Abstract
Cultural images of the knowledge society and the achievement generation are prevalent in current public and policy narratives about young people’s education. This article investigates how young people themselves give meaning to education, by reconstructing their narratives about the importance of schooling and education in today’s society. We present results from a qualitative in-depth study, consisting of focus group interviews with lower-secondary school pupils in suburban middle-class areas of Norway. From the perspective of narrative methodology, the article identifies how pupils construct, thematize and emplot the role and importance of education in their lives. The article finds that young people navigate a complexity of meaning dimensions in their lives. Although a master narrative of the knowledge society and its inherent achievement imperative certainly dominates the pupils’ accounts, they also present refinements and counter-narratives to these cultural imaginaries.
Introduction
In the last decades, knowledge has been considered a key driver of economic productivity and national education systems are trying to keep up with the global competition of the knowledge economies. Influential education policy narratives of living in a ‘knowledge society’ in which knowledge, skills and competences are pivotal for young people’s life chances, may transform the way young people perceive the role and meaning of schooling (Hilt et al., 2020). Contemporary youth has been characterized as an ‘achievement generation’, that is a generation facing immense and generalized pressures regarding success in all aspects of life (Madsen, 2018; Riese & Hilt, 2020). However, these overarching narratives about generational change should be supplemented and nuanced by studies of how young people themselves react to these circumstances, and how they ascribe meaning to education and their life prospects (Meier, 2023).
In this article, we will present results from a qualitative in-depth study consisting of focus group interviews with 25 lower-secondary school pupils in three schools. The schools were located in lower to upper-middle-class areas in the suburbs of a Norwegian city. Anchored in narrative methodology, the article will identify how pupils construct, thematize and emplot the role and importance of education in their lives, through utterances and discussions emerging in the focus group interviews (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009). We thus aim to investigate the following research question: What characterizes Norwegian lower-secondary school pupils’ narratives about the importance of schooling and education?
This article is part of a larger project in which the authors have previously published studies of education policy developments in the Norwegian and global context (Hilt & Riese 2021; Hilt & Riese, 2022; Hilt et al., 2020; Riese & Hilt, 2020; Søreide, 2022; Riese et al., 2020). These studies provide findings of conceptual shifts in education policies, based on analyses of policy documents from the latest Norwegian reform LK20. In this article, lower-secondary school pupils’ narratives about the meaning of education will be analysed in context of the narrative of the knowledge society, identified in previous publications. This will enable us to reconstruct the pupils’ narratives, not only as subjective accounts but also as they are structured by public and policy narratives. The article shows that the pupils’ narratives substantially align with what we call a ‘master-narrative’ of the knowledge economy, circulating in public and policy discourses (Fage-Butler, 2020). In the pupils’ narratives, education is valued strongly in terms of their life prospects; in fact, schooling is narrated as ‘the foundation of everything’ for them. Yet the pupils also present refinements and ‘counter-narratives’ (Roe, 1994), bringing in different values of schooling and what it entails to lead a good life.
Research on Young People’s Thoughts About Education
In this section, we will review the research literature on young people’s thoughts about education and the structural constraints they encounter when giving meaning to education. The role of education in the globalized modern state has been transformed from being seen as a public good, to being regarded as beneficial for the individual (Tierney & Aleida, 2017). Education policies emphasize measures to set the individual up for successful trajectories in education and life in general (Hilt et al., 2020), in addition to providing inclusive measures aimed at groups at risk of dropping out, or who need special attention (Brunila & Rossi, 2018; Søreide, 2022). Furthermore, Wyn (2009) identifies tendencies for individualizing responsibility for success and failure, as well as the shaping of reflexive future-oriented subjectivities. Researchers in the field of youth studies thus analyse the era of late modernity as representing immense complexity regarding young people’s abilities to navigate their own pathways.
Overall, however, studies do not support a simplistic narrative in which young people merely strive for the formal competences needed to access the labour market. Research finds that young people see education as important for personal growth (Spruyt et al., 2014), as well as societal development (Posti-Ahokas & Palojoki, 2014). When young people narrate their educational journeys, relationships to place-bound factors such as family (Butler & Muir, 2017), social relations, local spaces and labour markets (Rönnlund et al., 2018) seem to be important.
Additionally, the condition of rapid change, and the shifting circumstances of late modernity, are intertwined with continued structural inequalities in terms of gender, race and class (Woodman & Wyn 2015). Young people have varying resources and forms of capital available—cultural resources that are crucial for succeeding in education (Skeggs, 2004). Although structural factors still have an impact, young people nevertheless tend to portray their choices as being individually made (Hegna & Smette, 2017). Furthermore, Evans (2002) finds that youth attribute a universal value to competence and consider individual efforts as more important to success than structural conditions.
In a Nordic context, public discourse has called attention to a conceived rise in mental health issues among youths, for which the role of education is considered crucial (Hilt & Riese, 2022). A much-discussed topic is the concern for perfectionism as a generational problem, and research finds that young people increasingly worry about the future, seeing their own efforts as fundamental to their life chances (Bakken et al., 2018; Eriksen, 2021a, 2021b; Jacobsen & Nørup, 2020; Meier, 2023; Sørensen et al., 2017). Furthermore, research (Balvig, 2006, pp. 57–66) on adolescence and criminality has suggested that we are witnessing a new disciplining mechanism that particularly affects the young people of today, namely ‘future-disciplining’, in which imaginaries of the future function as a mechanism to steer and control individuals’ conduct. The push towards individualization of responsibility within neoliberal economic rationality has been depicted as a general societal tendency, leaving individuals vulnerable.
However, the narrative of ‘the achievement generation’ might risk a too-universal framing of the youth generation and the individualization thesis might risk overestimating the agency of young people (Krogh & Madsen, 2023). Young people juggle several, and opposing, ideals as they strive to both live up to and resist expected educational standards (Meier, 2023). Against a similar background, White and Wyn (1998) have previously called for a more contextual approach to youth studies. Generally, youth research has moved from investigating structural conditions to emphasizing agency, but Biggart (2009, p. 119) predicts that more attention will be paid to agency within structural constraints, interrogating the complexity that characterizes the current situation of mass education. Coffey and Farrugia (2014) suggest foregrounding analyses of subjectivity as a more ethical and powerful approach to youth studies, acknowledging the subject’s embeddedness in discursive, material and interpersonal environments, as well as its ability to act in relationships with these structures. To provide such a contextual approach when studying the meaning young people ascribe to education, this study will use narrative theory as its analytical framework.
Narrative Theory
As narrative inquiry ‘… is a theoretical and methodological approach …’ (Lueg et al., 2020, p. 4), we will now outline the concepts of narratives, master narratives and counter-narratives. Our specific narrative analysis procedures will be accounted for in the methods section.
Narratives are one of the most fundamental ways human beings give meaning to the world (Bruner, 1991). For narratives to make sense, their plots always include some elements and exclude alternative, contrasting or opposing aspects. Through temporal or causal emplotments, narratives connect concrete experiences and happenings, artefacts, as well as more elusive ideas and assumptions in meaningful ways. Narratives thus help us to understand, organize and govern otherwise complex and incoherent areas of our life and society (Roe, 1994; Søreide, 2022).
Although a huge amount of narrative inquiry focuses on individual narratives, this article pays attention to what Somers and Gibson (1994) have coined ‘public narratives’, that is, narratives that are concerned with social, structural and policy phenomena, circulating in society, groups, communities and organizations. We are particularly interested in a specific kind of public narrative, namely what Roe (1994) calls ‘policy-narratives’, that is ‘… scenarios and argumentation on which policies are based …’ (Roe 1994, p. 2). As there are ‘… interconnections and overlaps …’ between various narrative levels (Lueg et al., 2020, p. 6), the article will focus on the narratives that emerged across the focus interviews, as well as the policy narratives the pupils drew on.
