From the late 1970s onwards, a group of researchers in Sweden worked to make “future preparedness” a unifying knowledge object and school subject. The ability to think, adapt to and shape a still uncertain future, in what was now repeatedly described as a changing present, was described as a key competence in a way that bridged the dividing lines between work, leisure and personal life project. Every moment opened up for branching off towards other possible futures than the temporal trajectory people were currently moving towards, and the trained citizen could use this to realise both their life project and make Sweden a dynamic and knowledge-oriented nation. The aim of Carl-Filip Smedberg and Björn Lundberg’s project, The Educationalization of the Future: The “Future Preparedness Project” and the Creation of the Late Modern Citizen, c. 1978-1990, is to investigate how the future became the subject of pedagogical considerations and thereby contribute new knowledge about the formation of late modern civic virtues, individualization, and ways of relating to time. The project has received funding from the Crafoord Foundation.

Image: “Slussen aug 1978” Holger.Ellgaard, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons