘digital revolution’. It examines how digital disruption has been mobilised in ways that render young people’s lives visible to technical, instrumental, and economic intervention by both domestic, and © The Author(s) 2019 S. B. Duggan, Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30675-5_4

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increasingly, global actors. Here, I examine how technology is positioned within discussions about what are considered ‘desirable’ educational futures, and by whom. Using a network analysis approach, it brings together an archive of key reports and initiatives by the World Economic Forum (WEF), global management consulting firms McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) between 2013 and 2018. Focusing on the formation and sedimentation of networks within and between these organisations, I show how the logic of digital disruption is instrumentalised—and made instrumental—through its marriage with a market-oriented understanding of education and training. There are three kinds of knowledge creation emerging across management consulting firms that this chapter is concerned with: first, the repositioning of educational systems within a consulting ‘logic’ which conceives them as markets for and of the ‘future’; second, the construction of ‘gaps’ between the present educational context and desired futures that require market solutions; and third, the filling of these ‘gaps’ through the legitimisation of new knowledge by emulating and appropriating traditional scholarly forms. The key contribution of this chapter is not in looking specifically at how consultants are deployed in educational policy making, as has been the subject of a significant body of educational policy scholarship over the last decade (for example, Gunter et  al. 2015; Ball 2015; Lingard 2016), but rather in investigating the knowledge-producing and knowledge-positioning practices these firms engage in with particular concern to how they frame the ‘future’. Accounting and management consulting firms have played an increasing role in public policy debates over the last decade (Ylönen and Kuusela 2018). In Australia alone, Government contracts to strategy and accounting firms accounts for over $700 million in annual spending, almost doubling since 2013 (Belot 2017), which in terms of GDP, represents a sizable chunk of the $58 billion spent by governments on management consulting globally. In terms of their influence in the education space, the rise in the use of consulting firms is just as dramatic, with over $2 billion committed in the United States annually, and a 200% increase in their use in the U.K. over the same period (Consultancy.uk 2018). These numbers are echoed across the OECD (Lapsley et  al. 2013), and are reflective of a global trend, especially in the global south (Burch and Smith 2015). In short, management consulting in educational markets is highly lucrative and represents a growing vector of influence for ‘big four’ accounting

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firms and their management consulting counterparts. As has been shown in education policy literature (for example, W. W. Au and Ferrare 2015) and can be seen across the examples given here, the influence of these firms has a widening reach, promotes a market-oriented logic, and permeates both official and unofficial policymaking discourse. As Burch and Smith (2015, 191) put it, the ‘multiple channels and pathways through which state-corporate ties…influence policy processes in the era of market-­ based education policy’ are oriented toward the construction and maintenance of mutually beneficial arrangements, the promotion of particular market solutions, and their embedding in formal educational policy and practice. The treatment here follows key documents from two management consulting firms which have framed conversations around digital disruption and the future of education on a global scale. First, McKinsey & Company’s (hereafter McKinsey) continued work following the highly influential 2007 report How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top, focusing on a series of reports and interviews which the company released in 2013; second, the WEF’s 2015 report New Vision for Education Unlocking the Potential of Technology, produced by Boston Consulting Group. I do not seek to position these logics as inherently positive or negative, but rather invite consideration of what future(s) are amplified and endorsed, for whom, and toward what ends.

Trends, Opportunities, and the Rise of Management Consulting Think-pieces To fully appreciate shifts in understanding around how young people are being prepared for ‘the future’ and the increased role of corporate organisations in agenda setting, it is necessary to begin with the McKinsey’s How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top (2007), and How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better (2010). As Coffield (2012, 131) puts it, since the release of the first report, ‘its conclusions have quickly hardened into new articles of faith for politicians, policy-makers, educational agencies and many researchers and practitioners’. These documents, authored by one-time Chief Adviser on Delivery to the British Prime Minister, Sir Michael Barber, and McKinsey Partner Mona Mourshed, have drawn significant interest from critical education policy researchers, politicians, and educators alike (for a useful if not ­critical summary, see Coffield 2012). For some, the reports represent a

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‘new paradigm’ of educational policy making, and as Auld and Morris (2014, 149) assert, “[d]espite its self-portrayal as non-ideological and scientific … [their] … rationale and assumptions embody and reinforce an ideology that sees education as an economic investment designed to cultivate human capital”. Auld and Morris (2016) argue that policy texts such as the McKinsey reports tend to follow two narratives: stories of decline, and those of control. For the former, phenomena are framed within a perpetual ‘need to improve’ that takes up a problem of the present, positions it within a competitive environment, and orients it toward (often perpetual) reform. Policy texts constructed within this narrative are particularly prevalent in education, with government reactions the world over to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) serving as a pertinent example (see, for example Lingard et  al. 2014; Lewis 2017; Baroutsis and Lingard 2017). Stories of control on the other hand tend to inspire “faith that the identified problems can be fixed, providing policy-makers with authority for action in the form of expert knowledge of ‘what works’” (Auld and Morris 2016, 203). Indeed, the McKinsey reports were influential in framing perhaps the two most significant policy documents in the Australian educational landscape over the last decade, the 2011 Review of Funding for Schooling, and its successor the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools released in March 2018 often colloquially referred to as Gonski 1.0 and 2.0, respectively. Thus, their orientation deserves some treatment here, particularly in relation to how they reflect a broader shift in how policies, both in education and beyond, are made up, translated, and permeate. The two McKinsey reports are primarily concerned with the comparative mapping of schools, which they construct as systems with a specific focus on the human capital dimensions of their operation, evaluation, and ‘improvement’. By leveraging a growing comparative tendency of governments in relation to their educational systems, the reports reframe educational management as a question of improving effectiveness and efficiency of relatively few levers. This move is familiar to many politicians and shifts in the management and privatisation of other areas of the public sector over the last three decades, which may explain both the use of this approach, and its popularity with governments on a global scale. Returning to Coffield: The attention paid to the first McKinsey report can partly be explained by the anxiety displayed by politicians … to compete successfully in the global

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knowledge economy. When they are told authoritatively that this can be done most effectively, not by reforming the quality of goods and services, but by making three (or perhaps only one) changes to their schooling system, then the prominence of the report’s conclusions in policy documents becomes easier to understand. (2012, 132)

Beyond the actual substance of the reports, what is critical for this book is the commercial positioning over time by management consulting firms such as McKinsey across educational practice and their creating new markets for consultation, evaluation, and deployment. Critical to this project, as Gunter et al. (2015) argue is how the logics of market-oriented policies that have been deployed across the public sector in recent times are extended into educational decision making writ large. The expansion of markets into all aspects of decision making around public life and their normalisation in conversations by politicians about how policies are made opens a space for consultancies like McKinsey to have an outsized influence in policy making. Put slightly differently, Gunter et al. (2015, 529) suggest that “markets are expanded through the normalisation and indeed embodiment of business ideas and cultures, and in doing so, the pedagogy of consultancy enables particular dispositions to be shaped and legitimised”. This is an issue of influence, whereby particular figures are able to command massive amounts of authority in relation to particular issues, such as is the focus of Ball’s (2016a) work in relation to the Indian Educational Reform Movement (IERM) or Hogan et al.’s (2015) analysis of global education resource giant Pearson. Yet, it is also one of access, where the open availability and accessibility of these types of reports assists greatly with their rapid dissemination on a global scale. Gunter et  al. (2015, 532) capture this well in suggesting that “when the focus is on the politics of knowledge exchange … the integration of consultants and consultancy with the mandate to govern enables shared strategies and dispositions to be evident”. Put another way, the use of consulting firms in the creation, deployment, and evaluation of policy involves two-­way processes of governments and governance. First it involves advancing market-logics across complex public sector systems across contexts; and second, legitimising the knowledge generating practices of consulting firms through a preference by public offices for a focus on ‘what works’ that is often schematised, decontextualized, and reinforces existing preferences for cost-minimisation, efficiency, and measurement.

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The McKinsey reports represent a critical moment in the increase of influence of management consulting firms in educational policy making. However, in many ways, they were only a beginning. In the decade since the release of the first report in 2007, McKinsey has grown its educational practice on a global scale to incorporate all levels of formal education, and increasingly plugged these contributions into publicly available think-­ pieces alongside its paid practice. A cursory examination of the current McKinsey ‘social sector’ website suggests that their current education practice encompasses over 175 consultants across 50 countries, and a client book of around 600 projects (McKinsey & Company 2018). They state: We help governments, foundations, non-profits, and corporations to achieve rapid gains in student learning and completion outcomes. (McKinsey & Company 2018)

Beyond this though, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of McKinsey’s educational practice is their promotion of McKinsey ‘Insights,’ which returns well over two-thousand results when searching for ‘education,’ on topics from improving access to education for girls, to transforming national education systems, or analysis of ‘readiness for investment’ across school systems. In relation to digital disruption and educational transformation, they offer three key ‘insights’ from 2013 that I examine below: a report titled Education to Employment: Designing a system that works; and interviews with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, and free online education provider Kahn Academy founder Sal Kahn. Though a fraction of contributions by their overall education practice, these examples illustrate a strategic positioning of proprietary knowledge that seeks to centre McKinsey in relation to digital disruption and educational reform.

What Works, and the Threat(s) of Unprepared Youth Education to Employment: Designing a system that works opens with three rapid vignettes, a description of the more than 700,000 Japanese young people who have withdrawn from society, known as hikikomori; a claim that ‘restless youth’ were at the forefront of Arab Spring demonstrations in North Africa; and the crisis of under-employment that continues to affect young people across the United States. They continue that the crisis of youth unemployment, well documented across the OECD and beyond,

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both represents a threat in terms of social unrest (of which the Arab Spring serves as warning for governments globally), and a “gigantic pool of untapped talent” (Mourshed et  al. 2012, 11). With over 230 scholarly citing documents at time of writing, the report has had a markedly smaller impact than its predecessors, however, its reach remains impressive, drawing discussion from scholars on a global scale and it continues to be of interest, with just under one-third of citing articles emerging in the last two years. Led by Mona Mourshed who co-authored the two reports discussed above, the report (hereafter either Education to Employment or ‘the Mourshed report’) makes two key claims that are suggestive of an extension of McKinsey’s earlier education practice: first, that there exists a ‘skills gap’ between how educators are preparing young people and what employers need in terms of human capital; and second, that this problem can be explained at least in part by a lack of, in their words, “hard data on the issue” (2012, 11). For the authors, the risks of failing to address these twin issues are potentially catastrophic, ‘even violent,’ and the lack of progress on the issue is—despite decades of extensive scholarship across all of the contexts examined in the report—due to a lack of “a bird’s-eye view of the whole process” (2012, 12). Education to Employment centres on three empirical claims that the authors draw from surveys and interviews with key stakeholders: (1) globally, an estimated 75 million young people are unemployed; (2) that “[h]alf of youth are not sure that their postsecondary education has improved their chances of finding a job”; and (3) around “40 percent of employers say that a lack of skills is the main reason for entry-level vacancies” (2012, 13). Combined, they assert that these conditions have resulted in “the twin crises of a shortage of jobs and a shortage of skills” (16); one which a broader view, and the ‘hard data’ that the report proposes to offer, will address. In their introduction to a recent edited collection, Kelly and Pike (2017) note that despite the wealth of data about the worsening conditions of life that many young people find themselves on a global scale, there is little energy for change from those who control the vast swaths of wealth, accumulating in an ever tightening pool of the, often termed, ‘one per-cent’. For Kelly and Pike (2017, 11) one of the key issues facing young people and populations more generally is the “lack of a political stomach for the difficult task of holding capitalism to account for an array of consequences, effects and practices that should, rightly, be the object of critique and action”. Capitalism here is taken as both consistently escaping the “ordering processes and practices” of those who would

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seek to limit its influence, and energising the “production of newer, more sophisticated ordering devices and practices” (2017, 11). Here, Mourshed et al.’s call for ‘hard data’ is bound up in the perpetual project of capitalism and the three claims can be refigured: young people feel that their education does not prepare them for a life of work that is being re-worked by organisations who then find that young people emerging from education do not meet their needs. The flywheel, as it is, turns, and the cycle continues: many young people, vulnerable to the ways that paid employment is shifting, feel a sense of pointlessness, and in some extreme cases, withdraw completely, as with the hikikomori, or seek to directly intervene in the system, as in the Arab Spring.1 Two further aspects of the report are worth expanding here. First, in framing their analysis, the authors conceptualise education-to-­employment as a ‘highway’ with three ‘critical intersections’: enrolling in post-­ secondary education, skill development, and seeking work. In each, they draw on a large cohort survey to highlight dispositions to study, and link this back to demographic and outcomes data as available for each country. There are a number of assumptions it makes: that education is (equally) important to success for all young people; that attitudes to study are a key parameter for determining educational success; and finally, that ‘willingness to pay’ for education is a marker for determining one’s commitment to succeed. Second, in determining whether young people have the ‘right’ skills, there is a marked preference throughout the report for the attitudes of employers over educators or governments. The language of competence frames the discussion of skills throughout, and this is borne out particularly in their assertions that between employers and education providers, differences in ratings of competence are “particularly stark in theoretical and hands-on training, problem solving, and computer literacy” (p.37). As Moore and Morton (2017, 591) suggest, surveys and studies “aimed at gauging satisfaction levels among employers regarding the abilities and dispositions of the graduates they employ” have become common place over the last decades, both by industry and consulting firms, as well as commissioned directly by government conducted. They suggest that as is the case of Education to Employment, these studies “typically record levels 1  It is worth noting that not all commentators agree with Mourshed et al.’s characterisation that the Arab Spring was an inherently youth-led movement. For an excellent analysis of this, see Tufecki’s (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas.

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of skills acquisition thought to be below the required industry standard” (2017, 591), and then use these data to promote higher levels of integration of ‘job readiness’ into higher education courses. One key issue with this approach, aside from beginning with what appears to be a predetermined end in mind, is that these kinds of surveys tell us relatively little about the specific concerns that employers have. This approach tends to flatten out ‘skills’ into relatively generic categories, as can be seen in McKinsey’s discussion of ‘problem solving’ or ‘computer literacy’ as though they are relatively homogenous ‘chunks’. As Walsh (2017, 106) argues, “[i]ronically, some businesses struggle to describe what their workforce will be like in the future”. For him, this is in part due to the changing nature and technological disruption of many sectors of the economy, however, it also points to a larger pattern where many employers are simply unsure what their human capital needs will look like. There are two primary orientations in response to this realisation: first that organisations denounce established educational systems for not graduating young people who fill their ‘needs,’ or second, calling for a reimagining of the whole system of education as being backward looking and outdated. I now turn to an example of the latter orientation in Tim Draper’s Draper University of Heroes.

The Promises, Possibilities, and Problems of Survivor Bias Tim Draper, managing director of Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson is known for two things: his penchant for loud ties, and his bullish stance on the promises and possibilities of the future. The former, though somewhat trivial, makes Draper stand out from the crowd, most recently in his sporting of a purple and gold ‘Bitcoin’ tie in an investigative documentary into the rise and fall of fraudulent blood testing startup Theranos, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The latter, relatedly, marks Draper as someone who takes large bets on the future, including in the speculative cryptocurrency market, and in risky startup ventures like Theranos. For Draper, the future can’t be known; but one should maintain an entrepreneurial disposition toward it, “take the chance, and don’t be afraid to fail” (Draper 2013). It is this mantra that best sums up his Draper University of Heroes, a private, immersive boarding-school style program focused on teaching entrepreneurship.

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Draper University operates around three key ideas: its curriculum changes with each intake, with the speakers, topics, and projects all changing based on ‘what is relevant at that time’; learning and programs are team-based; and the program is deeply experiential. Draper explains: The first part is all called ‘future.’ We don’t teach history at Draper University. We teach future. [emphasis added] And future is predictive analytics, and science fiction, and projecting what could potentially happen. Then we have survival training. During survival training, the students get both urban and rural survival training. Some of it is very brutal, sort of militaristic, and some of it is just mental-anguish survival training. (Draper 2013)

Draper’s pairing of teaching only ‘the future’ with ‘survival training’ is illustrative of the ongoing conversation in youth studies scholarship around Kelly’s (2006) ‘entrepreneurial Self’ as introduced in Chap. 3. As he suggests it, “the population of Youth at-risk, in its negativity, illuminates the positivity that is the entrepreneurial Self” (2006, 18). It also picks up on what Facer and Furlong (2001, 463) suggested is an ongoing “debate on what it means to be ‘successfully young’ in the digital age”. Bringing these two perspectives together around Draper’s description of Draper University both reinforces the ways in which young people are cast as at threat from (digital) futures, but also positioned as able to endlessly pivot, entrepreneurially, toward an ever-shifting definition of (digital) ‘success’. The implication of this is two-fold. For Draper, entrepreneurship is a battle for survival: it requires, as Kelly puts it, “entrepreneurial projects in which persons should be engaged—reflexively, continuously, endlessly, for the term of our natural life” (emphasis in original, 2006, 18). Second, it involves, as Mazzotti (2017) suggests, “open[ing] the door on possible futures”. These openings are provisional, experimental, and risky in Draper’s framing, and require both the ‘freedom to fail,’ and type of entrepreneurial Self who “will make a lot of mistakes, so that something like [inventing penicillin, a mistake] will happen and they’ll go off and become great successes” (Draper 2013). Draper continues: You don’t know what’s coming next. We could make you paint a picture, or you could go car racing, or you might have to rappel a giant cliff. And all of this is a part of entrepreneurial training … all along the way, they’re building their own business—but it’s all group oriented. So you live and die by the team you have been placed with.

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The only grades we give are the team scores. And team scores are all tied to extraordinary behavior, spectacular failures, and big successes. I don’t think academically it would make total sense to a lot of professors, but I think if they look at the entire program, they’ll see how extraordinary it is and how we really are changing a lot of people’s lives for the better. (Draper 2013)

The Californian Ideology, a provocation coined by Barbrook and Cameron ([1995] 2015) in the shadows of the rapid growth in internet business of the mid 90s has come to describe, in a significant way, not only the dot-­ com boom, but also the intensification and leveraging of digital modes of governance around the activities both by established and ‘startup’ digital corporations of Silicon Valley. For Barbrook and Cameron (2015, 17), the overriding promise of this ideology is that “each member of the virtual class is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur”. In this enlarged reading two decades after the initial provocation, the entrepreneurial subject emerges around an image of (normally) young people as well-paid, experimental, ‘digital artisans’ on the one hand, yet work-addicted, precarious, and motivated by economic liberalism on the other. Draper’s twin suggestions that Draper University ‘doesn’t teach history’ preferring instead to ‘teach the future,’ paired with ‘survival training’ and ‘spectacular failures’ reinforces Barbrook and Cameron’s point. Beyond the usual emphasis on forms of digital labour and leisure, Draper’s ideal candidate is imagined as an idealized economic subject who makes, unmakes, and remakes the present within a form of techno-centric capitalism. This idealized form especially resonates with current conversations about how young people ought to orient themselves through education and labour-making practices in that it tends to flatten out the lived experience of structuralised precarity in ways that render it a problem of an individualised subject, in an individualised context.

Measure, Personalize, Streamline: Rethinking Young People as Talent By almost any conceivable measure, Sal Kahn is an inspiring individual. The former hedge fund analyst’s rise to EdTech fame began in an attempt to tutor family and friends, uploading his mathematics lessons on YouTube, where they attracted almost 500 million views in the first few years. Kahn

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Academy, a ‘free school’ which supplies both online content for students, and coaching for teachers has attracted funding from tech giant Google, and significant investment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Kahn himself has appeared on network television all over the globe, appeared on TIME magazine’s ‘100 most influential people’ list in 2012, gave a highly popular TED talk, and Kahn Academy has been featured in Forbes, where it was touted as a ‘$1 Trillion Opportunity’ (Noer 2012). Kahn Academy’s mission is ‘to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere,’ and in this sense, McKinsey’s interview with Kahn in September of 2013 marks a perfect fit for promoting the Education to employment report considered above. Across a brief interview with McKinsey San Francisco Director James Manyika, Kahn makes the case for his Academy, but he goes further to argue for an expanded relationship between what he calls ‘traditional education’ and the new, entrepreneurial world of Silicon Valley, which he sees as the foremost site of innovation, and building the future. Kahn makes three key claims that link back to the Mourshed report and that are important to the broader discussion of consulting and ‘consultocracy’ (Gunter et al. 2015) as it is considered in this chapter. First, Kahn promotes the academy as allowing for enhanced ‘personalised learning’—echoing many in the Education-for-All (EFA) movement including the Gates Foundation (see Tota 2014)—which he sees as a critical project for promoting a competency-­based model. For Kahn, this is made possible through his second suggestion; the promotion and deployment of ‘big data,’ following the tactics of Silicon Valley companies in attracting and retaining users. His discussion of this is worth quoting in full: In the Internet world, there’s this phenomenon of A/B testing, where, “Hey, you want people to click ‘purchase’ on your e-commerce store? Well, why don’t you have 5 percent of your users see a slightly different button? Instead of saying ‘buy now,’ it says ‘I want this.’ And see, does that increase purchases? Does that decrease purchases? Does it have other side effects?” We get to now do that same type of thing, but not with trying to get someone to buy a widget. Instead, we test to make sure that they get engaged with the material, to make sure that they get proficient in the material, and to try to see if they retain the material. We are running experiments about if you explain a concept—seeing negative exponents in a different way, using certain text or not using certain text—how does it affect how quickly a student gets to proficiency? How does it affect their attention one week later, two weeks later, their actual

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forgetting curve? We do a 5 percent study, we get 40,000 data points by tomorrow, which is unheard of in the traditional world. And we can control for all sorts of things and we can measure all sorts of variables. (Kahn and Manyika 2013)

Kahn seeks to advance the skills gap discourse that frames the Mourshed report by suggesting that it is more a question of signalling than of skills. Again, taken at length: If on top of that you can create data, “Look, people who do well on this,” you create the pipeline. “These are the employers that care about it, these are the salaries they’re making, this is the probability of success, et cetera, et cetera.” You can really start to streamline the signalling problem and the employment problem. […] But I think if the Department of Education or someone else isn’t going to create some type of competency-based mechanism, you can. Especially a large organization, they would have the clout. Form a consortium with your competitors to find the talent in petroleum engineering, in software engineering, whatever it might be. (Kahn and Manyika 2013)

Kahn’s suggestions do much more than echo the Mourshed report, or New Vision for Education that I discuss in the next section. In the first excerpt, Kahn reframes the ‘problem’ of learning to one of extraction, analysis, and response to data, collected at an increasingly rapid pace. Here, as Williamson (2017, 9) suggests in relation to EdTech startup AltSchool, ‘education’ is “animated by a particularly powerful imaginative resource which envisions [it] as a massively data-driven and software-­ supported social institution”. Education is a technical process to be uncovered through technical means. For Williamson, this is not neutral, but rather, “constructed to support a particular cultural vision of education as being ‘personalized’ around each individual” (2017, 10). Young people’s learning made digital, and datafication made material in how large numbers of data points are deployed back onto the ‘traditional’ world. For the second excerpt, data becomes the standard for how education-­ to-­employment pathways might be constructed and controlled. Echoing Silicon Valley’s motto of “moving fast and breaking things,” Kahn suggests here that traditional forms of Government and governance can be side-stepped through a consortium approach to streamlining the discovery of talent. Each of the emphases is notable, the first in bracketing off what

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Kahn sees as the inefficient legacy practices of governments, the second for building a pipeline that draws from trusted channels (though, beyond the traditional ‘Ivy League’), and the third, recasting young people’s skills, competencies, and experiences in a competitive landscape, whereby corporations seek to identify the best players, akin to a sporting draft. Kahn’s three strategies in this interview come together to form what Auld and Morris term a ‘logic of action’ (2016, 211). In their view, this logic consists of recasting the present in terms of a need for reform that draws on precedent that demonstrates the viability of the approach, but also repositions the status quo as irrational or as having a hidden agenda. Telling CEOs to ‘be creative’ in their sourcing of young people as ‘talent,’ and building alternative pipelines is more than a solution to the problems of education—it deploys a new set of metrics that make possible a new future state. This future state, for Kahn, exists alongside the current one, allowing organisations such as Kahn Academy to deploy the logics of Silicon Valley in evaluating how young people learn. It is this call to a new future state that animates the WEF’s 2015 report, New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology, authored by the Boston Consulting Group and interestingly, drawing on Kahn’s expertise as an interviewee that I discuss in the next section.

New Vision[s] for Education: Technology as Pivot and Possibility in Educational Policy In late January of 2015  in Davos, Switzerland, then-Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Yoka Brandt, began her remarks launching UNICEF’s 2015 report The Investment Case for Education and Equity (2015) with the suggestion that education and children were “…[i]ssues that we don’t speak about very often at the World Economic Forum” (World Economic Forum 2015). The panel, including former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, banking giant ING CFO Koos Timmermans, and prominent musician and activist Angelique Kidjo, explored the themes of the report from their respective expertise: Brown as Special Envoy to the UN and education advocate; Timmermans from the perspective of how large corporations might champion programmes in collaboration with organisations; and Kidjo on the intergenerational importance of educational opportunity and access in the African context. Combined, they high-

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lighted the “twin crises of education” that would come to inform the orientation of much of the multi-year New Vision for Education (WEF 2015) initiative released a few months later: lack of educational access for the world’s poorest young people, lack of educational attainment for many of their peers who are fortunate enough to receive basic access, and the opportunities technolog(ies) provide for remediating both. In her opening remarks, Brandt called for three actions: more investment, more equitably targeted to address the needs of all communities, and more effectively targeted to make a positive contribution. Though this call to action is of no surprise to global policy scholars, reflecting a much longer history, their utterance in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and their coupling with the promise of education technolog(ies) does, indeed, serve as an important marker in framing digital disruption and education policy in the present. New Vision for Education: The Investment Case for Education and Equity (hereafter the UNICEF report) and its relationship to what Sahlberg (2011) calls the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) deserves some treatment here in framing New Visions. The UNICEF report emerges at the tail of a process of development activities between 2012 and 2015—the Post-2015 Development Agenda—which marked the end of the UNs eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); a shift in focus from ending extreme poverty and its manifest effects to one of localised action, governance, and a deep commitment to Public-Private partnerships. Much has been written about the longer history of this shift and the influence of the World Bank in repositioning educational development within a neo-Liberal paradigm (Klees 2017b). However, the UNICEF report in many ways reflects a crystallisation of this trajectory in positioning private partnerships as a primary vector for addressing educational access in increasingly complex populations, especially in the global south. The UNICEF report represents a call to action in what Brandt ­acknowledges is a weakening investment and donor environment in the post-GFC landscape, especially for young people born into poor communities and conflict, and the embedding of a technical, ‘data-driven’ approach to educational policymaking (Williamson 2016). For Klees (2017b), the World Bank’s shift in orientation in the 1980s through its self-designation as the ‘Knowledge Bank’ is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of its work, with a market-oriented one-size-fits-all policymaking and a remarkable amount of global influence, in part because of the lever-

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age it has in Education For All (EFA) funding in the global south. To this end, the UNICEF report seeks to reorient (optimistically) or rebrand (cynically) much of this work within the post-2015 environment. The key, for UNICEF, is in recognising the growing importance of secondary, rather than simply primary-level education, or in their words, with “the goal to equip children and youth with skills that are adapted to the needs of the labour market in a fast-­changing and increasingly globalized economy” (UNICEF 2015, 1). Drawing on a wide evidence base that recognises the limitations of access-focused interventions, the UNICEF report makes a case for investment focused on maximising impact for cost. In doing so, technology-­ mediated interventions, including ‘computer-assisted learning’ are considered ‘high impact’ and, paired with other scientifically-oriented accountability measures (both high- and low-tech), are optimistically regarded as well positioned to meet the access/attainment challenges facing an estimated one billion children by 2020. This approach resonates with each of the reports which are the concern of this chapter and reflects a broader shift toward the measurement and commercialisation of educational systems on a global scale. As Beech and Rizvi argue: Claims to scientific status are used by these global policy actors as a way of providing an aura of authority to their proposals. The telos within current global policy initiatives is the grand narrative of the twenty-first-century learner and preparing a new kind of individual for a new society: the knowledge worker for the knowledge society. (2017, 380)

For Beech and Rizvi (2017, 381), “normative comparative science has become much more efficient in its capacity to measure and to manage data,” and through their deployment, “[o]utcome-based technologies of comparison, such as PISA, have created conditions for these type of normative mechanisms to have huge influence on educational developments”. Put slightly differently, the UNICEF report promotes educational practice as an economic as well as a social good, providing, by means of evidence, a doubling of educational practice as technical practice. Or perhaps less favourably, it refigures current educational problems as future economic, rather than simply social, challenges and opportunities. In a recent editorial in the Journal of Education Policy, Ball (2018, 587) reflects on this shift, suggesting that “the processes of reforming education create a set of present and future profit opportunities for Edu-businesses”. He contin-

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ues: “the reform process and reform initiatives themselves create a raft of specific (wholesale and retail) profit opportunities, particularly in relation to digitalisation–pedagogy, teacher education, assessment, data analytics and big data” (Ball 2018, 587). It is these opportunities that open the space—and provides the orientation—for New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology.

