Education Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Work

Framing Young People’s Futures in the Present

Shane B. Duggan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030306748
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030306755
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Labour Economics

This book examines the possibilities, practices and consequences of digital disruption and networked economies in education policy. As traditional notions of learning and labour are abstracted by networked technologies, young people are exposed to new forms of governance and intervention. Tracing key education policy shifts from the turn of the millennium to the present day, this book explores notions of value, aspiration, and equity in the context of the rise of the networked economies and the 'end of work'. It argues that a policy focus on preparing young people for the future – a future that will be dominated by networked technologies – informs both what counts as 'success', and reorganises young people's orientation in the present in new commodified forms. In an era where the costs of higher education are rapidly increasing despite their relative decline in value, this book will resonate with scholars in youth and educational studies, as well as those with an interest in emerging forms of labour and work. 

© The Author(s) 2019

S. B. DugganEducation Policy, Digital Disruption and the Future of Workhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30675-5_1

Begin Abstract

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

Shane B. Duggan¹

(1)

RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Shane B. Duggan

Email: [email protected]

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 peopleFuturityDisruptionDigital

End Abstract

“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 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 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 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 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Framing Networked ‘Youth’ in the Present: Chasing the Horizon
• 2. Thinking with the Future
• 3. Young People and the Disruption of Everything
• 4. The Hard and Soft Networks of Digital Disruption
• 5. The ‘Digital’ as Problem and Purpose in Education Policy
• 6. Digital Disruption, Education Policy, and the Future of Work: Shifting Frames of Reference in Shifting Times
• Back Matter