Rethinking young people’s aspirations in times of crisis: stories of futures from a de-industrialising city

Abstract

In this paper - where we will draw on data from a small scale longitudinal study of young people’s post-COVID aspirations and sense of their futures in a de-industrialising city - we will suggest that Appadurai’s (2004) ideas about the ‘capacity to aspire’ encourages us to shift our focus from the ‘aspirations’ of individual young people to think, instead, about the different resources that might be at play in shaping a capacity to aspire. Departing from the detailed stories of two of the young ­people who participated in this project, we will argue that critical, post-humanist and futures oriented ontologies offer productive possibilities for reimagining the ‘promise of education’ in relation to young people’s aspirations, their dreams and hopes, fears, anxieties and despair that emerge from the “thick of social life” (Appadurai, 2004) in which young people live, imagine who they are, and what they might become.

Keywords:

• Young people
• futures
• capacity to aspire
• post-human ethics
• the promise of education

Introduction: young people’s ‘disadvantage’, ‘misalignment’, and the ‘capacity to aspire’

The future of work, often characterised as being shaped by the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ (WEF 2020), has become much more complex and uncertain as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic (Cook et al. 2021). However, just prior to the pandemic, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (Mann et al. 2020) published a report titled Dream Jobs? Teenagers’ Career Aspirations and the Future of Work that explored particular versions of this future. The report is based on the responses to a survey conducted alongside the 2018 PISA assessment of young people’s ‘reading skills for a digital world’.¹ More than 600,000 students from 32 countries were asked questions about ‘the occupation in which they expect to be working at the age of 30 and their plans for further education after leaving secondary schooling’. According to that report:

• Jobs with origins in the 20th century or earlier…are most attractive to young people;

• Many young people…from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, anticipate pursuing jobs that are at high risk of being automated;

• Approximately one in three disadvantaged teenagers who perform well on the PISA tests does not expect to pursue tertiary education or work in a profession to which university education is a common gateway (Mann et al. 2020, 8).

The OECD (Mann et al. 2020, 6) understands these populations of young people as being ‘negatively misaligned. That is to say, the level of education and qualification to which they aspire is lower than that typically required of their occupational goal’. In this sense, young people’s aspirations are largely understood in terms of education, training and employment pathways – which are imagined as being more or less ‘linear’, and with some ‘end point’ in mind, where they have become ‘aligned’ with the ‘jobs of the future’ - or not (Mann et al. 2020). As Konstanz Spohrer (2011, 53) has argued, governmentalised problematisations of young people’s aspirations such as this tend to construct ‘young people from disadvantaged backgrounds as deficient’, a move that ‘conflates economic and social equality discourses and individualises structural problems’.

In this paper we aim to make a contribution to sociological work that seeks to explore young people’s hopes and aspirations for futures that are characterised by uncertainty, disruption and crisis - and which may not be solely, even primarily, focused on the job that they will be doing at 30. Our interests include the ways in which these hopes and aspirations emerge from the complexities of places in globalising contexts, and the ways in which national and international agencies seek to govern aspects of these uncertainties by developing young people’s aspirational dispositions. In the following section we will reference the substantial sociological work over the last four decades that has examined and critiqued the ways in which neoliberal capitalism, precarious work, and education and training systems create demands for young people to develop ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘aspirational’ orientations to futures that are characterised by uncertainty and crisis.

We then outline a place-based, longitudinal study of young people’s aspirations, and their education, training and employment pathways in Geelong (Victoria, AUSTRALIA), a large provincial city that has been described, at different times during the last four decades, as a ‘deindustrialising’, ‘rust-belt’ regional city, and which is characterised by a patchwork of materially privileged and disadvantaged suburbs. In that project we have engaged with young people as we track their education, training and employment pathways in COVID ‘normal’ socio-ecologies that are profoundly shaped by historical and contemporary processes of disengagement, marginalisation and disadvantage. Here, social class, gender and sexual identities, First Nations heritage, migrant and/or refugee background, geographic locality, neurodiversities, and mental and physical well-being challenges intersect in complex ways in shaping young people’s disengagement, marginalisation and historical disadvantage (Kelly, Campbell and Howie 2019). Following that account of the project we present a version of the stories of two young people, Madeline and Marisa, who were interviewed during 2021. Drawing on the ‘more-than-representational’ approaches of Vannini (2015) and Coffey (2022), these stories seek to illustrate the embodied, material and affective entanglements that shape Madeline and Marisa’s hopes, aspirations, anxieties and uncertainties about their pasts-presents-futures.

In our final Discussion section will suggest that critical, post-humanist, and futures oriented ontologies offer productive possibilities for reimagining the ‘promise of education’ in relation to young people’s aspirations as these emerge from the ‘thick of social life’ (Appadurai, 2004, 67) in which young people live, imagine who they are, and what they might be and become.

Young people’s hopes and aspirations, and futures of uncertainty and crisis

In 2020-2021 the pandemic pushed global, national and regional economies into a period of profound uncertainty and crisis that has been compounded by high inflation, possible recessions, surging energy prices, labour shortages in different labour markets, supply chain issues, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the unfolding consequences of the climate crisis. Indeed, The Lancet (2022) has observed that a young person born in 2006 in Europe, ‘will have gone through the great recession…austerity…a pandemic with disrupted schooling and social isolation, a cost-of-living crisis, war in Europe, and a world coming to terms with the magnitude of climate change’.

COVID-19 has amplified a world of profound inequalities and injustices. A world in crisis at what Braidotti (2019) identifies as the convergence of the 4th Industrial Revolution and the 6th Mass Extinction: ‘between an advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities’. In this context the UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2021) has declared a ‘code red for humanity’, the European Policy Centre (EPC) (2021) has identified what it calls a state of ‘permacrisis’, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) (2023) names the present and future in terms of ‘polycrisis’.

During this time, it has become apparent that many young people will carry a heavy burden over the next decade in terms of their well-being, and education, training and employment aspirations and pathways. Much as young Australians did in the ‘lost decade’ (Productivity Commission 2020) in the aftermath of the 2008-09 GFC, and as their peers experienced in the Great Recession in many European and North American economies of the OECD (Kelly 2017).

The discourses of young people, futures and aspirations, and the ways in which disadvantaged young people are imagined as ‘lacking’ aspiration for futures that are largely characterised in terms of pathways to uncertain and novel ‘futures of work’, are widespread and influential (Mann et al. 2020; World Economic Forum (WEF) 2020). As we have indicated, our interests and concerns here emerge from and build on significant research in sociologies of youth, education and work which has explored the ways in which neoliberal capitalism, precarious work, and education and training systems, create demands for young people to develop ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘aspirational’ orientations to their futures (Cook et al. 2021; Howie and Campbell 2016; Oinonen 2018; Ikonen and Nikunen 2019). Much of the work that we are interested in adopts a ‘critical’ approach to the ways in which young people’s education, training and employment pathways, their hopes and aspirations, are understood by key agencies such as the OECD. As Spohrer (2011, p. 60) suggests, the discourses which construct young people as having ‘low aspirations’ share parallels with ‘social inclusion policies that take ‘excluded’ groups as their starting point for interventions, rather than labour market structures’.

In this context, Walsh and Black (2022, 98) have examined the ways in which a particular form of uncertainty is visited on young people in the context of ongoing crises, and suggest that ‘uncertainty has its roots’ in multiple crises ‘which are generated and experienced collectively but the effects of which, and the responsibilities for which, are deeply individualised’. There is further, significant work that explores the complex relations between young people’s presents and the linear narratives of time that are reproduced through discourses of youth pathways and transitions, including Mandich’s (2020, 681) account of young people’s complex ‘modes of engagement with the future’ in everyday life; Leccardi’s (2005, 123) analysis of the ways in which young people construct biographical narratives in a ‘social context characterized by great uncertainty’; and Woodman’s (2011) argument that young people draw on multiple temporal orientations as they collectively plan for the future and cope with the present.

Others also critique these tensions and contradictions, including the construction of ‘aspiration’, as something that disengaged, marginalised and historically disadvantaged young people ‘lack’. Here, Zipin et al. (2015, 227) seek to re-conceptualise aspiration as a ‘complex socio-cultural phenomena’, in order to problematise the ‘raising aspiration’ policy discourses aimed at ‘human capital investment and economic competitiveness’ in so-called ‘knowledge economies’. In this literature, there is a focus on hope as an ‘active’ and ‘social’ disposition towards the future (Cook 2017). In addition, a number of researchers, working with different ideas about forms of capital, capabilities and agency, have explored the ways in which diverse forms of disengagement, marginalisation and historical disadvantage shape young people’s aspirations. Baker (2017), for example, examines young people’s ‘range of motivations for pursuing particular goals’, and ‘why aspirations can remain high even in the absence of capitals, resources, or opportunities’ (see also Polesel, Leahy and Gillis 2018).

In this context, Arjun Appadurai’s (2004) influential essay, The Capacity to Aspire, provides a useful point of departure from which to problematise the forms of the individualisation and responsibilisation of young people for identifying and managing the uncertainties of futures via the development of an aspirational disposition. Appadurai argues that in order to understand the continuation of extreme poverty, and disadvantage, and why people who live in these conditions appear – to some commentators – not to ‘aspire’ for a ‘better life’, then we need to shift focus from the individual and their ‘failings’ and how we might ‘fix’ their ‘misaligned’ sense of the future:

But here is the twist with the capacity to aspire. It is not evenly distributed in any society. It is a sort of meta capacity, and the relatively rich and powerful invariably have a more fully developed capacity to aspire. What does this mean? It means that the better off you are (in terms of power, dignity, and material resources), the more likely you are to be conscious of the links between the more and less immediate objects of aspiration. (Appadurai,2004 68-69)

In our final Discussion section we will suggest that Appadurai’s ideas about the capacity to aspire encourages us to think about the different resources (economic, social and cultural), family contexts and relations, ideas, role models, peers and peer networks, opportunities, bodily abilities and disabilities, and histories that might be at play in shaping the complex and uncertain relationships and contexts in which young people live, imagine who they are, and what they might be and become.

COVID-19 and young people’s education and employment aspirations in geelong

For much of the twentieth century the provincial city of Geelong (population 270,000+) was a prosperous regional centre, home to an array of industrial manufacturing operations. However, during the last four decades the impacts of processes of neoliberal globalisation, successive economic recessions, and government industry restructuring policies have fallen heavily on the region (Johnson 2012). These processes of globalisation and de-industrialisation continue to re-shape the education, training and employment pathways for young people in Geelong (Noonan and Kelly 2019). Prior to the emergence of the pandemic, the twelve-month average of Geelong’s youth unemployment rate to August 2018 was 12.4%, a rate roughly commensurate with the Victorian and national averages. However, in the Geelong region the suburbs of Whittington, North Geelong, Corio, Bell Post Hill and Norlane and North Shore have, over a number of decades, been identified as zones of significant economic disadvantage. In these areas, youth unemployment rates are ten percentage points above the city average, and are home to the highest proportions of people with below Year 11 levels of educational attainment (COGG 2018). The 3214 postcode (comprising Corio, Norlane and North Shore), for example, recorded the third worst ranking in Victoria across 22 indicators of disadvantage including income, education level, literacy and numeracy, and long-term unemployment (Crane 2015).

In early 2021 young people were invited to participate in the project with the support of a wide range of stakeholder organisations affiliated with the City of Geelong Pre-employment Professionals Network (PPN). The PPN included representatives of employment, mental health, and disability support services, members of the Geelong Regional Local Learning and Employment Network (GR-LLEN), and local government officers with links to managers of services for young people. Staff at these agencies and organisations helped the research team to connect with young people. After discussing the project, and their interest in participating, young people were sent a link to the automated, video-capture platform Video-ask. Young people were asked to respond to a version of the following questions:

1. My life at the moment

   Can you tell us about how you view your life at the moment?

2. The world now, and in the future

   Can you tell us your thoughts about the current state of the world at the moment?

3. My life in the future

   We want to know a little about your hopes and aspiration for your future

4. Something else?

   This is an opportunity for you to say something about your life, and the things that you care about.

During the first year of the project, and in the midst of extended public health lockdowns in response to rising COVID-19 infections, thirty three young people (aged 16-23) were interviewed:

• 12 young people identified as male, 17 as female, 1 as a transgender male, 1 responded that ‘gender is a social construct’, and the 2 remaining young people did not answer that question.

• 6 of the cohort provided details about their culturally and/or linguistically diverse (CALD) identities including young people of Iraqi, Maltese, Congolese, Afghani ethnic backgrounds.

• 1 young person identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

• Many were enrolled in either a year 11 or year 12 Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) or Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) program.

• 13 were completing further study and were enrolled in an accredited vocational training program.

• 5 were enrolled in a Higher Education program.

• About half were employed, almost all on a casual basis.

• 12 young people identified that they had a disability, or were neurodiverse, or living with anxiety and depression.