Defining Education as a System of Markets In March 2013, representatives from government, development agencies, and NGOs came together in Dakar for 2 days to discuss what has become known as the post-2015 education agenda. The post-2015 education agenda is the revision and culmination of two policies that have shaped global education policy over the last four decades: the World Declaration on Education for All (the EFA movement) of the 1990s introduced above, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the 2000s. A key line of analysis that has emerged with regard to the post-2015 agenda is its increased framing within a market-oriented neoliberal agenda. Enns (2015, 383) argues, that although “traces of neoliberal ideology remain present in discussions on the post-2015 education agenda … [early conversations signalled a] … shift away from the narrow conception of economic considerations in global education priorities”. Ball et  al. (2017, 148) are less optimistic about this shift, noting that over the last three decades, as new policy assemblages have come into being and new private enterprise has formed up around questions of educational access, technologies, and curriculum, “ideas and practices that were at one time viewed as antithetical are sutured together by discursive change into new productive relationships”. These relationships are sticky, and tend to emerge and sediment in debates first as substituting, and then increasingly, substituting established state-led practices (2017, 148). This line of argument is particularly powerful for examining the WEF’s New Vision for Education initiative, both in terms of the Unlocking the Potential of Technology report, which is the focus here, but also their follow-up Fostering Social and Emotional Learning Through Technology, which I also consider. Across four brief chapters, New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology makes three key claims in support of thirty recommendations for policy-makers, educators, EdTech providers, and funding partners. First, it argues that that the rise in technologically-mediated

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aspects of present life and work require a unique skillset that includes technical competence, but also specific non-technical capabilities. Here, the authors argue that that the evolution of technologically-mediated aspects of life and work require a specific set of skills and orientations that are unique to the present, and will persist into the future. In this sense, they argue that the skills required to successfully navigate this environment involve both traditional ‘hard’ skills such as language, mathematics, and sciences, as well as a corresponding battery of so-called twenty first century skills around problem-solving, critical thinking, and curiosity. Drawing on language common to the Twenty First Century Skills debate (see, for example, Buchanan et  al. 2012), the report brings together a whole set of logics which marry ideas of persistence and collaboration with more traditional knowledge disciplines. The language of ‘thriving’ in a ‘rapidly evolving’ world here sits alongside what that ‘thriving’ will allow: engagement with “today’s innovation-driven economy” where “workers need a different mix of skills than in the past” (WEF 2015, 2). They identify 16 critical ‘21st-century skills,’ drawn from a “meta-analysis of research about twenty-first-century skills in primary and secondary education” broken up into three categories: foundational literacies, competencies, and character qualities (2015, 3). Citing a lack of available evidence, the report notes that for the latter two categories—competencies and character qualities—a lack of comparable indicators across countries makes broader comparison impossible. However, for the authors, this does not blunt their importance, in noting that “[m]uch more needs to be done to align indicators, ensure greater global coverage for key skills, establish clear baselines for performance integrated with existing local assessments” as well as to “standardize the definition and measurement of higher-order skills across cultures and develop assessments directed specifically towards competencies and character” (2015, 3). Extending this, they suggest what they term a ‘closed loop’ approach, drawing on engineering and ­manufacturing, which they define as “a system that requires an integrated and connected set of steps to produce results” (2015, 8). For the New Visions authors, these skills and capabilities are not only required by young people, but also educators: both in teaching and administrative capacities. The shift to a skills and capability approach for both young people and educators has been well documented across initiatives in the USA and UK in particular (Williamson 2017; Facer 2016; Selwyn 2015). Williamson’s (2017) examination of the “combined process of ‘datafying’ and ‘digitizing’ education” is particularly relevant for analysing

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the New Visions report, and indeed he does so in examining the second report in the New Visions series: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning Through Technology, published one year after Unlocking the Potential of Technology. As Williamson notes (2017, 10), the promotion of “data-­ driven education systems” hinges on notions of personalisation, ‘evidence-­ based’ approaches to learning, and continuous innovation. Indeed, each of these are captured in the New Visions series, first in their promotion of “project-based, experiential, inquiry-based and adaptive learning methods,” and then “instructional delivery, ongoing assessments, appropriate interventions and tracking of outcomes and learning” with a focus on addressing resource shortages and ‘inadequate’ teacher training (2014, 1). Here, personalisation is both enabled by the datafication of educational policy and practice, as in Williamson, as well as through its reversal; the optimisation of educational practice to that which can be datafied. As he argues, “[t]he imagined datafication of schools is to be attained through pursuing these goals of personalization, evidence-based learning, efficiency and continuous innovation” (2017, 11). Crucially, as Williamson shows in relation to Fostering Social and Emotional Learning Through Technology, the extension and intensification of the measurement of non-­ cognitive learning is part of a “desirable ambition in the commercial domain” and “is becoming a key target of education authorities around the world” (2017, 146). Taking this further in their analysis of emerging bio- politics in education, Gulson and Webb (2018, 287) argue that “[t]he introduction of new knowledge in education may lead to a narrowing not only of what type of knowledge counts as policy knowledge, but also what techniques and expertise are legitimate”. This is particularly pertinent in the report’s recommendation that policymakers create “incentives for education technology providers to develop products and services that develop competencies and character qualities” (WEF 2015, 20), as well as for funding bodies to “[p]rovide resources and advice to pilot technology-­ ­ enabled models for the development of competencies and character qualities” (WEF 2015, 21).

Skills Markets beyond Education for All The third turn in Unlocking the Potential of Technology—drawing on case study examples from Africa, South American, and North America—is the suggestion that the development and deployment of educational technologies is a key vector along which ‘21st Century Skills’ and capabilities

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might be addressed on a global scale. Here, the language of equity, efficiency, and accountability echoes what Ball (2018, 587) argues is a “re-­ imagination of the ‘educational space’ as a market and the production of an infrastructure of organisation, processes and subjects in whose relations market exchanges become a sensible and necessary form for the production and consumption of education”. This is particularly the case in WEF’s suggestion of “[e]nable easier scaling up of promising models within local markets and the transfer of best practices across markets” (8); explicitly, to “[w]ork in collaboration with the private sector to improve skills critical to the workforce of the future” (20); or, to “[f]ocus seed funding on solutions with both a high impact on outcomes and sustainable financial models” (21). Though careful to insist that their inclusion does not signal an endorsement, the selected case studies too, affirm Ball’s thesis. The first case study: Private school ‘network’ startup Bridge International Academies deploys an aggressive scaling model aimed at providing ‘low-­ cost’ education to primary school-aged young people living on less than $2 per day across Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors frame the problem thus: Kenya faces a number of serious educational challenges related to human capital. For example, 42% of all instructional time is lost due to teacher absenteeism from the classroom. In addition, only 35% of Kenya’s public-­ school teachers display mastery in the subjects they teach. As a reflection of these and other challenges, Kenyan students struggle to acquire even the most fundamental skills of literacy and numeracy. (WEF 2015, 15)

Bridge’s model represents perhaps the zenith of the scale up mentality to ‘low cost’ Schooling. As Riep (2017, 352) explains it, “student/customers receive scripted lessons, devised at corporate headquarters in Boston and Nairobi, which are transmitted wirelessly and recited word-for-word by local community members using tablet e-readers…uniform and ­consistent from one cookie-cutter school to the next”. Examining the shift in global education policy and market-making, Riep (2017, 353) suggests that Bridge’s expansion has explicitly and purposefully “assembled a variety of tools that intervene and interact to create education markets”. These activities are comprised of technologies, both digital and otherwise, and enabled through their proliferation, use, and monitoring. Drawing on the work of Preda, Riep (2017, 354)suggests that Bridge operates with the ultimate goal of performing “standardised and replicable processes” in the deployment of ‘market devices’ through five related

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activities: one, creating spatial and temporal boundaries; two, deploying and managing ‘backstage support’; three, providing ‘epistemic’ tools, such as data generation, tracking, and circulation; four, managing market transactions; and finally, “generating new transactions”. For the New Visions authors, these market devices “have the potential to lower the cost and improve the quality of education” (1), which has the on-flow effect of increasing the overall impact Bridge can have: Bridge’s focus on centralized systems, research and data collection and continuous feedback has allowed the network to launch a new school approximately every three days. The organization has set itself an ambitious goal of educating 10 million low-income students in a dozen countries within 10 years. (15)

These goals are market generating in ways that generate a feedback loop that seeks to open up an ever complexifying network of public-private investment partnerships. By establishing a network of schools, as well as the supply chains to design, fit, and run them, Bridge “aims to refashion markets already occupied for low-cost schooling into new configurations and service arrangements that enable the company to provide other key services at the bottom of the pyramid” (Riep 2017, 360). New Visions is pertinent for thinking about digital disruption and education policy for two reasons. First, it links to how Twenty First Century Skills are imagined as a ‘gap’ both in how industries are operating today; and second, how it is anticipated that they will operate into the future. In part, the recommendations of the report are not surprising. After all, the World Economic Forum’s membership includes many of the largest companies in the world, seeks to foster improved public-private cooperation, and a consistent theme across their work encourages greater private sector involvement in traditionally highly regulated spaces such as education and health. Similarly, it is not surprising that the WEF report identifies technological advancements as the key pivot upon which to drive efficiencies in educational management, delivery, and monitoring—the case studies which make up the report are large and complex organisations which draw on the expertise of key players across the Edu-business space. What is noteworthy, however, is their interest in education, at this time, with digital technologies as their focus, and with emerging, rather than established markets as their focus. New Vision for Education effectively reframes the issue of educational access and inclusion—more than a problem of human

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capital development which has been a consistent theme of neo-Liberal policy advocates since the 1980s—as a technical skills gap addressable through technical means. As with many conversations around digital disruption in work and life, ‘the future’ requires technological solutions fashioned for previously non-technical problems, and non-markets require marketisation along increasingly digital lines.

Conclusions This chapter sought to interrogate the claim that young people are underprepared for the so-named ‘digital revolution’. It examined how the logic of digital disruption is mobilised in ways that render young people’s lives visible to technical, instrumental, and economic intervention by both domestic, and increasingly, global actors through educational policymaking and advocacy. As Ball (2018, 588) notes, the increased activities of commercial players within the global education ‘marketplace’ creates “a role for new knowledges and for those with expertise in those knowledges to become significant in the development and enactment of neoliberal governmentality”. The examples given here are not exhaustive, and indeed, are only a fraction of the circuits of advocacy, translation, and sedimentation that are embedded across popular and policy discussions around digital disruption in relation to education policy and indeed young people’s lives. However, taken together, these reports represent one channel among many along which knowledge work and the logics of disruption flow between established and emerging corporations, and into in/formal circuits of governance and policy instruments. Analysis around accounting and management consulting companies within critical education policy studies shows a steady growth in both the number of consulting firms being deployed across the policy landscape, and their growing influence in terms of market-oriented analysis and ­recommendations (Gunter et al. 2015). Whilst many within this field have increasingly come to focus on the creation, maintenance, and influence of policy networks, there remains a need for a strong critical line which examines the artefacts that these kinds of firms produce and circulate, often in conjunction with highly influential individuals, such as with Sal Kahn and Tim Draper who are considered in this chapter. These individuals make up and sustain vast networks of influence, yet their crystallisation in openly available web and paper resources places their thought-leadership alongside that of related, or not so related fields. Put simply, these networks, but

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also the knowledge that is validated publicly through them, matters. EdTech emerges here as one market among many—such as in Education to Employment for McKinsey, or New Visions for BCG and the WEF— alongside a whole ecosystem of regulatory, fiduciary, macro- and microeconomic demands and opportunities its provision makes possible. As mentioned above, this has been explored in significant detail with relation to education publishing giant Pearson (Hogan et  al. 2015; Ball et  al. 2017; Williamson 2019), as well as with regard to how these kinds of global initiatives support an increasingly powerful network of private actors who, as Ball et al. (2017, 148) put it, “certainly see themselves as addressing and responding to the failure of governments to provide Education for All”. Here, three questions emerge: what kinds of future are being promoted; toward what ends, both intended and unintended; and with what assumptions regarding the conditions in which young people are making a life? Taken together, these questions are crucial for thinking about how problems of the ‘future’ as an unknown space are flattened out, and made actionable in the present in terms of the anxieties, opportunities, and instrumentalities which govern young people’s lives. The archive that constitutes this chapter shows how discussions around young people’s lives are bound up not only by their positioning as participants in the (future/ present) labour market, as has been the focus of a wealth of educational policy literature (for example, Klees 2017a; Ball 2016b; Robertson et al. 2011), but also how that positioning also constructs young people as a market, colonisable through technologies by various organisational and corporate interests. These questions have both local and global effects, both in terms of their coalescence around particular technologies and policy initiatives, and in reinforcing the logic of a competitive global education marketplace. In the next chapter I examine this further in relation to national coding in schools policy as it emerged in the Australian Federal parliament in 2015 and leading up to the 2016 Federal election.

References Au, Wayne W., and Joseph J. Ferrare. 2015. Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policy Networks in the Neoliberal State. New York: Routledge. Auld, Euan, and Paul Morris. 2014. Comparative Education, the ‘New Paradigm’ and Policy Borrowing: Constructing Knowledge for Educational Reform. Comparative Education 50 (2): 129–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/030500 68.2013.826497.

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Consultancy.uk. 2018. UK Education Consulting Spend Rises 196% in 14 Years. Consultancy.UK. https://www.consultancy.uk/news/18534/uk-educationconsulting-spend-rises-196-in-14-years. Draper, Tim. 2013. Education for Entrepreneurship: An Interview with Tim Draper. San Francisco. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/ our-insights/education-for-entrepreneurship-an-interview-with-tim-draper. Enns, Charis. 2015. Transformation or Continuation? A Critical Analysis of the Making of the Post-2015 Education Agenda. Globalisation, Societies and Education 13 (3): 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724. 2014.959894. Facer, Keri. 2016. Using the Future in Education: Creating Space for Openness, Hope and Novelty. In The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education, ed. Helen E.  Lees and Nel Noddings, 63–78. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-41291-1_5. Facer, Keri, and Ruth Furlong. 2001. Beyond the Myth of the ‘Cyberkid’: Young People at the Margins of the Information Revolution. Journal of Youth Studies 4 (4): 451–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260120101905. Gulson, Kalervo N., and P.  Taylor Webb. 2018. ‘Life’ and Education Policy: Intervention, Augmentation and Computation. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39 (2): 276–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/01 596306.2017.1396729. Gunter, Helen M., David Hall, and Colin Mills. 2015. Consultants, Consultancy and Consultocracy in Education Policymaking in England. Journal of Education Policy 30 (4): 518–539. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2014.963163. Hogan, Anna, Sam Sellar, and Bob Lingard. 2015. Commercialising Comparison: Pearson Puts the TLC in Soft Capitalism. Journal of Education Policy 0939 (Dec.): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.1112922. Kahn, Sal, and James Manyika. 2013. Education for Everyone: An Interview with Sal Khan. San Francisco. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/education-for-everyone-an-interview-with-sal-khan. Kelly, Peter. 2006. The Entrepreneurial Self and ‘Youth at-Risk’: Exploring the Horizons of Identity in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of Youth Studies 9 (1): 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260500523606. Kelly, Peter, and Jo Pike. 2017. Is Neo-Liberal Capitalism Eating Itself or Its Young? In Neoliberalism and Austerity: The Moral Economies of Young People’s Health and Well-Being, ed. Peter Kelly and Jo Pike, 1–32. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58266-9. Klees, Steven J. 2017a. Beyond Neoliberalism: Reflections on Capitalism and Education. Policy Futures in Education, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1478210317715814. ———. 2017b. The Political Economy of Education and Inequality: Reflections on Piketty. Globalisation, Societies and Education 15 (4): 410–424. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2016.1195731.

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Lapsley, Irvine, Peter Miller, and Neil Pollock. 2013. Foreword Management Consultants—Demons or Benign Change Agents? Financial Accountability & Management 29 (2): 117–123. https://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12013. Lewis, Steven. 2017. Governing Schooling through ‘What Works’: The OECD’s PISA for Schools. Journal of Education Policy 32 (3): 281–302. https://doi. org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1252855. Lingard, Bob. 2016. Think Tanks, ‘Policy Experts’ and ‘Ideas for’ Education Policy Making in Australia. Australian Educational Researcher 43 (1): 15–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-015-0193-0. Lingard, Bob, Sam Sellar, and Glenn C.  Savage. 2014. Re-articulating Social Justice as Equity in Schooling Policy: The Effects of Testing and Data Infrastructures. British Journal of Sociology of Education 35 (5): 710–730. Mazzotti, Massimo. 2017. Algorithmic Life. LA Review of Books, January 22, 2017. McKinsey & Company. 2018. How We Help Clients: Education. https://www. mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/how-we-help-clients/education. Moore, Tim, and Janne Morton. 2017. The Myth of Job Readiness? Written Communication, Employability, and the ‘Skills Gap’ in Higher Education. Studies in Higher Education 42 (3): 591–609. https://doi.org/10.1080/030 75079.2015.1067602. Mourshed, Mona, Chinezi Chijioke, and Michael Barber. 2010. How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better. McKinsey. Mourshed, Mona, Diana Farrell, and Dominic Barton. 2012. Education to Employment: Designing a System That Works. Washington DC. http://mckinseyonsociety.com/education-to-employment/. Noer, Michael. 2012. One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education. Forbes, November 2012. https://www. forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/one-man-one-computer-10-millionstudents-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/#2a34638c44e0. Riep, Curtis B. 2017. Making Markets for Low-Cost Schooling: The Devices and Investments behind Bridge International Academies Investments. Globalisation, Societies and Education 15 (3): 352–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/1476772 4.2017.1330139. Robertson, Susan L., Lois Weis, and Fazal Rizvi. 2011. The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs and Incomes. British Journal of Sociology of Education 32 (2): 293–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692. 2011.547312. Sahlberg, Pasi. 2011. Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland. New York: Teachers College Press. Selwyn, Neil. 2015. Data Entry: Towards the Critical Study of Digital Data and Education. Learning, Media and Technology 40 (1): 64–82. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/17439884.2014.921628.

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Tota, Pasqua Marina. 2014. Filling the Gaps: The Role and Impact of International Non-Governmental Organisations in ‘Education for All’. Globalisation, Societies and Education 12 (1): 92–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724. 2013.858988. Tufecki, Zeynep. 2017. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven: Yale University Press. UNICEF. 2015. The Investment Case for Education and Equity. New  York. https://www.unicef.org/publications/index_78727.html. Walsh, Lucas. 2017. Treading Water? The Roles and Possibilities of ‘Adversity Capital’ in Preparing Young People for Precarity. In Neoliberalism and Austerity: The Moral Economies of Young People’s Health and Well-Being, ed. Peter Kelly and Jo Pike, 103–122. London: Palgrave Macmillan. WEF. 2015. New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology. Geneva. Williamson, Ben. 2014. Governing Software: Networks, Databases and Algorithmic Power in the Digital Governance of Public Education. Learning, Media and Technology 40 (1): 83–105. ———. 2016. Digital Education Governance: Data Visualization, Predictive Analytics, and ‘Real-Time’ Policy Instruments. Journal of Education Policy 31 (2): 123–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2015.1035758. ———. 2017. Big Data in Education: The Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice. London: Sage Publications. ———. 2019. How the Global Edu-Business Pearson Is Making Higher Education Markets. Unite for Quality Education. https://www.unite4education.org/ global-response/how-the-global-edu-business-pearson-is-making-highereducation-markets/. World Economic Forum. 2015. Press Conference UNICEF: The Case for Education and Equity. Davos, Switzerland. https://www.weforum.org/ events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2015/player?p=1&pi= 1&id=62879. Ylönen, Matti, and Hanna Kuusela. 2018. Consultocracy and Its Discontents: A Critical Typology and a Call for a Research Agenda. Governance, 1–18. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gove.12369.

CHAPTER 5

The ‘Digital’ as Problem and Purpose in Education Policy

Abstract  In this chapter, Duggan extends previous work into the announcement of ‘coding in schools’ policy in Australia since 2015. Drawing on Federal Hansard records, he examines the critical debate around innovation and training, and its embedding of computer coding as a key ‘literacy of the future’ in the Australian educational landscape. This chapter provides a critical analysis of parliamentary debates, media releases, and engagements by Government and Opposition Federal Ministers to consider how the re/articulation and embedding of innovation and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education takes up an idealised notion of ‘the future’ as tech-enabled and in need of policy response to ‘the new’. The analysis highlights three lines of debate that have emerged in operationalising and responding educational policy in the wake of digital labour market disruption: first, the rise and reach of networked infrastructures into traditional modes of life and work; second, the future value of existing and proposed programmes of study; and third, the implications for resourcing in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and uneven economic recovery. Combined, this chapter argues that whilst a policy focus on technical and instrumental skills such as computer coding may help young people to interact with dominant technologies of the present, they also risk weakening a more substantive conversation around educational participation and purpose in the present, and for the future. Keywords  Futures • Networked infrastructures • Digital labour market © The Author(s) 2019 S. B. Duggan, Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30675-5_5

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In late February of 2013, brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi collaborated on a short video titled “What Most Schools Don’t Teach,1” promoting computer science and decrying its relative lack of support in US Schools (Code.org 2013). The video, featuring tech CEOs including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jack Dorsey (Twitter) went immediately viral, becoming the top YouTube video in one day; at the time of writing, has over 14 million views, and has been translated into multiple languages. The video opens with a quote from the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs: “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer… because it teaches you how to think”. As the video progresses, various CEOs and tech founders speak to their first experiences of computer programming, and then speak to the benefits of working in the tech industry. Clips of young computer engineers riding scooters, lounging on a sundeck with a laptop, playing table tennis, video games, and live music highlight, as Dropbox CEO Drew Housten states, how “to get the very best people, [the industry tries] to make the office as awesome as possible”. Life as a computer engineer is positioned here as not ‘work,’ but rather a way of being: collaborative, engaged, and fun. By the end of 2013, and in part due to the overwhelming support for their video, the Partovi brothers had established Code.org and the ‘Hour of Code’ with the express support of then US President Barack Obama, reaching over 20 million students globally in 30 languages. Today, Code. org reports that number to be 500 million students having tried the ‘Hour of Code’, with 750,000 teachers and 25 million students extending beyond this to their full computer science course. Beyond their celebrity endorsements, one of the strengths of Code.org’s approach is in simultaneously providing classroom-ready digital materials, as well as training, curriculum, and policy advocacy. Indeed, within the Australian context, Code. org’s proponents included parents and after-school program leaders as much as classroom teachers, which has greatly assisted with its rapid growth. In late 2018, in conversation with Code.org’s head of research, it was clear that whilst the company’s mission is to raise awareness of coding and computational thinking in schools, the deeper vision was to directly inform educational policy at an international level, in collaboration with large organisations such as the OECD. In Australia, competitor ‘codeclubau.org’ boasts over sixty-five thousand student accounts across hundreds of school sites. Whilst these numbers currently represent a modest 1

 The video can also be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKIu9yen5nc.

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slice of the 1.4 million primary school students in Australia, they reflect a growing concern for ‘coding’ as a core competency young people should be encouraged to develop. As I argue below, this is symptomatic of the broader orientation in response to the rise of computer-mediated interactions in the labour market and represents a technical solution to an instrumental set of logics around networked technologies. This chapter traces the announcement of ‘coding in schools’ policy in Australia since its formal announcement by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in his budget reply speech in May 2015 until the following Federal Election in July of 2016. The announcement followed similar moves in other countries and cemented ‘coding in schools’ as a ‘literacy of the future’ in the Australian political landscape. Here, I draw on Federal Hansard records primarily between May and late June 2015 discussing innovation and ‘the future’. In this, I extend previous work (Duggan 2019) on coding in schools policy in the Australian context.

Education Policy and the Future as Opportunity and Threat A dominant presumption of recent education policy reform on a global scale has been to shape young people’s growth and development in such a way that they can participate in the economy of the future. In their recent comparative review of global efforts in digital innovation in education, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggests that “education can prepare young people for work in the sectors where new jobs are expected to be created in the coming years” (2016, 67). Implicit throughout this report is an overriding market-logic of embedding digital technologies as fundamental to innovation both in the present, and toward the future. In many post-industrial nations, innovation-­focused reforms are often framed as a response to the broader embedding of networked technologies in many parts of the economy at a global scale. In this characterisation, the ‘market’ becomes the litmus test against which decisions are made, and as Adams (2016, 291) argues, “the values and ethos of business provide an ethical base for operationalising education and for defining how success might be judged”. Here, for the OECD and others, tensions emerge both in navigating the link between local conditions and larger patterns in economic and policy structures, and how those relationships play out between public and private sector ­entities. As is noted in recent policy scholarship (Ball 2016; Lingard and Keddie

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2013; Scholz 2013), the marked increase by corporations in the production and circulation of market-oriented policy has had a profound impact on the shape of schooling systems at a district, state, and national level. As Lingard and Keddie (2013) show, these interests increasingly operate through networks that, in a significant way, construct, promote, legitimise, and then sell solutions to real and imagined ‘crises’ of educational provision and practice. At a policy level, ‘coding in schools’ has been tied to two emerging lines of debate in recent times that are useful for this analysis. The first extends discussions around teacher preparation and resourcing toward what Williamson (2016, 40) suggests is an emphasis on digital governance or what he terms “political computational thinking” (emphasis in original). The second emerges from an increasing economic concern from governments globally around the proper preparation of young people within the context of digital disruption, the rise of networked technologies, and fostering innovation in the future. To elaborate both: Williamson cites the shift in English curriculum policy from Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to computational thinking as indicative of a pivot toward algorithmic thinking and data analytics across a broad range of education disciplines. This mirrors the “disparate social, political, cultural and economic contexts, across governmental, civil society and industrial sectors, and in scientific, social science and humanities disciplines” (2016, 40). These concerns are not limited to education policy. As Srnicek (2017) suggests, the broader ways that forms of labour have undergone a material, as well as symbolic shift that mark the continued expansion of the networked economy are key sites of anxiety for policymakers that animates policy conversations around life, learning, and labour. The instrumentalisation of current practices in educational thought overwhelmingly tend to be presented in terms of rational thought, and the technologisation and quantification of an increasing body of social and cultural practices. Gulson and Webb (2017, 16) consider this as the embedding of a “computational rationality”. In their view, “systems of thought [can] be understood as intensifying an instrumental set of logics in educational governance and decision making” (2017, 16). They continue, “the development, design, implementation and evaluation of policy solutions (i.e. the ‘policy cycle’)” involves the sequencing of “social policy as a logic,” reflected either as forward mapping in terms of predicating a particular outcome, or backward mapping in defining, in advance, a set of desired behaviours in order to develop a set of objectives (Gulson and

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Webb 2017, 17). Both of these are at play in the push toward coding in schools: the former for defining success in terms of future engagement with the digital economy, and the latter for orienting schools, teachers, parents, and young people toward digital technologies as a sort of rational behaviour. Gulson and Webb (2017, 18) are critical of this second orientation om particular, noting how “these rationalities are situated according to the dominant representation of the problematic situation and rarely analyse how problematic situations have come to be represented”. Similarly, for Selwyn (2016, 18), the “digital improvement/transformation/disruption of education clearly require[s] problematizing” in both its articulation through forms of policy governance, and in its implementation in and around schools. Here, coding in schools is implicated as a form of digital governance in which it comes to stand-in for particular forms of solution-making at both a policy and practice level.

Skills, Innovation, and the ‘Jobs of the Future’ On Thursday, 14 May 2015, Australian Federal Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten rose for his ‘Budget Reply Speech,’ launching a wide-ranging plan for supporting the ‘jobs of the future’: Madam Speaker, Productivity is the most important catalyst for our economy. And the most important catalyst for productivity is education. Resource booms come and as we discover, they go—but our future depends on investing in our best natural resource: the creativity and skills of the Australian people. Digital technologies, computer science and coding—the language of computers and technology—should be taught in every primary and ever secondary school in Australia. And a Shorten Labor Government will make this a national priority. We will work with states, territories and the national curriculum authority to make this happen. Coding is the literacy of the 21st Century. And under Labor, every young Australian will have the chance to read, write and work with the global language of the digital age. All of us who have had our children teach us how to download an app, know how quickly children adapt to new technology. But I don’t just want Australian kids playing with technology, I want them to have the chance to understand it, to create it, and work with it. (Shorten 2015)

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These aspects of the Opposition Leader’s budget reply speech were generally well received by the public and despite the initial resistance that I examine below, over the 12 months that followed both major political parties committed to a national ‘coding in schools’ policy. There are three moves in this speech that are significant for unpacking the logic of the ‘new’ that reflect popular anxieties about the future. First, Shorten suggests that ‘productivity’ is a catalytic driver—which follows from the previous section of the speech which foreground the importance of high tech and advanced manufacturing in response to global changes. Here though, productivity is connected a specific quality: creativity, which is positioned alongside ‘skills’ as the heart of ‘education’ and “our shared future”. Second, for Shorten, these skills come together around “the language of computers and technology”—as both an example of creativity and skills in-action, and by proxy, the language of the future. As Selwyn (2015, 437) notes, this move necessarily positions ‘Industrial-era’ schools as ‘broken,’ and in their place, “various digital technologies are celebrated for kick-starting ‘twenty-first century learning’”. This characterisation as to why young people need digital technologies often papers over “the complex and compounded inequalities of the digital age” (2015, 437), preferring instead broad-brush instrumental solutions to complex, technical problems. Indeed, Shorten’s announcement in many ways resonates with that of the previous Federal Government led by his party, and their calls to fostering the ‘education revolution’. As Buchanan et al. (2012, 103) note, the education revolution, with its dual focus on significant investment in digital hardware and emphasis on traditional literacies, represented “for the Australian Labor Party the vision of a modern education system that is future proofing Australia’s economy through the preparation of workers for the knowledge economy”. The call to the provision of ‘technologically mediated education’ is amplified in Shorten’s statement, with an accompanying shift from hardware and software to a computational rationality which takes coding as a core (if somewhat conveniently alluring) competency. The reflexive move toward the end of the above excerpt: “Coding is the literacy of the 21st Century…every young Australian will have the chance to read, write and work with the global language of the digital age” ­elevates ‘coding’ twice over in a way that is significant both in the Australian context, and an emerging common sense globally. First, it lifts coding to the status of a ‘literacy’ to be considered along more traditional literacies.

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This debate has played out globally in scholarly circles since at least the late 1960s (Vee 2013) but has gained considerable traction among Education Technology companies and coding in schools advocates in the last decade in particular (for example, Lynch 2018). However, as Vivian et al. (2014) suggest, at least in the Australian context, little is known as to the effect this push has had on the reorganization of the curriculum as a whole, especially where those effects are distributed among multiple areas of instruction, as is the case in the Australian National Curriculum. Shorten’s announcement is also significant in its positioning of ‘coding,’ beyond a literacy, as the global language. This resonates with recent scholarship which examines the ways in which education policy in recent times operates as an “authoritative allocation of values” (Lingard 2010, 132) that measures, borrows, and learns—on a global scale—against a backdrop of increased commercialization, privatization, and economization (Rizvi 2013). It also calls to what Walsh (2016, 69) describes as a dominant policy discourse that “constructs young people as responsible for aspects of their lives that are shaped by national and global forces beyond their control or influence”. Elevating ‘coding’ in this way both responds to calls for its deployment by the various stakeholders described above, but also pulls it into the ‘logics of marketisation’ that view education at the national-level through the prism of international league tables and competition (for example, Ball 2004; Lingard and Sellar 2013; Ball et al. 2017). Two weeks after the Opposition Leader’s Budget Reply Speech, parliament met for a wide-ranging discussion of innovation and its impact on educational policy. Three key themes emerged across the debate: an emphasis on competition both nationally and internationally for technically skilled ‘talent,’ and their development through the formal education system; a shift in logic from ‘jobs of the future’ where young people are at risk of not having the right skillset, to ‘economies of the future’ which hold the collective potential and possibilities of youth; and finally, a focus on innovation as a scientific and technical logic, where an emphasis on skills suggests the emergence of the skills gap. The remainder of this chapter considers each in turn. All titles and ministries of Members of Parliament (MP) below reflect their recording in the Hansard papers of the time. All Hansard citations in the sections that follow acknowledge the day and page of the debate in the official record, obtained from the Parliament of Australia web archive, with the name noted acknowledging the speaker.

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A Piece of the (Global) Pie: Youth, Competition, and (Digital) Risk The 2008 documentary Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination follows the lives of six young people each from China and the United States through high school, based on the idea that once they enter high school, these students have roughly two million minutes to prepare for college (Linder 2011). The premise of the show is clear: in a rapidly globalizing world, young people no longer merely ‘compete’ nationally for access to the highest profile (and arguably, quality) College places, rather, whole countries compete with each other and risk ‘falling behind’ without the proper investment and policy focus. As Linder (2011) argues in her analysis, in many ways the competitive narrative offered by the film does not play out in the reality of the young people it follows: the material and systemic conditions around their education follow a predictably neoliberal path, with much more opportunities in the apparently ‘lagging’ system in the United States, than the highly aspirational Chinese system. As she notes, ‘[w]hile competition is a foundational component of neoliberalism, it should be understood that this competition is always already influenced by social, political, and economic power structures’ (2011, 455). Competition has been a central tenant of education policy discussions on a global scale, especially since the introduction of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by the OECD in 2000. As Gorur and Wu (2015) suggest, although Australia has consistently ranked ‘high quality,’ the relative decline in scores as more member-states have been admitted to the programme has emerged at the core of education policy debates at a Federal level. The competition narrative is not limited to one side of government, with Australian Labor Party (ALP) Minister Clare O’Neil noting: “China, for example, is right up there at the top of the league tables. Jobs of the Future fits into this important discussion about where we as a country are going” (O’Neil, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4549). Notably, it is this push for an emphasis on remaining competitive that informs the discussion around the role of education policy in ‘the future’. As Shadow Minister for Communications Simon Clare (ALP) argues at length: In 2003 about 9,000 people graduated in Australia with ICT degrees. Ten years later that was reduced to 3,446. In other words, the number of people

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graduating with an ICT degree in Australia, in the last 10 years, has dropped by two-thirds … How do we compare with the rest of the world? Sixteen per cent of Australians graduate from university with STEM degrees. South Korea is about double that. In China 41 per cent of students graduate with a STEM degree. In Singapore it is nearly 50 per cent. These are the countries that Australia is competing with. We are already falling behind. (Clare, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4540)

Continuing, Clare links up current outputs with their relative programs at an increasingly early age: … If we are going to do this properly we cannot just do it at university or at high school, it has to start at primary school. Last year, in the United Kingdom, they introduced coding in kindergarten. Other countries are doing exactly the same thing: Vietnam, Canada and Singapore. Finland is starting it next year. The United States is trialling it in 30 school districts, right across the country, including Chicago and New York. Why are they doing this? They are doing it because they understand that coding is the literacy of the 21st century … that students in this century will need to understand coding like we needed to understand English and maths in the last century. (Clare, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4541)

Here, it is possible to see how anxieties around the ‘jobs of the future’ and their genesis in technical and scientific labour manifest as a global issue, requiring measurement against the policy orientations of other countries. Conservative Liberal Party (LNP) minister Andrew Laming MP reinforces this: …in the last 10 years we have slipped six months backwards for 15-year-olds worldwide on school performance. We have effectively lost six months of education based on quality. Teachers have 12 weeks of holidays every year. They should credential up and become absolutely qualified to teach Maths and start doing it. (Laming, Hansard, Monday, 1 June 2015, 5198)

Across these excerpts, at one level, remaining competitive on international tests is seen as proxy for improving future economic growth, but it can also be taken as core to the ability for young people to participate in the economy at all. This sits well with Komatsu and Rappleye’s (2017, 170) suggestion that international comparative tests, and PISA in particular

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have become “a new logic of educational policy formation and the accelerating confidence-cum-reach of the new global policy regime”. Beyond this, the focus on international comparison both to international testing regimes and the deployment of coding in schools policy can be seen as the proliferation of a ‘what works’ paradigm (for example, Lewis 2017), whereby ‘best practices’ are held up as models for policy-action by policy makers. In many ways, the declaration of computer programming as ‘the global language of the digital age’ (Claydon, Hansard, Thursday, 28 May 2015, 5104) reinforces a narrative of international comparison as it emerges across debates around other literacies. The implication is two-fold. First, as Komatsu and Rappleye note,2 linking up PISA test results to future economic activity by economists such as Hanushek and Woessmann—which has been the genesis of a significant body of scholarly literature—has encouraged a whole network of policy responses linking educational competition to future economic activity. Second, as Lewis (2017, 282) argues, if “commensuration, measurement and the visualisation of performance difference help to identify local educational problems, then the best practices … provide local educators with a set of ready-made, evidence-­ informed solutions to be borrowed from international ‘reference societies’”. In the Parliamentary debate above, this manifests through an extension of the logic of international PISA comparisons as the best basis for discussions around computer coding as an emerging literacy, and the porting of ready-made international approaches into the Australian context. It is this joining up of educational policy and the ‘jobs of the future’ that allows for these kinds of comparisons, and their extension into broader economic data such as that reported in the Harvard Business Review (Chakravorti et  al. 2015), which is acknowledged multiple times across the debate: [The] Harvard Business Review published a report the other day that looked at the digital economies of countries around the world. They said that Australia is stalling. Here is why. Remember … money and skills? …We spend more on the Melbourne Cup every year than we do on new start-up businesses every year. (Clare, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4539) 2  See Komatsu and Rappleye (2017), 167 for a detailed examination of Hanushek and Woessmann’s influence.

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The emphasis on ‘stalling’ is also mentioned by ALP minister Timothy Watts: In Australia, unfortunately, we are leaving the bike in the shed. This year the Harvard Business Review ranked Australia’s digital capacity as ‘stalling out’. Only 32 per cent of Australian students have the opportunity of learning to code in school as either a curriculum subject or an extracurricular activity. (Watts, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4551)

What is key across these two excerpts is the way that the Harvard Business Review metaphor of ‘stalling’ is joined up first by Clare to a “money and skills” gap, drawing a comparison to the popular horse racing event, the Melbourne Cup, and then by Watts to coding in schools. In the former, the lack of development of the ‘digital economy’ is the result of a lack of policy that encourages investment and skills development, and in the latter, this is framed as a capacity problem, in part due to the lack of specific programs developing young people’s coding skills. This is reinforced in an extended discussion by O’Connor: There is no doubt that, when it comes to points of comparison, we are not keeping up with comparable countries … Is it any wonder you are seeing unemployment rise in the next financial year to 6.5 per cent? Is it any wonder that you are seeing 80,000 more people lining the unemployment queues today than was the case at the last election? The government has no plan to deal with these issues. It has no plan to articulate what is needed. … We have a plan to ensure we encourage young people, whether it be in primary school, secondary school or higher education, to take up these areas and that skill acquisition at a very early age, like other countries do, to ensure we can compete with countries in our region. (O’Connor, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4544)

Harvard Business Review’s report is not the only piece of evidence which is used to frame the debate. McKinsey & Company’s 2015 text No Ordinary Disruption provides a frame for thinking about the challenges and opportunities of digital disruption: …No Ordinary Disruption said that there are all kinds of forces, in the institute’s opinion, that will impact on countries such as ours—the rise of emerging markets, the accelerating pace of technological innovation, an ageing world population and the accelerating flows of trades, capital, people and data. All of that impacts on our nation. (Chalmers, Hansard, Monday, 25 May 2015, 4397)

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Again, this is linked to education and training as a way of mediating the ‘threat’ of disruption: It is so important that, when we think about where the jobs of the future are going to come from, with all of the challenges and disruption that we are going to have from automation, emerging technology, change and the challenges around the world from climate change and other megatrends, we talk about how we are going to train the future workforce. (Butler, T., Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4515–16)

Across each of these excerpts, coding in schools is seen as one response to the threat of ‘megatrends’—a term popular with management consulting companies, and specifically used by the McKinsey Global Institute in their public-facing reporting. As I explored in relation to management consulting firms in the previous chapter, what is most significant here is how the language of consultancy is deployed as a vision of the future, in which problems are (re)framed as ‘solvable’ through technical interventions. At its core, this is informed by an interplay between positioning coding, as Claydon notes, as “the global language of the digital age” (Claydon, Hansard, Thursday 28 May 2015, 5104): something deployable in ways that, returning to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, help to produce “a smarter, more productive competitive workforce for all employers” (Shorten, Hansard, Wednesday, 3 June 2015, 5644). I consider this further with specific relation to the emergence and sedimentation of ‘platform capitalism,’ as put forward by Nick Srnicek (2017), in the next section.

Platform Capitalism and the Economies of the Future The future is largely unknown. We know that, in the fast-growing technological age in which we live and work, our young people will have ever-­ shifting and very fast-growing demands placed upon them. (Markus, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4548)

In late January, 1996, US Patent Number 5,487,069 was granted for ‘a wireless LAN, a peer-to-peer wireless LAN, a wireless transceiver and a method of transmitting data’ (US5487069A). The patent, assigned to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), is heralded as one of Australia’s most significant contributions to com-

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puter technologies and has become something of common folklore. The subject of a protracted legal debate which resulted in an almost half-billion dollar settlement with major tech companies around the globe, the invention of the ‘802.11 standard’, or WiFi as we more commonly regard it, can as much be understood as the ‘winning’ standard from the myriad competing options and technologies that were proliferating in the early 1990s as an innovative solution to the complex problem-set around minimising interference in the transmission of high-speed radio signals. In many ways, the triumph of Wifi as a global standard has become a touchstone for Australian governments, inventors, and entrepreneurs both in terms of the outsized effect that it has had on a global scale, and as a flagship of Australian innovation in, as Markus notes above, the “fast-growing technological age”. The invention of WiFi signals an important shift in technological development. Whilst the first personal portable computers had entered the market in the early 1980s, by the early 1990s they remained primarily the purview of business-people, with very high price-tags and limited functionality. This however, was rapidly changing. For example, in 1996 Apple’s flagship PowerBook 1400 cost around $2500 USD, yet by 1999, the lower-powered retail-focused iBook G3 had almost halved that figure at $1600 USD (Hay Newman and Kirk 2016). The mass adoption of WiFi over the decade following its invention would first signal the arrival of multiple device households, and then the rapid uptake of portable devices across both the business and retail consumers. It would also make possible whole new categories of consumer technologies and in many ways, supported the arrival of software as a service (SaaS) and through the eventual adoption of portable personal devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, the emergence of digital platform companies. At its most general level, digital platforms, as Srnicek (2017, 43) puts it, “are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact”. More concretely, these platforms, such as Facebook for social networking, Google for online searching and targeting advertising, or the Microsoft Windows operating system for developing specific applications enable new ways of connecting up consumers, suppliers, and producers. Returning to Srnicek (2017, 6), “[t]he platform has emerged as a new business model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data”. The complex interaction of platforms, users, and businesses results in a secondary market around data creation, capture, and translation ecosystem, which itself can be packaged and commoditized.