The distinction between public master- and counter-narratives (Lueg et al. 2020; Roe 1994) has been important to our analyses. Educational master narratives are narratives that represent and constitute meaningful interpretations of what it is possible to say or not about a given educational phenomenon, and they draw on dominant discourses and power/knowledge relationships about education (Fage-Butler, 2020). Educational master narratives thus have a dominant position when it comes to how education is conceived and practised in society. When such master-narratives overlap with ‘policy-narratives’ their sensemaking, organizing and governing power grows (Fage-Butler, 2020; Roe, 1994). A counter-narrative, however, is a narrative that entails opposition and resistance towards an existing narrative (Lueg et al., 2020; Roe, 1994), such as about aims, values, content or the organization of education. As counter-narratives provide different storylines, they can destabilize master narratives by giving access to alternative knowledge systems, values and identities (Fage-Butler, 2020). Investigating both master- and counter-narratives may thus illuminate a variety of beliefs, values and identity resources.
Preparing and Conducting Focus Group Interviews
The article is based on five focus group interviews with 25 pupils in lower-secondary schools in Norway. It should be emphasized that the pupils were recruited from schools in typically middle-class, suburban areas of Norway, although with some variation as to whether the three schools were located in lower or upper-middle-class areas. 1 None of the schools were situated in disadvantaged areas, and only three pupils had a multicultural background. There was, however, an overall gender balance of 12 girls and 13 boys participating in the groups. Accordingly, this study cannot provide a universal account of young people’s narratives on education but does provide findings of pupils’ sensemaking in contexts such as this.
As we were interested in the pupils’ narratives about the importance and value of education and schooling, focus group interviews proved useful to encourage pupils to voice equal and different stories on our topic. Focus group interviews also have the benefit of providing rich data within a moderate range of time (Denscombe, 2007). Each focus group consisted of one or two moderators and usually four to six pupils. They were recruited via the schools’ heads of department, and/or by the interviewer informing classes in plenary sessions.
The project was approved and registered by our institutional system for processing personal data and in consultation with our data protection officer. All pupils gave informed consent before the interviews started, and we obtained consent from the parents of pupils below the age of 16, in accordance with the Norwegian ethical guidelines (National Ethics Research Committees, 2021). The pupils were informed in detail by the interviewer, to make sure the consent was informed and voluntary, while the parents were informed via information letters. The interviews were video-recorded, using a go-pro-camera, and audio-recorded and transcribed immediately after the interviews. The recordings and the transcribed interviews were stored in accordance with ethical guidelines (National Ethics Research Committees, 2021) in a system designated for the safe processing of empirical data.
All authors cooperated in writing the interview guide and validating questions. We also prepared two sets of materials to function as prompts and stimuli in the interviews (Denscombe, 2007). The first set comprised two written cases, describing different types of pupils and their relationship with schooling. One of these descriptions was based on our previous analyses of the ‘ideal pupil’ in Norwegian policy documents (Hilt et al., 2020), while the other description was constructed as a contrast to this ideal. Both cases were open enough to encourage creativity and meaning-making.
The second set consisted of pictures representing different dimensions of ‘what it means to live a good life’. Pupils were encouraged to choose two or three out of 12 pictures, representing such aspects as schooling, knowledge, success in working life, money/income, family, friends, love, freedom, pets, religious devotion, travel, relaxation, etc. The pictures were ambiguous and could be interpreted in different ways. The pupils were encouraged to reflect on their reasons for choosing their pictures.
The interviewer adapted the questions to the social setting in the groups and asked the questions differently in different settings, to encourage a variety of perspectives on themes, while being aware that the storytelling environment mediates the meaning of narrative accounts (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009, p. 10). The interviews were conducted in familiar surroundings at the pupils’ schools. The interviewer focused on creating a safe space, giving the pupils time to answer questions, encouraging discussions and sharing perspectives. This was particularly important to prevent domination and conformity, a common challenge when conducting focus group interviews (Denscombe, 2007).
Analysing the Material
With narrative theory as an analytical framework, we interpreted the material to identify how pupils construct, thematize and emplot the importance of education in their lives. With the special nature of focus group interviews in mind, we highlighted the interactional dynamics, which is how narratives are co-constructed in the group. In the analyses, we employed analytical bracketing, which is ‘a strategy for shifting analytic perspectives in order to capture complex empirical terrain’ (Gubrium & Holstein, 2009, p. 29). This allowed us to vary our focus between the different aspects of the narrative reality.
The Master-narrative of the Knowledge Society
In the following section, we will first describe the dominant public narrative about the significance of education, identified in our previous studies of educational policy. We will then illuminate how the pupils’ narratives about education were framed by this dominant public narrative.
The Master-narrative in Education Policies
Recent policy developments in Norway emphasize education as key to participation in society and living a long, good and healthy life. To ensure the states competitiveness in the global competition between knowledge economies, education is now considered crucial for state productivity as well as the flourishing of individuals. The main premise of this policy narrative seems to be that, since we live in an increasingly knowledge-intensive society, education is becoming increasingly important, not only to succeed in working life and financially but also to maintain our health, social relations and family bonds (Hilt et al., 2020). Conversely, dropping out of school and a lack of education are considered to increase the risk of exclusion from working and social life, as well as marginalization, with costs for both the individual and society. Thus, the narrative that we are living in a knowledge society seems to create a strict emplotment between childhood and adolescence, and potential risk scenarios (Hilt & Riese, 2022), as well as between education/lack of education and future individual success/failure, respectively (Søreide, 2022). The narrative of the knowledge society and the domino effects of success and failure can thus be seen as a master narrative that stems from policy but eventually gains an equal hegemonic and dominant place in public and everyday narratives. 2 This master narrative, including the promise of a bright future for those who are successful in schooling, and the risk of marginalization for those who are not, is, as will be shown, also very much present in the pupils’ narratives.
The Master-narrative in the Interviews
With some nuances, as will become clear, the importance of schooling was unequivocal in the pupils’ narratives, creating a master narrative ascribing great value and importance to schooling, grades, education and rational life choices. The domino effects of educational success are, for instance, described in a pertinent way by one of the pupils:
In a way, school is just one thing. Said differently, these things are connected. Education can, as P said, lead to a job, leading to money, which eventually leads to a good and nice life with family, where you are able to keep your family together and all that. Money leads to food as well (…), access to the gym, mobile phone, art-stuff, a guitar—right? So, in a way, schooling not only leads to education, since in a way it leads to all these things. The school also leads your attention towards things (…) like climate-change. So, in the small picture, schooling is one thing, and in the big picture, schooling is everything.
The importance ascribed to schooling became especially pronounced in the part of the interview where the informants were urged to select two to three pictures of their own choice, to illustrate what was most important for them in leading a good life. Many pupils picked pictures that could symbolize education, and/or reflect on the role of schooling to achieve other goods represented by the pictures. The following excerpt illustrates this:
Interviewer: What do you think of the role of schooling?
K: School lies ahead of all the pictures we have got here. It is what leads us, our relationships, personality, yes, it is what enables us to get to the other points (referring to the other pictures) we see here. J: It is the foundation of everything. How you do in school is how you will end up.
The value these pupils attributed to schooling was striking in the interviews, a finding that may indicate that these pupils are indeed appropriating the master narrative of the knowledge society. Still, this finding should also be seen in the context of the study, which is the middle-class areas in which these pupils reside. The hegemonic narrative of the knowledge economy, with its strong narrative link between educational value and success, fits neatly with middle-class values. In fact, one could argue, in line with Skeggs (2004, p. 3), that these pupils are producing class through their positioning and exchange of narrative resources in the interviews.
The pupils did not reflect on their class background, however, but narrated the value of education as universal and as an effect of societal changes, such as increased use of and need for technological development, and a more complex, knowledge-based society with less emphasis on informal and experiential competences:
Today, you need competence for everything. If I am going to get a foot in the door, the school is almost the only way to get accepted. If I learn something from my family because they work on something I can get knowledge of, then this is not a legitimate form of knowledge today. [An employer] will think specifically about what your competences are: he has worked there, he has these grades, diploma certification.
The pupils thus narrated their situation in terms of the great societal changes they faced, in which education was becoming increasingly important to society and their own life prospects. This student seems to reflect on the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society, valuing education and technology to solve the big problems of our time:
Nowadays, schooling is more and more important, because we use more technology. We need to develop better and better technology to, for instance, solve the climate-crisis. So, earlier, schooling was not as important as it is today. Back then, you could be trained in a vocation, and you became a carpenter, (…) or you could work with steel and make boats. Nowadays, things are increasingly complex, so schooling, your foundation as youth, is becoming increasingly important.
The idea that education can be considered a door-opener to other societal domains, working life in particular, as well as to economic benefits and relational bonds, was prevalent in the interviews. Education was also depicted as being of great importance for new technological developments and solving the climate crisis. In this sense, one could argue that the pupils adopted the hegemonic narrative of the knowledge society rather uncritically. At first glance, their view of the value of education for leading a good life appears as straightforward as the master narrative of the knowledge society and, as illustrated below, the pupils adopted the narrative in a very middle-class way:
J1: You get a good education. You have parents who support you in your choices. You have someone who is always there for you. You start working on something you like. You look forward to going to work. You get a good salary. You can buy the house you want and the car you want. You get a girlfriend, cohabitant, someone to share your life with. So, that is a good life.
The Master-narrative as a Disciplining Image
The narrative of the knowledge-intensive society, with its possibilities, demands and risks was, in other words, very much present in the pupils’ stories. We can reconstruct the assembly of the series of events from the interviews into the following narrative plot:
Figure 1 illuminates the emplotment of a series of events proposedly leading to educational success. The idea of education as the key to leading a good life functioned as a disciplining image in the pupils’ narratives. The image framed stories about how they put in extra effort at school, even though they had many other things they considered important in their lives, such as relationships with friends and family, and leisure activities.
Emplotment of Life Success.
Many pupils thus expressed how school and homework took up a lot, sometimes too much, of their time and energy and that they had a rather ambivalent relationship with these efforts:
Because if you want to achieve anything in the tests and get good grades, then you need to practice a lot, and if you have a big test, you need to start preparing far ahead. Often, there are several tests, and then you spend all your free time rehearsing and doing homework.
The quest to keep a good balance between preparing for tests, doing homework, attending leisure activities, keeping fit and nurturing friendships was a much-discussed topic. Although they expressed a need for more time for other aspects of life and narrated schooling and homework as a burden, the pupils described their hard work as necessary for their future lives.
Refinements and Counter-narratives
Although the master narrative of the knowledge society, and the strict emplotment of success and failure, were dominant in the pupils’ stories, we also found nuanced and alternative stories. Typically, the stories that emerged during the focus group interviews became more elaborated and nuanced in the course of the discussions between the pupils, as exemplified by this excerpt:
Yes, education, getting food and friends. But the thing is, schooling helps you get all these things, but you can manage without school as well, right? (…) many people have managed to get a life, right, to get food and friends, without schooling. Ehm, just that, it will be difficult of course.
Such refinements of the strict emplotment between education and success in life were prevalent in the interviews. Yet we did also identify plots that created the following counter-narratives to the master narrative.
The Importance of Experiential and Practical Knowledge
As previously mentioned, we used cases as prompts in the focus group interviews, illustrating two different types of pupils: one (‘Mathias’) being very eager to learn, getting very good results in school and the other (‘Markus’) not being as motivated for schoolwork, but having other strengths and interests in life. The pupils elaborated on the cases of Markus and Mathias in the discussions, and these stories illuminated alternative routes to leading a good life:
Mathias has all options available to him. And yes, Markus will have more problems than Mathias. However, if you are applying for work, then other things are more important than grades. How good are your competences? There are reasons they want vocational competences—and not only theory. If you employ someone and they have only worked theoretically, then (…), they do not really know what to do. But those who have practical skills understand what to do and know how to work. Ehm, and he [Markus] will achieve this because he shows a great interest in YouTube and things like that.