Video-Ask interviews could be completed on any device, at a time that suited the participants, and responses could be submitted via video, audio or text. The format enabled young people to consider the questions and frame draft responses before submitting a final response. Our experience of the format suggests that many of the young people who participated were expansive and reflective when given the opportunity to respond to the asynchronous video prompt questions. Jenner and Myers (2019), for example, suggest that video interviews can be an engaging research method, are a popular choice among participants, and can provide a more ‘private’ space for participants to discuss their concerns and interests. Watson and Lupton (2022) also provide a productive account of using innovative qualitative methods - including video - in the context of the pandemic. As in all qualitative research, some young people were more expansive and thoughtful than others, and became ‘key participants’.²

In the following section, we tell a version of the stories of two of the young people who were interviewed for the project: Madeline and Marisa. As will become apparent in the telling of these stories, both Madeline and Marisa, like many of the young people we interviewed, had experienced a number of events and circumstances which presented significant challenges for their well-being and had resulted in disruptions and divergences in their education, training and employment pathways. Madeline and Marisa were seeking to think and act through various complexities and complications that suggest to us that we needed to develop different modes of telling their stories, and different ways to make sense of their hopes and aspirations for the futures that they are able to imagine.

The choices to tell these particular stories are also pragmatic and determined by available space - we have told other stories elsewhere.³ In addition, we have chosen to tell a limited number of ‘stories’ rather than provide a ‘thematic’ analysis using a larger number of young people’s voices. In a recent paper Julia Coffey (2022) uses the stories of two young participants in her research to explore the embodied and affective dimensions of young people’s well-being. Her account provides a productive example of the ways in which this form of storytelling can move beyond ‘representational’ logics that are concerned with ‘uncovering internally-motivated meanings through thoughts and explanations of action, to explore the co-extensive, affective, processes as mediating, not determining action’ (Coffey, 2022 72). Phillip Vannini (2015, 15) claims that at the core of this more-than-representational research is ‘the ethos of animation’ through ‘diverse ways of knowing’, which seeks to ‘render rather than represent, to resonate rather than validate, to rupture and reimagine rather than to faithfully describe, to generate possibilities of encounter rather than construct representative ideal types’.

Our sense is, that if, as Buddel (2018, 16) suggests, ‘the stories of our lives shape dispositions towards imagined futures’, then it is important to explore what stories young people tell of their lives and their imagined futures in these different configurations. Our aim is that Madeline and Marisa’s stories, told and presented in the ways we do here, can pose a challenge to the representational logics which underpin the individualising, normalising ‘figure of the aspirational young person’. In these ways, Madeline and Marisa’s stories are illustrative of the ways in which young people from different backgrounds spoke about their hopes for their futures. And how these hopes and aspirations are entangled with the messiness of pasts-presents-futures of their lives and where they live these lives, with their health and well-being, education, training and employment challenges and opportunities, and with their experiences of crisis and uncertainties, and the temporality, spatiality and materiality of these places, at these times.

Madeline’s story

During 2021, Madeline was 17 years old and completing the VCE while working a casual job at a local supermarket. She was also a member of the City of Greater Geelong’s Youth Council, which was how she was introduced to this project (City of Greater Geelong 2018). For Madeline the challenges of that time related to how the ‘normal patterns’ of daily life had been disrupted:

Life at the moment’s in and out of lockdowns, not going to school, not being able to see friends, not being able to communicate [with] others, not being able to be in real life, in our real life.

For Madeline, these disruptions were most keenly felt in the expectation that young people were expected to be able to transition to remote learning arrangements in a more or less seamless fashion:

I feel that I’m behind in school as well because of the remote learning.

It’s really hard to get used to and, you know, I feel that people expect all of us to be able to transition well to remote learning.

But it just doesn’t work like that.

They don’t understand how hard it is to focus on schoolwork when there’s so much around you, when you’re not in a proper classroom, when you don’t have communication between people your age.

You’re in your bedroom, doing school work at home. And there’s a teacher talking to you through a screen. And they can’t see you either.

Perhaps because of her role as a member of the Geelong Youth Council Madeline was able to situate her individual experience in the context of processes of transformation and change that were beyond her individual situation, and to observe the ripple effects of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns on the wider Geelong community:

I don’t know if I’m going to be at school next year.

My life at the moment I see as pretty good, pretty well off, compared to others.

But it is challenging and for everyone it is challenging at the moment, in Geelong especially.

Like we’ve seen everybody’s lives be changed because of all the lockdowns we’ve been in and out of.