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The story of the 802.11 standard and its role in the emergence of platforms, more than that of the contested lineages of innovation and entrepreneurship, is one of the transformations of the world of work, and people’s roles within it. On one level, it is one of the proliferation of particular technologies on a global scale, but on another, a reworking of life, work, and learning. For Srnicek (2017, 5), the “digital economy is becoming a hegemonic model: cities are to become smart, businesses must be disruptive, workers are to become flexible, and governments must be lean and intelligent”. Importantly for the discussion around innovation and education in late May of 2015, this is also a discussion of what role governments can and indeed should play in transitioning an emergent area of the economy. Across this debate, this manifests in a framing of two futures that are mutually implicating: that of the jobs of the future, and their place in the economies of the future. Responding to a bill aimed at reframing tax and superannuation to be more friendly to innovation and startup businesses, Dr. James Chalmers MP elaborates: The future of this country and the future of its economy will be determined by people’s capacity to innovate, to create new things and to create new jobs based on the ideas and their imagination. (Chalmers, Hansard, Wednesday 27 May 2015, 4746)

For Chalmers (4746), conversations around economies of the future should be framed by three key qualities, “innovation, aspiration and creativity,” and these are positioned as the key to “economic prosperity,” which opens up “the ability to benefit from technological change”. The distinction here is critical: economies of the future require long-term vision, but are ultimately defined by their openness to possibility, and in particular, the possibility of benefiting from disruption, rather than being the victim of it. Extending Srnicek’s observations, Sellar and Cole (2017) consider the recent turn to ‘accelerationism’ in accounting for the role of technology in everyday life. As they put it, accelerationism holds that “capitalism has created, is creating, and will increasingly create time-based, cybernetic feedback loops, in which time spirals in on itself as capital is continually reinvested in technological development” (2017, 39). These feedback loops have economic, policy, social, and cultural implications in how capital is deployed, along which vectors, and toward what ends. For Srnicek, these implications revolve around one central theme: data. Beyond this,

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though, the rise of the platform and its data extraction, refinement, and peddling gives rise to new forms of corporation and monopolization, based primarily on the disruption of the corporate-industrial complex. The shift to innovative platform-based models of business that rely on data mean that “if platforms wish to remain competitive, they must intensify their extraction, analysis, and control of data” (Srnicek 2017, 97). This poses specific problems for the structure and purpose of education. As Sellar and Cole note, this means challenging “the normative beliefs of capitalism” and the tendency to position “the exploitation of global markets through electronic mediation [as] necessarily ‘good’ and we ‘should’ all therefore become creative and innovative digital entrepreneurs” (2017, 40). This logic can be seen in ALP MP Ed Husic’s suggestion: We have a combination, for example, of 20,000 Australians working right now in Silicon Valley. They are there because there is not enough opportunity here … The issue is: is this government prepared and committed to supporting these future jobs for the next generation of Australians? The answer is no. (Husic, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4547)

Throughout the debate, the directionality of the skills and opportunity gap shifts, even for members of the same party. ALP MP Terri Butler explains the ‘gap’ for the Australian technology sector: Australians are ready to take up the jobs of the new economy. There are jobs in this country right now that rely on those skills that we are not filling with Australians. (Butler, T. Hansard, Monday 1 June 2015, 5372)

Here, the ‘new economy’ not only drives the potential for future jobs, but also signals a potentially vibrant contribution to the overall economy, as Leigh notes drawing on OECD data: The OECD has found that small firms younger than five years old create 42 per cent of new jobs. If we want to create good jobs by the thousands, we need to work harder at building an economic ecosystem in which innovation and entrepreneurship will flourish. (Leigh, Hansard, Wednesday, 3 June 2015, 5778)

What emerges across these contributions to the debate is a clear articulation of what I have considered elsewhere, drawing on McLeod and

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Wright’s (2012, 283) notion of “the promise of the new”. For them, a fixation on “utopian strands and grand gestures to the more formulaic rhetoric” underpins the ways in which policy discourses make, and sustain “declarations of new policies for new times” (2012, 283). Here, anxieties around the ‘new’ are rooted in discussions about young people’s lives both in terms of how they represent an opportunity or threat from specific technologies, as well as in how those technologies ‘make up’ the future in potentially positive, but also potentially destructive ways. This is echoed in Srnicek’s reflection upon the rise in platform capitalism, in his suggestion that within the monopolistic tendencies embedded in new forms of platform corporations, “[t]he digital economy appears to be a leading light in an otherwise rather stagnant economic context” (2017, 5). This extends the ‘threat’ of digital technologies from that of a force that potentially makes redundant, as in Standing’s (2016) ‘precariat,’ a whole class of workers, to one that elevates data about people’s lives above their lived lives altogether. It is this logic that animates the third turn for this chapter to which I now turn, that is, the emergence and labelling of digital capabilities as a skills gap, addressable through coding in schools as universal policy.

Scientific/Technical Innovation and Framing of the Skills Gaps “…jobs for the new economy, coding in schools.” (Hall, Hansard, Wednesday 27 May 2015, 4927)

Amsler and Facer (2017, 7) argue that education policymaking is “often dedicated to the formation of future persons, the realization of social futures, and the advancing of historical projects”. As I have considered elsewhere (Duggan 2019), this orientation means that policy instruments often imagine an idealised kind of future subject, and seek to anticipate the challenges and opportunities they will find there. To this end, policy is both anticipatory, in that it makes choices between probably, possible and preferable futures as I considered in Chap. 2, and constitutive, in that it forms up sets of policies and practices that shape the conditions of the present toward those preferable (or not) futures. In the sections above, this means first placing young people engaging with formal education in Australia as in competition with a global push toward innovation and digital technologies, and second, framing the future as mediated increasingly

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through networked and platform technologies. The compound effect of both, by logical extension within the Parliamentary debates around innovation and education in May and June of 2015, is that of an emerging ‘skills gap’ between the capacities that young people are taught in formal education, and the needs of future-oriented industry. The identification of a ‘gap’ in suitably qualified individuals to fill information technology roles is not new. In 1997, the US Department of Commerce released a report titled: America’s New Deficit: The Shortage of Information Technology Workers (see Button et al. 2002). Similarly, in the Australian context, IT skills have been seen as in demand since the late 1990s, and have increasingly been included in discussions around the skills and capabilities required to successfully participate in the ‘economies of the future’ over the last two decades (Gulson and Webb 2017). The ‘solution’ to the skills gap, as it emerges across the Parliamentary debate, which is the focus of this chapter, is in building young people’s capacities around computer coding through coding in schools. Clare states: Most of those are jobs that require STEM skills: science, technology, engineering and maths. Seventy-five per cent of the fastest-growing jobs in Australia today require STEM skills, and we are not producing enough people with those skills. […] Already, employers are finding it hard to get employees with the necessary STEM skills. The chief scientist put out a report two or three weeks ago where he had done a survey of employers. He asked them what they were looking for from employees and how they were able to get employees with STEM skills. They surveyed hundreds of employers. They found that a third of employers could not find the employees they needed with STEM skills, STEM graduates. (Clare, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4540)

Clare’s statements extend the debate above from digital technologies, and STEM as a proxy for talking about them as a problem of the future, to one of the present for the future. As he suggests, employers feel that they are not able to source employees with necessary STEM skills now which places them at a disadvantage in participating in the economies of the future. The language around STEM as future-oriented, and as a proxy for digital competency is reinforced through its connection to broader ideas about innovation, the emergence of new networked industries, and shifting demands in the labour market that are already in motion. As Watts argues immedi-

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ately following, within this logic, computational rationalities and STEM become a foundational literacy: To thrive in the modern economy, Australians need more than just to be passive users of technology; they need to understand how to use technology to innovate. People in the IT sector—the sector that I worked in before coming to this place—describe the difference as being the difference between being able to ride a tricycle and ride a bicycle: anyone can ride a tricycle within seconds of seeing one, but it is those who learn the extra skills necessary to ride a bike who can get to more places. (Watts, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4551)

Unlocking these skills, for Watts, is more than a problem in the present or the future, it is one of the opportunities that accompany coding. Speaking about a ‘code club’ event he had visited in the weeks prior to the debate: What they were learning was not just a new language; it was a new way of thinking, a new way of solving problems and a new skill set for the future … The problem is that, at the moment, not enough Australian kids are getting the chance to learn this new way of thinking in our schools. (Watts, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4551)

The focus on new ways of thinking, and their utility for interacting with the new econom(ies) both reflects the burgeoning public policy discourse that centers on digital technologies as a logic of the future, and the cementing of education as fundamentally for workforce preparation which has become a feature of modern discussions about young people, and education policy (Wolff and Booth 2018). As Wolff and Booth (2018) note, this orientation follows a broader trend which identifies a gap between the perceptions of higher education providers and employers in terms of graduate employability. It is also illustrative of the trend toward ‘future of work’ summits and forums on a global scale which have increased in popularity among governments in that last decade in particular (Peters et  al. 2019). These summits, more than reflecting a desire to prepare individuals for the future of work, are driven by a desire to emerge as economically competitive on a global scale. Husic channels this in his suggestion: If a country could open up nearly half a million new jobs through one sector alone, you would think that you would seize that opportunity and try and generate that job growth. If that sector could contribute four per cent of

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GDP, over $100 billion—and that is up 0.4 per cent from what it is doing now—you would think it would be supported, especially in a climate where the jobs and the income being generated by one sector in particular, mining, are disappearing or shrinking before our eyes, and there is urgency: how do we actually generate new jobs and regear the economy to make sure that the next generation of Australians coming through will have jobs? (Husic, Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4546)

Wrap this back

Conclusions This chapter has traced the announcement of ‘coding in schools’ policy and the Parliamentary debates which followed in the Australian Federal context. This is, in many ways, an incomplete account: it does not trace the production of actual curriculum documents, but rather, draws on a discussion of how the future is framed up by Federal political figures in a protracted debate around innovation and education in May and June of 2015. In this, I have extended previous work (Duggan 2019) on coding in schools policy in the Australian context, but also sought to expand the conversation around the curriculum aspects of computational thinking curriculum in education policy scholarship. In doing so, I found three orientations that coalesce to produce an image of the future which both highlights the anxieties around preparing young people for the econom(ies) of the future as contestable, aspirational, and at risk, three themes which I return to in the final chapter which follows. One year from Bill Shorten’s Budget Reply speech, coding in schools as a policy orientation had bipartisan support, with both sides of government agreeing on the need, if not the exact policy settings, for coding in schools programs to be implemented in schools at a national level. ‘Coding,’ once a fairly fringe issue, has become central to conversations about what kinds of skills and capabilities young people need exposure to during their formal schooling. Support for Computational Science curriculum among educators, as Falkner and Vivian (2015) illustrate, has remained relatively unambiguous over the last two decades. However, from a policy perspective, there has been a sustained shift from the business community toward stimulating discussion around the mis-match between the desired digital technology skills young people emerging from formal education have mastery of that can be ‘put to work’. This is framed both as a productivity

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issue in terms of solving the short-term ‘skills gap,’ but also one of the possible futures available to the economy at a broader level in terms of prosperity and increasingly global competition. As I have noted elsewhere (Duggan 2018), in this sense, specific policies around the embedding of STEM skills in contemporary work and life matter less than how and where they emerge, what they are ‘plugged into,’ and how they sediment in popular and policy discourse. It is to these technologized capabilities and capacities I now turn.

References Adams, Paul. 2016. Education Policy: Explaining, Framing and Forming. Journal of Education Policy 31 (3): 290–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2 015.1084387. Amsler, Sarah, and Keri Facer. 2017. Contesting Anticipatory Regimes in Education: Exploring Alternative Educational Orientations to the Future. Futures 94 (Nov.): 6–14. Ball, Stephen J. 2004. Education for Sale! The Commodification of Everything. King´s Annual Education Lecture 2004, 1–29. http://sys.glotta.ntua.gr/ Dialogos/Politics/CERU-0410-253-OWI.pdf. ———. 2016. Following Policy: Networks, Education Policy Mobilities and Glocalisation. Journal of Education Policy 0939 (July): 1–17. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/02680939.2015.1122232. Ball, Stephen J., Carolina Junemann, and Diego Santori. 2017. Edu.Net: Globalisation and Education Policy Mobility. Routledge. Buchanan, Rachel, Kathryn Holmes, Gregory Preston, and Kylie Shaw. 2012. Basic Literacy or New Literacies? Examining the Contradictions of Australia’s Education Revolution. Australian Journal of Teacher Education 37 (6): 97–110. https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2012v37n6.8. Button, Kenneth, Kenneth Cox, Roger Stough, and Samantha Taylor. 2002. The Long Term Educational Needs of a High- Technology Society Technology Society. Journal of Education Policy 17 (1): 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0268093011010007. Chakravorti, Bhaskar, Christopher Tunnard, and Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi. 2015. Where the Digital Economy Is Moving the Fastest. Harvard Business Review, February 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/02/where-the-digital-economy-ismoving-the-fastest. Code.org. 2013. What Most Schools Don’t Teach, 2013. Duggan, Shane. 2018. Hacking the Future: Youth, Digital Disruption and the Promise of the New. In Young People and the Politics of Outrage and Hope, ed. Peter Kelly, Perri Campbell, Lyn Harrison, and Chris Hickey. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004387492.

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———. 2019. Examining Digital Disruption as Problem and Purpose in Australian Education Policy. The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 18 (1): 111–127. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/ index.php/IEJ. Falkner, Katrina, and Rebecca Vivian. 2015. A Review of Computer Science Resources for Learning and Teaching with K-12 Computing Curricula: An Australian Case Study. Computer Science Education 25 (4): 390–429. https:// doi.org/10.1080/08993408.2016.1140410. Gorur, Radhika, and Margaret Wu. 2015. Leaning Too Far? PISA, Policy and Australia’s ‘Top Five’ Ambitions. Discourse 36 (5): 647–664. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01596306.2014.930020. Gulson, Kalervo N., and P. Taylor Webb. 2017. Mapping an Emergent Field of ‘Computational Education Policy’: Policy Rationalities, Prediction and Data in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Research in Education 98 (1): 14–26. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0034523717723385. Hay Newman, Lily, and Chris Kirk. 2016. It’s Apple’s 40th Anniversary. How Much Money Have You Given Them Over the Years? Slate, April 2016. http:// www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/04/01/apple_s_40th_anniversary_ how_much_old_products_cost_in_2016_dollars.html. Komatsu, Hikaru, and Jeremy Rappleye. 2017. A New Global Policy Regime Founded on Invalid Statistics? Hanushek, Woessmann, PISA, and Economic Growth. Comparative Education 53: 166–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/03 050068.2017.1300008. Lewis, Steven. 2017. Governing Schooling through ‘What Works’: The OECD’s PISA for Schools. Journal of Education Policy 32 (3): 281–302. https://doi. org/10.1080/02680939.2016.1252855. Linder, Kathryn Elizabeth. 2011. Global Competition in a ‘Flat’ World: A Foucauldian Analysis of the Neoliberal Mentalities of 2 Million Minutes. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32 (3): 443–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.573260. Lingard, Bob. 2010. Policy Borrowing, Policy Learning: Testing Times in Australian Schooling. Critical Studies in Education 51: 129–147. https://doi. org/10.1080/17508481003731026. Lingard, Bob, and Amanda Keddie. 2013. Redistribution, Recognition and Representation: Working against Pedagogies of Indifference. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 21 (3): 427–447. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366. 2013.809373. Lingard, Bob, and Sam Sellar. 2013. Globalization, Edu-Business and Network Governance: The Policy Sociology of Stephen J. Ball and Rethinking Education Policy Analysis. London Review of Education 11 (3): 265–280. https://doi.org /10.1080/14748460.2013.840986.

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Lynch, Matthew. 2018. Coding as a Literacy for the 21st Century. Education Week, January 2018. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/education_ futures/2018/01/coding_as_a_literacy_for_the_21st_century.html. McLeod, Julie, and Katie Wright. 2012. The Promise of the New: Genealogies of Youth, Nation and Educational Reform in Australia. Journal of Educational Administration & History 44 (4): 283–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022 0620.2012.713926. OECD. 2016. Innovating Education and Educating for Innovation: The Power of Digital Technologies and Skills. Paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/97892 64265097-en. Peters, Michael Adrian, Petar Jandrić, and Alexander Means. 2019. Introduction: Technological Unemployment and the Future of Work. In Education and Technological Unemployment, ed. Michael Adrian Peters, Petar Jandrić, and Alexander Means, 1–12. Singapore: Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-981-13-6225-5. Rizvi, Fazal. 2013. Equity and Marketisation: A Brief Commentary. Discourse 34 (2): 274–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013.770252. Scholz, Trebor. 2013. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. Edited by Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 9518398.2013.816888. Sellar, Sam, and David R. Cole. 2017. Accelerationism: A Timely Provocation for the Critical Sociology of Education. British Journal of Sociology of Education 38 (1): 38–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1256190. Selwyn, Neil. 2015. Minding Our Language: Why Education and Technology Is Full of Bullshit... and What Might Be Done about It. Digital Innovation, Creativity & Knowledge in Education Conference 41 (3): 437–443. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2015.1012523. ———. 2016. Is Technology Good for Education? Cambridge: Polity Press. Shorten, Bill. 2015. Budget Reply Speech 2015, 15 May Parliament of Australia. Canberra, ACT. http://www.billshorten.com.au/budget-reply-2015. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Standing, Guy. 2016. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. 2nd ed. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Vee, Annette. 2013. Understanding Computer Programming as a Literacy. Literacy in Composition Studies 1 (2): 42–64. https://doi.org/10.21623%2F1.1.2.4. Vivian, Rebecca, Katrina Falkner, and Nickolas Falkner. 2014. Addressing the Challenges of a New Digital Technologies Curriculum: MOOCs as a Scalable Solution for Teacher Professional Development. Research in Learning Technology 22 (September 2017). https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v22.24691. Walsh, Lucas. 2016. Educating Generation Next: Young People, Teachers and Schooling in Transition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Williamson, Ben. 2016. Political Computational Thinking: Policy Networks, Digital Governance and ‘Learning to Code’. Critical Policy Studies 10 (1): 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2015.1052003. Wolff, Ralph, and Melanie Booth. 2018. Bridging the Gap: Creating a New Approach for Assuring 21st Century Employability Skills. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 49 (6): 51–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/0009 1383.2017.1399040.

CHAPTER 6

Digital Disruption, Education Policy, and the Future of Work: Shifting Frames of Reference in Shifting Times

Abstract  In this chapter, Duggan consider how forms of future policymaking are implicated and taken up within what he terms the speculative capacity of aspirations for the future. The accounts across this book are informed by a political economy approach and in closing, Chap. 6 questions how young people’s lives are implicated in discussions about the future that take—as a key logic—the embedding of networked technologies, digital transformation, and their contingent effects on learning, labouring, and life. Duggan offers a taxonomy of the future along three lines: the spaces of the future, the places in which it is realised, and the temporalities along which it is realised. He explains how the ‘digital’ operates for many as both a promise and purpose in terms of innovation and growth, and as solution-making in terms of mitigating, or at least minimising the effects of many population-level issues of health, mobility, and education. Keywords  Policymaking • Futures • Networked technologies • Solution-making In June of 2018, The Washington Post revealed that “somewhere inside the sprawling Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters of his rocket company, SpaceX,” Elon Musk had launched an exclusive school called Ad Astra (Holley 2018). The school, reported to operate like a ‘venture capital © The Author(s) 2019 S. B. Duggan, Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30675-5_6

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incubator’ does not follow the formal Californian curriculum, instead focusing on science and mathematics, along with “tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs” (Ars Technica 2018). The scant details available on Ad Astra’s website and in media reports read as much like a school out of a Hollywood superhero film as somewhere young people engage with the knowledge, skills, and capabilities to be engaged citizens both in the present and for the future, and perhaps that is the point. In Ad Astra, the future is ‘in here’ as much as ‘out there’: what better place to prepare the minds and bodies of the future than on the campus of a corporation actively and ambitiously trying to build part of it? Digital disruption is a both a ‘problem’ of how the future intervenes in the present, and how the present disrupts the potential of probable and preferable futures. This distinction is both rhetorical, in the ‘qualities’ of the future, their directionality, inclusiveness, etc. as Michael (2017) has it; and embedded in the cultural logics that undergird how people make a life (and how they would like to). In this final chapter, I return to Michael’s (2017) call to the directionality of ‘big’ and ‘little’ futures in bringing together the lines of analysis in this book, and to consider the speculative capacity(ies) of aspirations of the future. This book opened with Rob’s assertion that: “[t]oo often, we find ourselves looking to technology to answer questions we’re asking in the wrong way”. It is an interrogation of these questions we ask of and about technology that animates this investigation. More broadly, the programme of work that I draw on in this book began with an interest in the ways that digital disruption impacts how we understand young people’s lives. In this, I asked three interrelated questions: first, which youth are included or excluded in discussions about the future; second, how do dominant narratives and market-oriented logics around the ‘needs’ of the future influence the orientation of educational policy making; and third, what does the emerging picture of a future predicated on human-computer interface look like in relation to life, labour, and learning? To respond to each, drawing on stories which focus on the embedding of networked technologies, and their underlying logics, I sought to examine how young people’s lives and identities are framed up in terms of the opportunities and threats embedded in the promise of digital disruption. The choice to examine soft policy documents such as those produced by management consulting firms Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for the World Economic Forum, and McKinsey & Company alongside the

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Australian Federal Hansard was not accidental: rather, it reflects an (imperfect as it may be) attempt to show how evidence and discourses about digital disruption are formed up in public and policy discourse about ‘the future’ more generally. The approach taken here affords insight into how the framing of futures is made up of repetitions around possible and probable imaginaries of what the future will look like, for whom, and toward what ends. Hansard records of the post-2015 budget debates around innovation and education reveal the persistence of well-worn discourses which understand the purpose of education as primarily vocational in orientation; yet they also highlight the emergence of new patterns in how the future operates ‘in here’ as well as ‘out there,’ ‘big’ and ‘little,’ ‘large’ and ‘small’. My analysis in the preceding chapters considers how future(s) have been taken up in relation to education, technology, and youth, understanding each in terms of their temporal and spatial relationship to young people’s lives. Drawing on literature from across sociological, theoretical, and political scholarship and contemporary thought, I argued for an expanded understanding of the relationship of the future to the present, and also how futures might be considered as multiple, contingent, and consistently unfolding in-action. Aspirations about what kinds of futures are possible or preferable within the conditions of the present are, as Appadurai (2013, 180) understands it, a navigational capacity. Within this, there is a need for both a language and a mode of critique for rendering visible assumptions about the future, and how those assumptions are framed in place, as well as spatially, and temporally. Futures are social practices, and in this book, those practices are constituted by the assumptions that are carried into conversations about the role of networked technologies in and of people’s lives. Second, this book sought to extend recent debates around the ‘crisis’ of youth, and how these crises are joined up with the emerging ways that young people are conceived within the networked econom(ies) as digitally savvy, yet simultaneously at risk from being ‘hacked’. Here, although somewhat beyond the focus of the book, ‘economies’ are taken as at once singular, as it is in Standing’s (2016) precariat, and plural, as in Wark’s (2017) General Intellects. The doubling is purposeful, and reflects the difficulty in pinning down the interrelationships and flows between data, young people, and digital architectures, as well as social, cultural and political networks of practice. Returning to Chap. 1, where I considered Wendy Brown’s suggestion of the political rationality of neoliberalism as setting

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the “conditions of possibility and legitimacy of [their] instruments” within a distinct “mode of reason” (2015, 21): The ‘logic’ of the networked economy both positions and is positioned by young people’s lives in ways that offer up discourses around the ‘value’ of higher education in ‘new times’ alongside a corporate and popular lurch toward distinct modes of youth culture, their demonisation, and valorisation. In policy and popular logic, the ‘digital’ is for many both promise and purpose in terms of innovation and growth. It is solution-making in terms of mitigating, or at least minimising the effects of many population-level issues of health, mobility, and education; and solution-taking in its potential to address non-technical, sticky social problems. Disruption: the breaking apart of the present, and its reassembling in particular configurations for particular purposes, operates on different populations, differently. This isn’t merely tautological, it animates a network of logics (and a networked logic) that produces solutions to problems, defining the character of both, in what locations, and for whom. The net ‘work’ of digital disruption—like William Gibson’s oft-quoted1 reflection on the future—is not evenly distributed. Alongside Michael’s (2017) ‘big’ and ‘little’ futures, the lines of analysis in this book were concerned with the contested spaces, places, and temporalities of the future. The remainder of this chapter will consider each in turn.

Spaces of the Future: Layering the (Digital) Map In popular and policy discourse, digital disruption operates both as a layer upon which social, cultural, economic, and political life operates; and just as often, as a dimension that might be included alongside each of those ways of doing life. In this book, I have shown how certain constellations of future-making activities form the digital up as, more than a policy orientation, a rationality for doing ‘life’. This was certainly the focus of digital and hacker subcultural research in the last decades of the twentieth century and rapid rise of networked communities in the early 2000s, however, enthusiasm here has waned somewhat with the decline of communities 1  The origin of Gibson’s quote “the future has arrived—it’s just not evenly distributed yet” is a site of significant debate. Though the quote is attributed to Gibson, he has no recollection of actually saying it. For an interesting deep dive, see: https://quoteinvestigator. com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/.

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such as Second Life, and the mutation of hacker culture beyond the Californian Ideology as considered in Chaps. 3 and 4. These powerful practices are both normative and novel in that they respond to established patterns of aspiration and participation, and reflect shifting technological, social, and cultural patterns of life. This manifests in recognition of how productive practices are generated within a hierarchy which renders them relatively more or less valuable for orienting ‘successfully’ toward the future. In Chap. 3, I argued for an expanded political economy of youth perspective for thinking about the ways in which young people’s lives are conceived within the networked economies as fragmented, platform-­ centric, and at risk from being ‘hacked’. The political economy of youth perspective rightly places emphasis on how young people’s interactions with capitalist economies are mediated within the conditions of the present. In this regard, it has advantages in its ability to render visible the influence of macroeconomic trends around the decline in dignified work, shortage of affordable housing across the global north, and compound effects of the massification of post-primary education. Recent attempts within political and economic theory to recognise the detrimental effect of human activities on natural resources have much to contribute to an expanded understanding of youth-as-future-class, both in the anticipation and imagining of possible and probable futures. Such work must necessarily acknowledge the potentially productive and sometimes detrimental effects of hackers for disrupting both labour and leisure practices within and for young people. It might also take as a case the ways that multinational organisations such as Facebook have co-opted the hacker ethic of ‘move fast and break things,’ recapturing them for the purpose of profit and growth. Here, there is a need for a youth account which recognises, alongside a general deterioration of labour and social conditions for young people as a segment, an explicit understanding of the emergence of new forms of capital and their effects on young people’s lives along increasingly constricted lines. These ‘vectors,’ following Wark (2006), sit within a worsening of the environmental and ecological conditions which sustain them, such as those which underpin the Anthropogenic effects of human production and consumption practices. What is critical in thinking about powerful practices is how they are enacted in and across spaces which projectively orient toward the ‘not yet’. In Chap. 4, this can be seen in the expansion of market-oriented logics such as those deployed by McKinsey & Company into all aspects of

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­ ecision making around public life, and how this influence reflects more d than simply a specific consultancy project, but rather the normalisation of particular kinds of networks which have a management consulting model at their heart. As Ball and others have suggested, this is a shift in both the nature and the tenor of networked logics of practice in decision making that has deep implications for educational policy making. Gunter et al.’s (2015, 532) “politics of knowledge exchange” captures this well, where the embedding of consultancies into the ‘doing’ of public life is productive of a schematised and decontextualized form of policy borrowing which promotes preferences for cost-mitigation, efficiency, and continuous measurement. The creep of this logic beyond the explicit work of management consultancies can be seen in Williamson’s (2018, 2019) examination of ‘big data’ flows and the rise of EdTech, a point I return to in discussing the place(s) of future making below.

Bringing Youth Futures into Place(s), and Place(s) into the Future The second contribution that this book makes is in thinking about the interrelationship between how networked technologies and digital disruption are seen as ‘out there’ and operating as platforms on daily life, to their local embeddedness in the quotidian practices of the present. McKinsey’s Education to Employment: Designing a system that works is framed by an intensely localised set of problems that emerge within the context of digital disruption, and their relatedness across traditional cultural, social, and political boundaries. Perhaps the most intensely local: the Hikikomori2 are Japanese youth, confined to their (mostly depicted in densely urban) bedrooms, but the problems of social isolation affect young people, differentially, in other intensely local spaces, in part because of the disengagement from physical social spaces that is fostered through technology and platforms. Indeed, the ‘skills gap’ narrative purported by Mourshed is, in their view, a global phenomenon, though its effects are intensely local, and have deep implications for young people’s dis/connectedness to place. The future happens across spaces, but also in specific places. Barbrook and Cameron’s Californian Ideology speaks powerfully here too, alongside the long tradition of popular and scholarly writing into what makes Silicon Valley ‘tick,’ how it vacuums up the best people, resourcing, and translates 2

 For a comprehensive review of hikikomori, see Li and Wong (2015).

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them into ideas for the future. Whilst a recent report in the Economist showed that the gap in investment, revenue, and growth between Silicon Valley companies and those located elsewhere is closing (The Economist 2018), there still exists a substantial premium for building a rapid scale up business in San Francisco. On the one hand, this has meant that groups of individuals have come together into new communities that are oriented toward technological solutions to perceived and actual problems. However, it has also created a network of individuals both here and elsewhere who are excluded and marginalised by the processes of datafication and fragmentation associated with the development of the literal thousands of ‘apps’ mediating their experience of everyday life. An implication of the logic which designates certain places as future-­ focused and others less so is that these form a hierarchy across which ‘the future’ is more or less fully available for consumption, moderation, and development. Thus: future places are competitive—there is a limited quantity and quality of ‘new,’ and falling behind means missing out on innovative solutions to the problems of the present and the future. This was particularly pronounced in the Parliamentary Debates that were the focus of Chap. 5, where Australia was repeatedly noted as ‘stalling’ according to the Harvard Business Review, and lagging in the development of future-ready people, places, and industries. Stalling here means falling, not just in relative terms to other countries, but in terms of the ability to participate meaningfully in the future. Minister O’Connor’s tautological suggestion that “when it comes to points of comparison, we are not keeping up with comparable countries” (Hansard, Tuesday, 26 May 2015, 4544) reflects this on one level as indicative of the pernicious trend toward comparison among governments on a global scale (Connell 2013), but also as an anxiety for the kinds of futures that are available, and their concentration or distribution across the globe. It makes sense that governments are attempting to respond to the embedding of networked technologies across work and life, and particularly in relation to young people, who bear both the opportunities and risks of the future. However, as I have argued throughout this book, an interrogation of the common sense(s) that underpin the network of choices, preferences and logics that emerge in policy discussions is critical for understanding how they come to operate in particular ways, in particular spaces and places. What we can see here, then, is an embedding of anxiety for the future(s), and how those capabilities and capacities are technologized through the taking up of technical practices and p ­ rogrammes

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in the present. These capabilities and capacities emerge as logical and sensible (or not) within the context of education policy, such as the enduring appeal of the ‘local’ school coding programs that many countries have now pursued at a state level. More broadly though, they also mobilise, in a significant way, the kinds of practices that can be readily measured and brought up in continuous cycles of ‘improvement’. This can be seen clearly in Williamson’s (2017) examination of big data, and its proliferation across ever more aspects of learning, both within and beyond the classroom. Through the datafication of educational practice, the future can be brought into specific places, and places can (finally, relievedly) be brought into the future in specific, measurable ways.

