Hidden, inconsistent, and influential: Images of the future in changing times

摘要

In a research on the images of the future held by young Finns, the images dealing with personal future and one's own immediate life domain were generally seen as the realization of individual hopes, while the future of the country was seen much gloomier and the future of the world was mainly described as the actualization of all the global dangers and threats the mass media and science fiction have ever brought about. The same dichotomy is also evident in other studies in which the images of the future held by teachers and educators have been studied. Teachers and educators are not aware of the problem of young people's confusing images of the future at all. Instead, it rather seems that they share the confusion. The images of the future are more or less based on the assumption that the course of development in the future will follow the same route it has trailed so far. The future is taken as somehow given and described in rather conventional or popular terms and effects, without any deeper or more profound consideration or analysed anticipation. For example, the future of the school or university where an individual teacher works were described with concepts and choices that are more positive and optimistic than those used in describing the future of the school or university as an institution in a wider sense. When it comes to society itself, and especially to the future of the world, the images became much grimmer and issues and ideas of negative development were mentioned or chosen much more often. The results show that teachers' images are dominated by the belief in the persistence of traditional institutions and conventional, familiar ways of doing things. The challenge for teachers and educators is, how to prevent young people from losing their belief in the future and in their own possibilities to influence it, to take their future in their own hands, even if they also inevitably must see the threats facing this world? How to increase the positive effects of the world becoming smaller, contiguous, and more intimate at the same time when its future threats seem more and more uncontrollable? This means that teachers and educators should first become aware of their own images of the future and the dichotomies and discontinuities they might be composed of.