Madeline had a strong sense of the increased uncertainty that characterised life in the pandemic, and how this sense of crisis and uncertainty made it difficult to develop goals for the future. At the same time, she imagined a future working as a teacher, and striving to provide the kinds of support that she saw as lacking for young people today:

I see myself doing teaching because I want to be able to support children that experience something that’s tough in their life. And I want to be able to help them through that.

And going through online learning myself, I know how things can be really difficult and I think everybody needs some support some time.

For Madeline, part-time, casual work in a local supermarket allowed her to develop skills for the ‘real-life world’, such as ‘working with customers and how to talk appropriately to others’. Her hope was that this experience and developing these skills would benefit her future career prospects. However, she recognised that other young people in Geelong were perhaps not so fortunate to have the kinds of opportunities she did:

I feel that the employment in Geelong really needs to become better. And there’s just not enough employment…

So I work in a supermarket and I guess you would say that they do employ a lot of young people.

But what about those that are between 20 and 30? They always say no, because of their age.

I guess you’d say - two 15 year olds are the price of one twenty year old. And, you know, when you think about it, you’d employ two 15 year olds because, twice the work, same price as a 20 year old.

Whereas these 20 year olds have finished school, but now want to develop the skills for their future, after they’ve had their education. And this is what needs to be focused on.

Madeline was troubled by what she saw as the absence of young people’s voices in processes of local decision-making. This absence, she suggested, was most evident in what she saw as the work that would need to be done in the social and economic recovery that would have to occur in the aftermath of COVID-19:

See, the future of Geelong, I see it being really good and everything, but I feel that it’s up to us to make change.

But we can’t make the change, because I feel that adults don’t want to hear young people’s voices because they believe that our voices and our opinions don’t really count.

And I think we all need to work together to be able to, you know, see a good future for Geelong. Especially after COVID, and to rebuild it and to make it stronger.

But how can we do that when not everybody’s working together?

An issue that Madeline was particularly passionate about was mental health, in particular, the stigma around mental health issues and the lack of appropriate support services for young people. This is an issue that she saw as becoming especially acute during the pandemic:

Mental health in Geelong, at the moment, especially during COVID-19, isn’t great.

Throughout my high school life, especially during these past two years, I've seen so many people lose their lives.

Madeline’s sense was that young people are often afraid to speak up and admit they are struggling because of the stigma related to mental health issues:

A friend said to me, you can’t go to the school counsellor.

You’ll get judged, and it will go around the school like fire.

That should not be happening.

It should be normal to go get help and to go ask for help.

Her sense was that even when young people did make contact with support services, wait times to access these services often proved to be a barrier to young people getting the support they needed in a timely fashion. From Madeline’s perspective, if this state of affairs did not change, the consequences would continue to be dire:

There should be so many more services out there to help young people in Geelong.

Or this is going to get worse and worse.

By not focusing on it I think so many lives are going to be lost.

COVID’s been enough for us - mental health needs to get focused on as well.

In listening to and telling this version of Madeline’s story we have been invited to think about how, for Madeline and many other young people, the disruptions caused by the pandemic and the public health lockdowns had significantly impacted the ways in which they think about the relationships between their past-presents-futures, had created uncertainties and anxieties and concerns about their own well-being and the well-being of other young people. Madeline’s sense of these relationships and what hopes and aspirations might look and feel like found expression in relation to a number of key issues. In the first instance she struggled with a sense that lockdowns and moves to on-line learning and teaching were imagined as being seamless, as being mere technical issues in need of technical solutions: ‘I feel that people expect all of us to be able to transition well to remote learning…They don’t understand how hard it is to focus on schoolwork’. Connected to these concerns was her sense that the pandemic had amplified oftentime hidden dimensions of the problem of young people’s mental health and well-being, and the ways in which many young people still keenly felt the stigma of revealing the well-being challenges they might be facing in the institutions (schools) that should be supportive of these challenges: ‘You’ll get judged, and it will go around the school like fire…That should not be happening’. Finally, Madeline felt strongly, even as a member of a youth council, that an apparent emphasis on young people’s agency, voice and participation in education and youth policy discourses did not translate into adults and adult institutions actively listening to those voices: ‘because I feel that adults don’t want to hear young people’s voices because they believe that our voices and our opinions don’t really count’. Particularly in relation to young people’s hopes and aspirations for futures characterised by uncertainty.

Marisa’s story

In 2021, Marisa was 17 years old, in Year 11, and living with her parents and older sister. She was undertaking VCAL at the Geelong Technical Education Centre (GTEC), and imagined her future in these terms:

Okay, so well, my goal in the future is either to become a geologist or work as a curator in a museum.