In this excerpt, we see an opening towards other skills that might be useful and valued in society than those learned in school. A distinction between those who have ‘only worked theoretically’ and those who ‘understand what to do and know how to work’ is made in the story. The latter is exemplified by the pupil case Markus, emphasizing his interest and competence in making YouTube videos. Later in the interview, the same pupil elaborates on this:
Yes, he has some challenges, but it can be worked on, and we see here that he takes a great interest in YouTube and working with these videos may open a future for him. Because there is so much more besides what we learn in school. He can work in the film industry or something technical, because even though we do not learn this in school, it is quite important, and he too may have strong options for the future …
The fact that the pupil exemplifies alternative competences, with the kind of skills you get from working with YouTube videos, may of course be a result of this being part of the pupil case used as a prompt. However, it may also be the case that these alternative pathways towards leading a good life are very much present in young people’s media lives today. Although some pupils emphasized the change in the intergenerational transfer of knowledge (e.g., learning a vocation from your parents), and that you would need education to pursue a good life in the knowledge society, others saw YouTube as an alternative path towards a good life. One pupil mentioned the success of YouTubers such as PewDewPie as an example of life success without educational achievements: ‘He was not very clever in school but has created a YouTube channel with more than 100 million followers and earns a lot of money. So, there are other options besides general or vocational education’.
The Importance of Meaningful Relationships and Activities
Schoolwork took up a lot of time and effort, as previously mentioned, and the pupils expressed the need for more balance in their lives. They were asked specific questions about how much time schooling should ideally occupy in their lives. Even though education was considered crucial for the future, many pupils found other life aspects to be more important for their well-being here and now. They wanted time to keep fit, to nurture relations with family and friends, to relax and enjoy life and to attend leisure activities such as singing or acting.
The nuances regarding leading a good life were also very much present in the imaginations that came out of the selection of pictures illustrating what a good life entailed: ‘A good life for me is a life where I feel joy and have friends and family and someone to be with, and then a job that I like, in the future’. When reflecting on the pictures selected, many pupils emphasized the importance of solid relationships in their lives. A job that was interesting, fulfilling and/or fun was also narrated as more important than earning a lot of money. Some stories thus emphasized what have been called ‘post-material’ goods and values (Inglehart, 1977): ‘It is what I imagine. Having a wife that I love, some kids that I love, having a job where I earn enough money for my family and have some hobbies that I enjoy’.
The Importance of Becoming an ‘Authentic’ and Good Human Being
When engaged in these post-material narratives, the perspective on schooling was different than in excerpts that expressed alignment with the master narrative of the knowledge society. The narration of school as a social meeting place, where friendships were established and nurtured, was quite prevalent, as expressed here: ‘It is not only education we get from schooling, since we also get knowledge of what it entails to be a human being. And how to be with other people’. Here, we see a shift from the more instrumental narrative plots in previous sections, where education was valued for the sake of getting a good job, and for financial and material security and comfort. This excerpt rather emphasises a non-instrumental view of the role of education, where schooling can give you experiences and knowledge of what it means to be a human being. Some pupils even narrated schooling as a way of becoming themselves as human beings, that is to realize their potential as human beings:
Of course, everything is about social relationships. It is here [in school] we develop and are being formed, it is here we become ourselves as human beings. And this will influence all the other choices we make in life too.
Here, we see that education is valued strongly, but for different reasons than in the master narrative: school is a site for subjectivation, growth and authenticity. In this excerpt, a different pupil expands this plot by linking the development of oneself as a good person to leading a good life:
I would like to add that a good school should make you become a good person, so that you can get happiness in life, really. That is what happens in school, a good school should manage that.
This narrative of self-realization and authenticity is particularly noticeable in the discussions about what schools should value. Schooling should aim at realizing your abilities as a human being, value the diversity of interests and talent, and help you make the most of your potentialities and life in general:
(…) life is so much more than school. You should enjoy life. You only live once. Then you must use those years. It may seem as if you have a lot of years, but it’s not that many years when you think about it. To really enjoy life. And then you must make the most of it, and if something makes you happy, then you should focus on or pursue that (…) rather than learning something.
Here, an ethos of authenticity and self-realization directs the pupils’ plots and stories, thus opposing the achievement imperative identified earlier. Life is short, and one should focus on what makes one happy and joyful, rather than being strictly focused on ‘learning something’.
Still, as illustrated below, the counter-narrative of authenticity also acknowledged the tensions between the schools’ standards and ideals and the pursuit of developing into an authentic person.
Regarding what the teachers choose to focus on—it is not ideal, or not the teacher, but what politicians, and those who decide, say about what it is important to know. We all have different personalities, and we all have different interests, and it is with these interests we create the society we have. So maybe Mathias wants to be a politician (…), but this guy [Markus] could, for instance, work in the entertainment business—because he knows different things. Because they are equally important. We need everything, but it is not evident that we need it in school.
Discussion
This study shows that public narratives concerning the role and value of education influence the way young people perceive themselves and their educational opportunities. The idea of education as crucial to leading a good life, as proposed by the master narrative of the knowledge society, seems to function as a disciplining narrative for these pupils. Schooling is narrated as having indisputable value in their lives, constituting the very foundation of their life prospects. The emplotment of the possibilities and risks of the future that follows from educational success and failure seems to provoke a calculative disposition in the narratives of these young people. A pragmatic moral of negotiation and rational choices emerges one could argue, as a necessity to deal with the prospects and risks of the knowledge society. In the narratives, the pupils seize responsibility for their educational careers, and success is narrated to be very much up to yourself, although with the support of ‘someone who is always there for you’. Schooling then becomes a site for investment in the future, as somewhere to put in effort if you want to create a good future for yourself.
As mentioned, research (Balvig, 2006, pp. 57–66) has suggested that we are witnessing a disciplining mechanism called ‘future-disciplining’, in which imaginaries of the future control individuals’ conduct. Our study supports and supplements these findings from an educational point of view, suggesting that the concern with schooling and rational life choices may be influenced by the power of the master narrative of the knowledge society. By considering present policy developments when reading the pupils’ stories, we see how resources from the master narrative of the knowledge society are influential in the pupils’ narratives of their current and future lives. As Giddens (1991) points out, the reflexivity of the self develops very much in conjunction with the influence of abstract systems of reason.
Still, when interpreting these findings, we need to consider the fact that our informants were residing in middle-class areas and that most of them had a majority background. In this context, we can assume that the pupils had cultural resources at their disposal for understanding, negotiating and adopting the master narrative of the knowledge society. According to Skeggs (2004), class is not a given reality, however, but a dynamic and conflicted process in which class is produced through appropriation of cultural and classed resources. In this view, young people from different backgrounds have varying cultural resources at their disposal for appropriating the master-narrative. One could thus argue that the pupils are producing class through their ability to exchange and negotiate cultural and classed resources into valuable educational, economic and societal resources.
Accordingly, our study does not suggest a universal and unequivocal image of the ‘achievement generation’ as a linear ‘output’ of the master narrative of the knowledge society. First, inequalities in terms of cultural, classed, gendered and ethnicized resources to appropriate the narrative exists. Second, our study shows refinements and ‘counter-narratives’ to the hegemonic notion of the knowledge society. In the delineation of alternative educational trajectories, the post-material narratives evolving around solid relationships and love, as well as the ethos of authenticity and self-realization, we see that formal educational careers are only one among several lifestyle choices young people must juggle. The narratives expressed strains concerning the balancing of different lifestyle choices and conflicting ideals.
The pupils narrated grit and hard work as essential for their future happiness, while they simultaneously pursued values such as happiness, relational flourishing and authenticity. The narratives of the role of education in these young people’s lives thus tended to be quite ambivalent. Schooling and homework were described as much of a burden and in need of boundaries. The balancing between preparing for tests, doing homework, attending leisure activities, keeping fit, and nurturing friendships seemed to be motivated by the quest for happiness and being ‘true to themselves as human beings’. In other words, our study finds that these pupils must navigate ideals of mastery and hard work, as well as authenticity and happiness.
This finding may be open to several interpretations. The pupils’ narratives of pursuing happiness may be consistent with arguments that there has been a ‘happiness turn’ in advanced capitalist societies, in which self-fulfilment has become a moral imperative for the shaping of neoliberal subjectivities (Cabanas & Sánchez-González, 2016, p. 110). Also, the narrative of authenticity, and the quest to become a ‘true’ and ‘full’ human being, might be seen as part of the neo-liberal ethos of the constantly developing, reflexive and self-managing self (Foster, 2016). Normative expectations such as reflexivity, self-investment and psychological capital have become universal values in advanced capitalist societies (James et al., 2021). The achievement-imperative can thus be seen as a generalized imperative in young people’s life, not confined to educational success, but spread across many domains (bodywork, social achievements, etc.). In this perspective, the ‘counter-narratives’ of happiness and authenticity might be seen as drawing from the same ideological framework as the master narrative of the knowledge society.
Still, we argue that the counter-narratives of happiness and authenticity value quite different aspects of life than the master narrative of the knowledge society. Looking closer at the performative function of the narratives, it seems that the counter-narratives identified are employed as more of a coping mechanism and a sort of boundary marking vis-à-vis the expectations of mastery. The participants’ stories thus reflect a tension between being true to oneself and fulfilling the expectations of others, between mastery on the one side and subjectivation on the other side. This is in line with other studies of young people’s aspirations (Davidson, 2011; Meier, 2023), which note the tensions facing youth who are attempting to live up to social expectations which may be in conflict with ideals of authenticity.
Skeggs (2004, p. 139) points to how the development of the bourgeois possessive individual was predicated on the relational ability to draw to him/herself objects and personalize them in an act of appropriation. Middle-class subjectivities are thus constituted by their ability to stand outside themselves and have a ‘proprietal relation’ to their own subjectivity (p. 135). In this way, the middle-class possessive self becomes a site for rational and strategic decision-making in which the subject can attach and detach themselves from cultural ideals by experimentation. Following Skeggs (2004), the pupils’ ability to experiment with cultural resources of master- and counter-narratives can thus be interpreted as a middle-class resource. The pupils are not only appropriating the master narrative of the knowledge economy; they are appropriating it in an aestheticized and authentic way.
Designating the narratives of happiness and authenticity as ‘counter-narratives’ in this article is thus not an indication of a simplistic notion of resistance. Our point is to show how the master- and counter-narratives serve as intersecting repertoires for subjectivation, creating tensions in the pupils’ accounts of the meaning of education. Although the value of authenticity may involve an individualism congruent with the neo-liberal ethos, this individualism is ambivalent in terms of having the potential for opposition to the roles, rules and standards of society. In some instances, the identified counter-narratives offer opposition opportunities for these young people, as authenticity and happiness require a life that gives room for aspects of individual flourishing, stepping outside educational aspirations and developing constantly through learning. Thus, as Davidson (2011) points out, self-expression and authenticity may be empowering and disciplining at the same time. Experience of social and cultural contradictions may be a source of creative forms of subjectivation and scepticism towards established cultural accounts (Davidson, 2011).
The ‘achievement generation’ is considered vulnerable, overwhelmed and anxious, due to increased pressure to perform, and shaped by external and quite narrow conceptions of what it means to lead a good life. Vulnerability is thus nowadays described as a question of potential over-engagement in schooling (Eckersley, 2011). The striking aspect of the pupils’ narratives is the reflexive attention paid to their life choices and education careers, as well as their investment in strategic life planning. However, although the emplotments identified in our narrative analyses suggest that this group of pupils from middle-class areas are indeed mastering their lives in the knowledge economy, the risks and anxieties related to making the wrong choices, and thereby failing, follow as a shadow narrative. The stories of these young people may thus question the prevalent narrative that the youth generation is a generation of success and performance.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.