Advanced capitalist societies are characterized by three forms of power and powerlessness: a hegemony of political monoculture; the ‘undoing’ of democratic forms of political agency and subjects; and the ‘political construction of hopelessness’ in challenging these structural foreclosures and ideological consensus. In this context, how can learning enable collective survival in the present and enlarge possibilities for yet-unimaginable alternative futures to emerge? This paper explores this question by juxtaposing three models of educational futurity in different neoliberal contexts. The first, dominating state education policy and practice in Anglospheric and specifically British institutions, promotes performative and disciplinary regimes of anticipation. The second, circulating in discourse and in experimental spaces within this hegemonic context, advocates an emergentist, critical and creative relationship to the future. The third, which thrives in the margins and relative exteriorities of the capitalist world system, promotes an ecological, epistemically disobedient and utopian mode of anticipatory consciousness which ‘projects emancipation beyond the constraints of the existing discourse’ of colonial modernity. We do not attempt to compare these different contexts and models in this paper, but to read each for its difference to illustrate that modes of anticipation in education influence the construction of hopelessness and hope by shaping what is learned about the nature of political possibility and the relationship between learning and the future. We argue that pedagogies which embrace critical modes of anticipation offer alternatives to contemporary regimes of anticipation in education in Britain today

There is increasing concern that information poverty will soon become a key indicator of social exclusion, with those unable to use and access new technologies marginalized from key aspects of economic and social activity. This concern, at present, focuses primarily on adults, as young people are predominantly represented in media, academic and political discourse as naturally competent computer users. In contrast, this paper focuses on those young people who are self-described 'low or ambivalent' users of computers, exploring the links between family cultures, access and attitudes towards computer use. Drawing on a questionnaire survey of 855 children and group interviews with 46 young people, this paper identifies key themes emerging from interviews with low users of computers: difficulties accessing computers; a lack of relevance of computer technology to these children's daily lives; and the potential of formal educational environments to exacerbate inequalities in access and anxieties around computer use. This paper concludes that, if we are not to embed information inequality at the heart of the digital revolution, a radical rethink of the prevalent image of the child as 'cyberkid' is needed.

This essay examines the role of educators in the tangled economic, social, environmental and technological crises of the present time. It argues that a central purpose of education in this period is to support students to imagine and make liveable futures on their own terms. To do this, the paper proposes that the colonizing, optimizing and catastrophic stories that dominate accounts of the relationship between education and the future should be replaced by a recognition of students and worlds as co‐emerging. It introduces resources from the fields of anticipation, temporality and decolonial studies that gesture towards a new educational practice. It concludes by arguing that supporting students to make, tell and listen to stories has a critical role to play in enabling students to identify and articulate desires, hopes, fears and dreams for the future and to engage with the rich complexities of the present.