I think I've always really liked historical artefacts, and also learning about the Earth.

So I think it’d be a really cool thing to get into.

However, Marisa had recently changed schools from Matthew Flinders Girls Secondary College to GTEC after feeling pressured towards pursuing VCE and university studies, a pathway she wasn’t sure was the right fit for her.

Before I do [geology or museum studies]… I think I just want to go become a jeweller and then maybe like a gemologist to just get more information about it.

I think it’s a really good starting point for me, to see if I sort of want to go down a more artistic or sciencey path, because I think it’s the sort of a career where you need to know some things about science and then know how to think creatively and create new designs.

At that time, Marisa’s older sister was studying radiography at university. Observing her sister’s experience of tertiary education had influenced Marisa’s desire to pursue a more vocational path while she weighed up whether she wants to go to university:

I thought about my options when I was at Matthew Flinders doing VCE, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to university straight away.

I didn’t think I was ready.

I thought I didn’t want to make a full time commitment and waste a lot of money doing something that I’m not sure I would like.

That’s why I was thinking about going and doing a basic certificate course to see if I like jewellery making before I do it. That way I can be sure.

In this space of relative uncertainty, Marisa was aware of the different types of knowledge and experience she would need to get where she wanted to go, and that might be of benefit in her future career:

I think I have to be pretty confident with my knowledge of certain gems.

I don’t think I really have that at the moment.

I think I definitely need to read a lot more and get more practical knowledge, which I'll hopefully get on placement next year which will help with that.

So this will help me figure out if I really want to do this or if I don’t.

Marisa’s experiences of the differences between the learning and teaching environments of her previous school and GTEC had been significant in her shaping her thinking about her education, training and employment pathways and futures:

I was at Matthew Flinders originally before I came here [to GTEC], and I became too stressed with the workload.

I suppose I was a bit unhappy for a while because I thought, if I’m not doing VCE, I’d be receiving…It would be a large difference in the education that I’d be getting here.

But it’s okay, it’s not too bad.

I think it’s sort of the work you can do at your own pace.

It’s relatively easy, and with other things, you can make them as complicated as you want.

So if I really want to make something good, I can try hard to make it that way.

For Marisa, VCE and the ATAR score is not ‘the be-all and end-all’:⁴

I’ve always been really indecisive about what I want to do.

But I hope I can do what I want to do.

I think, even if I change my mind, I know there’s different ways and different pathways that I can take to get them.

I think schools don’t stress that enough, because they usually act like VCE and getting an ATAR score is the be-all and end-all.

And it honestly doesn’t seem that way, because I know heaps of students who got decent ATAR scores at our school and then have gone into University and then decided, ‘Actually, I hate this’, and then either changed subjects, changed what they’re doing, or just dropped out.

So yeah, I think you’ve just got to explore all your options to figure it out. And I think that’s what I'm trying to do now, is just figure out what I want to do.

Marisa suggested that these existing performance and pathway expectations did not disappear during the closure of schools as a public health response to the pandemic, and that, indeed, these expectations had produced significant health and well-being challenges for many young people:

I think recently during COVID there were a lot of suicides.

I think it was really sad, especially since… well before that one of my friend’s brothers also committed suicide.

I think it really impacted him in a terrible way and I think COVID just made it worse.

I think a lot of kids are getting stressed by school and that’s sort of what causes them to feel really disheartened, because they’re so stressed.

They just decide to end it, which really sucks!

Because I feel like they shouldn’t feel like that.

For Marisa, the ways in which schools’ prioritised academic performance often came at the expense of promoting ‘understanding more about the world’. In this sense, Marisa hoped that her education could provide her with knowledge, skills and capabilities that would benefit her not only in her future job or career, but in life more generally. Again, she suggested that time pressures often precluded this:

I feel like schools really pressure kids to always do better.

And it’s a great thing to always want to improve, but there’s got to be a point where you realise that kids at this age want to understand more about the world.

But you’ve got to give them the time to learn and understand it.

I think schools usually just chuck subjects in your face, and they were really good and interesting, but yeah, I think there needs to be more time allowed for kids to be able to explore things outside of school.

And in school as well, to learn more things about the world and learn things about themselves.

Discover what they like, what they don’t like, and to think about the world more, and like ethics and morals I suppose.