Youth Futures in Time There is, at the heart of digital disruption, an uneasy alliance between scientific discourses, market-oriented politics, and the practices of governance that creates a through-line to educational policy-making rooted in what Appadurai (2013, 220) terms the “foundational grammar of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment”. In this view, worth quoting at length: …a vivisectionist science, allied to a panoptical capacity to see like a state, meets a bankrupt secularist worldview and a banal form of commodity worship, to produce … a charnel house of destructive technologies and a host of repressive and invasive technological devices, allied to fundamentally deadening governmentalities through which states, statistics, capillary repressions, and various new technologies help to produce what Slavoj Žižek called ‘a plague of fantasies’. (Appadurai 2013, 220–21)

There is a lot to unpack here within the context of this book. Returning to Chap. 4, Education For All (EFA) relies on a call to universalism of (secular) education, driven by a view that scientific enquiry offers the best way to achieving freedom. However, it also responds to a local and global politics whereby small numbers of elites, often consultants from faraway places, make decisions that have very localised effects on the types of access people have with educational practice. As I have shown in relation to the recommendations of the World Economic Forum’s New Vision in Education reports, in this model, the promises of universal education are realised through increased technologization of classrooms, teachers, and

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young people. Certainly, this speaks to the sections above in terms of how the spaces of the future are realised in specific places, such as through technology-centric Bridge Academies beaming scripted lessons to teachers ‘on the ground’ in remote parts of Africa. However, it also speaks to a longer tradition around the perceived pre-eminence of scientific educational practices to address perceived educational ‘gaps’. Here, the imperative to ‘do something’ and the call to the universality of formal education as an inherent good shrouds and often outright masks the much deeper complexities around how these moves are implicated in market-oriented logics. After all, according to the WEF, education is a $10 Trillion ‘opportunity’. A second layer to Appadurai’s assertion picks up on how I considered the ascendancy of the ‘skills gap’ narrative as an opportunity for innovation modelled, as it is the world over, on the success of Silicon Valley. Here, Appadurai’s (2013, 221) suggestion of “destructive technologies and a host of repressive and invasive technological devices” that are enabled by a social, cultural, and policy orientation toward the ‘new,’ helps to valorise an innovation environment that privileges progress above all else. Or, as I considered in Chap. 2, returning to Adam (2010, 4), “the pursuit of progress itself” is predicated on the notion of “instability rather than stability being the inherent goal”. Marrying this with Appadurai’s perspective helps to add a historical dimension to Adam’s (2010, 3) future presents and present futures, whereby we may now consider the former aligned with our anticipation for change along certain historical paths, and the latter for taking up those practices within the everyday tasks of prediction and enactment as a fundamentally scientific practice. Disruption in this sense is the primary state upon which its current substantiation, the digital, is built. Two final points bear making in concluding this book. First, this book has sought to unpack how young people’s lives are implicated in discussions about the future that take, as their fundamental orientation, the primacy of networked technologies, their development, proliferation, and embedding in ever-increasing aspects of learning, labouring, and life. Disruption here is uneven, and necessarily so, but it does tend to move along channels and paths that are at least in part, predictable. How governments make sense of disruption, preparation for it, their ability to leverage it, and the role of their populations within it is necessarily bound up in both the historic and cultural dimensions of the present, and perhaps more importantly, the collective narratives through which they understand their

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place in it. Understanding Australia as a natural site for innovation by referencing CSIROs work in developing the 802.11a standard illustrates this point well. So do examples from abroad around digital surveillance, ethical or green innovation, financial technologies, and so on. What matters then as Appadurai (2013, 295) has it, is pursuing “those ways of thinking, feelings, and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity in … the capacity to aspire”. Second, there are two critical projects in youth studies that would benefit from an expanded discourse around the temporalit(ies) and econom(ies) of the future. This book has drawn on forms of public discourses around the role of digital disruption and networked technologies into young people’s lives both now and in the present, and it was not within its scope to examine the voices of young people living with, in, and alongside disruption. There exists a wealth of literature examining young people’s engagement with the social web (for example, Boyd 2014; Kofoed and Ringrose 2012; Lincoln and Robards 2017; Ringrose et  al. 2013) that could be extended through deeper engagement with a political economy perspective, and vice versa. The examination of a technology-oriented politics, such as that put forward in Söderberg’s (2017) examination of hacking as politics is a useful starting point here, in its account of the varied ways that people might come to ‘hacking,’ and are subsequently implicated in the disruption of technologies, people, and places. Finally, within the context of the present, digital disruption is often taken as an idealized form of the youth-as-future project in popular and policy discourse. This can be seen in targeted youth policy initiatives that valorise Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines (Williamson 2016), the ‘datafication’ of education (Gulson and Webb 2017), and the ‘hacking’ of digital affective labour in the use and control of social media in schools (Boyd 2014). Here, deeper engagement with the multiple and contingent ways that young people make, and are made up of futures and their embedding in policy and popular structures offers a potentially new way of thinking about well-worn patterns of disadvantage, and how they might be accelerated or mitigated within the economies of the future. These are questions of political, as well as social will. It is easy to be cynical, to imagine digital disruption as slowly (and sometimes rapidly) ratcheting down on whole categories of youth, such as in Uber’s ‘partner drivers’. But even here, there exist multiple narratives of hope, such as that offered in Rosenblat’s

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(2018) Uberland that bear both our interest, and our attention. Here, I am no doubt extending the specific contributions of this book, and thus this perhaps serves as a call to action for another project or author, suffice it to say that what this examination has illustrated is that digital disruption is a powerful force for mediating and governing the collective expectations and aspirations that we collectively hold for the future. It is a site in which futures are desired and produced that are not reducible to grand narratives of progress, but which are inevitably bound up in collective and individualised narratives around what it means to make a life in contemporary times. In a time of significant anxiety around the future of our earth- and political-systems, this is especially pertinent. This anxiety exceeds that of young people’s transitions through education to further study and work or the intensification of neoliberal imperatives of governance and measurement, yet it is anchored by them. Reflecting critically on the messy ways that policy is made from above and below—formally and informally and through big and small narratives—offers a crucial perspective for illuminating how such futures are made.

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———. 2011. Young People and the Future: Multiple Temporal Orientations Shaped in Interaction with Significant Others. Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research 19 (2): 111–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/110330881001900201. Woodman, Dan, and Johanna Wyn. 2015. Class, Gender and Generation Matter: Using the Concept of Social Generation to Study Inequality and Social Change. Journal of Youth Studies 18 (10): 1402–1410. https://doi.org/10.1080/136 76261.2015.1048206. World Economic Forum. 2015. Press Conference UNICEF: The Case for Education and Equity. Davos, Switzerland. https://www.weforum.org/ events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2015/player?p=1&pi= 1&id=62879. Wyn, Johanna, and Dan Woodman. 2006. Generation, Youth and Social Change in Australia. Journal of Youth Studies 9 (5): 495–514. https://doi. org/10.1080/13676260600805713. ———. 2007. Researching Youth in a Context of Social Change: A Reply to Roberts. Journal of Youth Studies 10 (3): 373–381. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13676260701342624. Ylönen, Matti, and Hanna Kuusela. 2018. Consultocracy and Its Discontents: A Critical Typology and a Call for a Research Agenda. Governance, 1–18. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gove.12369. Zipin, Lew, Sam Sellar, Marie Brennan, and Trevor Gale. 2015. Educating for Futures in Marginalized Regions: A Sociological Framework for Rethinking and Researching Aspirations. Educational Philosophy and Theory 47 (3): 227– 246. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.839376.

Index1

A Adam, Barbara, 22, 23, 26–28, 31, 33, 125 Ad Astra, 117, 118 Adulthood, 12, 24, 25, 35, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 56 Ainley, Patrick, 49 Appadurai, Arjun, 36, 52, 119, 124–126 Apple, Michael, 13, 105 Apps, 3, 6, 97, 123 Arab Spring, 70–72, 72n1 Aspirations, v, 6, 14, 16, 22, 28, 35, 36, 51, 52, 106, 118, 119, 121, 127 Automation, 5, 29, 55, 104 B Ball, Stephen J., 6, 12, 35, 47, 66, 69, 80, 81, 83–87, 95, 99, 122 Beck, Ulrich, 46, 47 See also Risk society

Big data, 53, 76, 81, 122, 124 Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 66, 67, 78, 87, 118 Boyd, Danah, 6, 126 Brown, Wendy, 12, 13, 119 C Californian Ideology, 53, 75, 121, 122 Capabilities, technological, 29 Code.org, 94 Coding in schools, 14, 15, 87, 95–99, 102–104, 108, 109, 111 Cohen, Phil, 49 Coleman, Gabriella, 54 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), 104, 126 Communities of practice, 9, 46, 57 Côté, James E., 10, 35, 44, 45, 58 Crises, of future, 34, 96 Crises, of youth, 119

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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Curriculum, 4, 5, 7, 15, 23, 35, 51, 74, 81, 94, 96, 97, 99, 103, 111, 118 Cyber kids, 5 D Digital disruption, v, vi, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10–15, 22, 25, 28–31, 35, 44, 52, 65–87, 96, 103, 117–127 problem, v, 7, 11, 14, 15, 68, 71, 73–75, 77, 87, 118, 120, 122 as promise, 31, 73–75, 118, 120 Digital labour, v, 14, 53, 75 Digital technologies, 3, 4, 6, 46, 55, 85, 95, 97, 98, 108–110 Digital transformation, 14–16 Draper, Tim, 70, 73–75, 86 E Economies of the future, 99, 104– 109, 126 EdTech, 75, 77, 81, 87, 122 Edu-business, 30, 80, 85 Education for All (EFA), 8, 76, 80, 81, 87, 124 Education policy, v, 2, 4, 6–10, 14, 15, 22, 34, 58, 67, 79, 81, 84–86, 94–112, 117–127 Education to Employment (McKinsey & Company), 45, 70–72, 76, 87, 122 Entrepreneurial self, 26, 74 Entrepreneurship, 42, 73, 74, 106, 107 F Facebook, 94, 105, 121 Facer, Keri, 5, 33, 34, 74, 82, 108 Furlong, Andy, 42, 44

Future making, v, 15, 22, 27–30, 120, 122 Future of work, 10, 11, 16, 29, 110 Future(s), v, 2–5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14–16, 42–48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 66, 67, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84–87, 95–102, 104–112, 117–127 G Giddens, Anthony, 12 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), vi, 30, 32, 42 Governance, 8, 10, 30, 49, 69, 75, 77, 79, 86, 96, 97, 124, 127 H Hacker, 53–58, 120, 121 hacking, 43, 54, 56–58, 126 I Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), 96, 100, 101 Information economy, 3, 4 Innovation, 2, 5, 7, 24, 26, 27, 29, 42, 76, 83, 95–99, 103, 105– 111, 119, 120, 125, 126 J Jobs of the future, 97–102, 104, 106 K Kahn Academy, 70, 75–76, 78 Keddie, Amanda, 35, 96 Kelly, Peter, vi, 4, 10, 11, 26, 32, 35, 48, 50, 71, 74 See also Entrepreneurial self

 INDEX 

L The Lean Startup, 30 The Learning Curve (Pearson), 9 Learning to code, 53, 103 Learn. Plan. Succeed (Chicago Public Schools), 50 Lingard, Bob, 9, 12, 35, 66, 68, 96, 99 M Management consulting, 9, 15, 33, 58, 66–70, 86, 104, 118, 122 Mansell, Robin, 10, 11, 29 Market logic/market-logic, 15, 32, 69, 95 Market-orientation, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 66, 67, 69, 79, 96, 121, 124, 125 McKinsey & Company, 9, 66, 67, 70, 103, 118, 121 McLeod, Julie, 23–25, 107 McLuhan, Marshall, 29 Michael, Mike, 24, 31, 36, 67, 118, 120 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 79, 81 Minecraft, 3 Mobilities, as concept, 7, 9 Mobility (of youth), 5, 7, 34, 35, 50, 120 Mourshed, Mora, 67, 71, 72, 72n1, 76, 77, 122 N Neoliberal imaginaries, 12, 34 Neoliberalism, concept of, 13, 100, 119 Networked technologies, v, 2–5, 8, 9, 11, 13–16, 22, 56–58, 95, 96, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126 New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning Through Technology (Boston Consulting Group), 83

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New Vision for Education: The Investment Case for Education and Equity (UNICEF), 78, 79 New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology (Boston Consulting Group), 67, 78, 81 No Ordinary Disruption (McKinsey & Company), 103 O Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 66, 70, 94, 95, 100, 107 P Policy governance, 97 Policy mobility, 7–10 Policy transfer, 7 Political economy of youth (PEOY), 47, 57, 58, 121 Precariat/precariat, 119 Present, as concept, 4, 26 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 68, 80, 100–102 Promise of the new, 108 R Rationalities, 12, 13, 22, 29, 97, 98, 110, 119, 120 Reay, Diane, 35, 51 Redundancy, 108 Review of Funding for Schooling (Gonski Report), 68 Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools (Gonski 2.0), 68 Risk society, 46, 47

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Rizvi, Fazal, 9, 12, 35, 80, 99 Rosenblat, Alex, 46, 126 S Scholz, Trebor, 53, 96 Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM)/Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), 14, 53, 101, 109, 110, 112, 126 Self-as-enterprise, 50 See also Kelly, Peter Selwyn, Neil, 5, 10, 11, 82, 97, 98 Shorten, Bill, 95, 97–99, 104, 111 Silicon Valley, 70, 73, 75–78, 107, 122, 123, 125 Skills gap, 49, 71, 77, 86, 99, 103, 108–112, 122, 125 Söderberg, Johan, 126 Srnicek, Nick, 33, 96, 104–108 Sukarieh, Mayssoun, 10, 11, 46, 49, 53 T Tannock, Stuart, 10, 11, 46, 49, 53 Temporality, 15, 22–25, 36, 120, 126

Time, concept of, 22–25, 27, 30, 36, 124–127 Transitions, 24, 25, 42, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 127 Tufecki, Zeynep, 53 U UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 22, 79 Urry, John, 23, 26, 31–34 W Wark, McKenzie, 11, 53–55, 57, 58, 119, 121 What Most Schools Don’t Teach, 94 Williamson, Ben, 53, 77, 79, 82, 83, 87, 96, 122, 124, 126 Woodman, Dan, 12, 24, 44, 46 World Economic Forum (WEF), 66, 78, 79, 85, 118, 124 Wyn, Johanna, 12, 44, 46 Y Youth, study of, 10, 25, 26, 32, 46, 74, 126