Dissertation Project: Imagining the Future in the Age of Bipolar Order

Vocational education and training are crucial in negotiations about future social and political visions. This is not only because most young people enter vocational education and training after lower secondary school in Switzerland. VET is part of the social imaginary (Taylor), i.e., normative ideas and images of the future, since it aims to acquire knowledge, skills, values, and ethics suitable for the world of work to improve opportunities for productive work, personal empowerment, and socio-economic development.

My dissertation project takes up the concept of future imaginations as an analytical category. Although futures are imagined and thus fictitious expectations, they acquire a function that guides perception and action in their respective present. This became particularly clear during the Cold War, which was also called an “imaginary war” (Kaldor). After the Second World War, the discourse on the future took on a new quality due to the conviction of its feasibility. At the same time, the future in 1945 was a fundamentally hollowed-out category that had to be filled with new forms of meaning through imagination.

Three cases examine ideas about the future of VET or produced by VET, expressed by vocational training teachers, vocational training policy advisers (in the context of futurology of the time), or apprentices themselves (with a focus on the apprentice movement of 1968). This should answer the question of how the future was imagined, communicated, and negotiated.

The ideas about the future will be critically analyzed, contextually reconstructed, and placed in an international context, and in some parts compared with the USA, “the nation of the future” at that time. Specifically, the project ties in with current work at the interface between historical futurology and historical educational research, whereby the first research strand is integrated into the second. The project, which is set up in terms of cultural history, is not least of interest in the history of ideas. It seeks to show the past structures of consciousness concerning education and society and to enable an understanding of collective integration processes. This seems particularly worthwhile because ideas about the future can differ significantly from the actual course of history.