Marisa expanded on this concern about how schools should facilitate young people exploring ethics and morals with reference to her personal interest in jewellery and gems. With the process of jewellery making often involving practices that are environmentally and socially destructive, she suggested it was important for young people, as consumers of these products, to learn about practices of ethical consumption:

I love jewellery, but I think usually, gold mining has been a really bad problem in Australia and in other countries, environmentally and socially.

Usually local populations are taken advantage of to mine things. So it’s not really good.

But I think it’d be great for kids to learn about that.

Especially to learn how to buy things, ethically, as well.

And to know and research, ‘Hey, if I'm going to get something, where does it come from?’

So they’re not supporting something that hurts other people.

I think kids really care about that nowadays.

Among a number of things, Marisa’s story asks us to reflect on the significant pressures placed on young people in the senior secondary years to make decisions about their future in a relatively short time frame. In the VCE pasts-presents-futures come together and are collapsed into the final two years of secondary school. In Marisa’s experience schools ‘usually act like VCE and getting an ATAR score is the be-all and end-all, and it honestly doesn’t seem that way’. Marisa’s hopes and aspirations, shaped by feelings of being pressured and even anxious, are framed by a sense that she needs to take her time, to slow down and think about her options and possibilities. She ‘feels’ - and she acted on these ‘feelings’ - that she needs to consider multiple, possibly winding pathways rather than the linear ones imagined by organisations such as the OECD in their constructions of young people as being negatively misaligned with the jobs of the future: ‘I think there needs to be more time allowed for kids to be able to explore things outside of school…to learn more things about the world and learn things about themselves’. Such a hope exists in tension with the learning, and human capital and skills development that governments, businesses and international agencies imagine as the ‘purpose’ of schooling.

Discussion: aspirations, futures, and the (broken) promises of education in the twenty first century

In this final Discussion section we want to do a number of things that emerge from telling Madeline and Marisa’s stories, and which depart from our earlier examinations of sociological critiques of aspirations discourses. In doing this work we will suggest that critical, post-humanist, and futures oriented ontologies offer productive possibilities for reimagining the ‘promise of education’ in relation to young people’s aspirations as these emerge from the ‘thick of social life’ (Appadurai, 2004, 67) in which young people live, imagine who they are, and what they might be and become.

Indeed, one of the things that emerges from listening to and constructing Madeline and Marisa’s stories is the sense that the pandemic and the lockdowns in places such as Geelong amplified many of the tensions that characterise the ways in which different stakeholders - governments, businesses, community and advocacy organisations, families and young people themselves - imagine and articulate what might be called the ‘purpose of education’. And the ways in which this ‘purpose’ might be distinguished from the ‘promise’ of education. As we discussed earlier, in many high- medium- and low-income economies during the last 40 or more years ‘education’ has been increasingly ‘re-purposed’ in relation to a dominant policy discourse of individual human-capital development that is made known through terms/concepts such as the ‘employability’, ‘enterprise’, and twenty first century skills that employers in the ‘new worlds of work’ demand (WEF 2020).

From the positions where we have listened to and told the stories of young people these appear as profoundly limiting understandings of the purpose of education, and what it is to be young, and to be often confounded by needing to determine what ‘my future holds’. Stephen Ball (2009, 213), for example, has argued that the purpose of education as it is understood here, imagines ‘a depthless, flexible, lonely, responsive and responsible learner (collectively represented as human capital), devoid of ‘sociality,’ the ultimate commodification of the social’. Madeline and Marisa look very different to this ‘depthless, flexible, lonely, responsive and responsible learner’/subject. And appear to experience the complexities of their past-presents-futures in very different ways to this subject of human capital discourse.

From a different, though related perspective, Facer and Sriprakash (2021), in a cautionary intervention into debates about the ‘codification’ of a capitalised ‘Futures Literacy’, critique the tendency to institutionalise and universalise human capacities to ‘anticipate’ and imagine the entanglements of pasts-presents-futures. In this sense, young people’s ‘aspiration’, as a manifestation of a form of future literacy, is reduced to a technical, even twenty first century skill that needs to be developed within a formalised, normative understanding of the future. In this context there ‘is an urgent democratic and educational imperative to understand, disrupt and reframe dominant contemporary uses and misuses of the future in the present’ (Facer and Sriprakash, 2021, 6). In sketching what might guide this imperative, Facer and Sriprakash (2021, 8) argue for an ‘emergentist’ philosophy in which ‘education is understood as an ‘end in itself’ that emerges from the threefold awareness of knowledge as situated, of self as emergent and of collective life as always in development’. Here, the ‘promise’ of education, as a ‘profoundly non-instrumental practice’ can be understood ‘as a form of care for the future’. In different ways, both Madeline and Marisa’s stories embody a yearning for this something more, a ‘philosophy’ that is largely absent from education as they have experienced it for 13+ years.

In this context, we can return to Appadurai (2004, 67) and his claim that aspirations are ‘never simply individual’. Rather, they ‘form parts of wider ethical and metaphysical ideas which derive from cultural norms’ and are ‘always formed in interaction and in the thick of social life’. In this context, the problem of young people’s aspirations and orientations to such things as new worlds of work would shift from ‘fixing’ the young person and their future orientations, to an examination and analysis of the kinds of ‘power, dignity and material resources’ which shape young people’s capacities to imagine and enact the futures that they might hope for (Appadurai, 2004, 69).

Here, Braidotti (2019) offers a radically different way of thinking about the models of time and temporal orientations that can give shape to the complex networks of resources that shape young people’s pasts-presents-futures in different places. Braidotti (2019, 122) argues for an ‘affirmative ethics’ that builds on a ‘radical relationality, aiming at empowerment’. For Braidotti (2019, 122), this ‘means increasing one’s ability to relate to multiple others, in a productive and mutually enforcing manner, and creating a community that actualizes this ethical propensity’. Braidotti (2019, 121) introduces a way of approaching temporality which accounts for the entanglement of pasts-presents-futures, and argues that the ‘co-construction of affirmative ethics’ can imagine and enact ‘virtual possibilities in the present’. Braidotti (2019, 121) suggests that the ‘multilayered structure of the present’ can be considered ‘as both the record of what we are ceasing to be and the seeds of what we are in the process of becoming’. Such an approach involves ‘creating empowering relations aimed at possible futures’ and attempts to ‘create possible worlds by mobilizing resources that have been left untapped in the present, including our desires and imagination’ (Braidotti, 2019 121).

Drawing on Braidotti’s work Bozalek (2018, 396) argues for the potential of ‘socially just pedagogies’ which foreground ‘the importance of transgressive transformation of the educational project’. For Bozalek (2018, 396) a ‘moving beyond critical deconstruction and critique to alternative enactments of becoming’ can provide ‘the impetus for rethinking learning as a creative and indeterminate process rather than one which has as its objective acquisition fixed bodies of knowledge’. In this sense, aspiration (and a range of other capabilities or skills such as critical thinking, resilience, enterprise, creativity) is ‘not an inherent property of individuals’ but is an ‘assemblage; a complexity of networks of human and non-human actors’ (Bozalek 2018, 396–397). Again, in listening to Madeline, Marisa, and many other young people in this project, we can discern an embodied, situated, but mostly un-articulated sense that their becoming, their entanglements with pasts-presents-futures, is irreducible to the ‘skills’ that powerful others demand that they develop, is irreducible to orientations to their futures that would identify them as aspirational.

The ontologies we have sketched here offer productive possibilities for reimagining the ‘promise of education’ in relation to the entanglements between pasts-presents-futures and young people’s aspirations. Given the state of ‘permacrisis’ (European Policy Centre (EPC) 2021) that characterises the collapse of the Holocene, and the actions and inactions of pasts and presents that are bequeathing young people futures characterised by uncertainty and crisis, then sociologies of young people and education, as Bozalek (2018, 396) argues, must do the challenging work of foregrounding the ‘potentialities and becomings in learning environments, where experimentation in education gives rise to unforeseen but productive and inventive processes rather than predetermined outcomes’.

Part of the work to be done in these contexts is related to identifying, telling and exploring the stories young people construct of their lives and their imagined futures in these different configurations. Importantly, the work here should also be concerned about the often limited social, cultural, economic and political stories, discourses, practices and resources that are made available to different young people, in different places, at different times as they seek to imagine who they are, and what they might be and become.

Ethics approval statement

Ethics approval for this project was granted by Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee (DUHREC). project ID: 2022-137. Madeline and Marisa approved the versions of their stories told here.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Anthony Costa Foundation.

Notes

1 https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm.

2 Ethics approval details provided after review.

3 See for example, (Kelly, Brown and Goring 2023).

4 The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) ‘is a number between 0.00 and 99.95 that indicates a student’s position relative to all the students in their age group…Universities use the ATAR to help them select students for their courses…’ See, https://www.uac.edu.au/future-applicants/atar.