The plague of privatization: A futures analysis of the zombification of education

Abstract

The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial decision enforced the withholding of data on private ownership and economic spending in education from the public, as transparency was deemed to damage the competitiveness of private schools. Hence, generating profits and business advantage are prioritized over public interests as the organization and provision of education is progressively shaped by privatization. These changes are what prompted us to consider ‘what if all education was privatized’?

The first part of the article reviews important developments in public education towards privatization and introduces our theoretical framework. The second part draws on aspects of speculative fiction in a dystopian scenario of an imagined educational apocalypse. The scenario starts in contemporary times and ends in 2121 where the education system is dominated by a financial conglomerate called Nescience Ltd. In this technologically advanced society, artificial intelligence systems have replaced educational institutions and teachers. Expensive tuition and fees have made people indebted to Nescience while learning is transformed into the manufacturing of alienated labourers. To understand these economic transitions and the position of Nescience as a knowledge provider in the future, we use the concept of ‘zombification’ to theorize the infection of privatization in the educational sector.

Prologue

Neoliberal restructuring of the public sector, through a market-oriented shift in policies, principles and practices of political organization and administration has affected educational systems globally. Particularly, education has been progressively positioned as a private good and re-articulated as a resource for the ‘knowledge economy’ (Ball, 2007; Beach, 2010). The traditional ideal of public education, infused by critical thinking and underpinning democratic process and citizenship, is in critical condition: ‘Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education are discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive’ (Nussbaum, 2010: 2). An important feature of neoliberalism is the marketization of education, which is produced through privatization and commercialization (Hogan and Thompson, 2020: 3). The inherent incompatibility of education for democracy and education for profit is evident in institutional and social transformations with the primary objective of securing profits: ‘in particular how the marketization of education has perverted the goals, motivations, methods, standards of excellence and standards of freedom in education’ (Hill, 2004: 1).

Ball and Youdell (2008) categorize privatization into two types: (a) endogenous, where public schools are increasingly organized as businesses by importing private philosophies and practices, and (b) exogenous, where public education is opened to private management and delivery of education through school choice, competition and profit-making incentives. However, privatization of education alters more than the organization, provision and funding of education. It changes the meaning of what education is (and should be) and ‘what it means to be a teacher and a learner’ (Ball, 2007: 186). The process of privatization blurs the boundary between the meaning of public and private. What the defining traits of ‘publicness’ currently are in marketized systems is uncertain (Hogan and Thompson, 2020). There is a large body of research examining the historical and contemporary processes and effects of privatization in public education, but in this article, we want to give attention to the future of education. How can we imagine the spread of privatization in the future and what could that imaginary mean for the future (end?) of public education?

We base our futures thinking on the case of Sweden, a country that remains at the forefront of disassembling public education in favour of market logic and which we believe can pose an interesting example of privatization. Over the decades, the Swedish educational system, as in most other European countries, has undergone a series of political reforms towards choice and competition. Through these reforms, the educational system transformed from a centralized comprehensive system to a decentralized marketized system and triggered a spread of endogenous and exogenous privatization on multiple system levels (Lundahl et al., 2013). A feature of the transformation from public to private production of welfare services in the Scandinavian countries is the nature of a more hidden process (Petersen and Hjelmar, 2014). For instance, the actual effects of privatization in education are hidden behind political indecisiveness and corporate protective legislation.

The future, however bleak, is not an abstraction; it is a component and principle of our present action (Slaughter, 1998). Further, ideas about the future affects the reality of the future to come (Aligica, 2011). Our futures analysis is founded in pre-factual thinking and inspired by and based on science fiction, which makes it possible for us to contemplate more socially imaginative and extraordinary future worlds (Kupferman, 2020a). Similar to prior works that have used the spread of viruses and disease to conceptualize change in education and the economy (McMurtry, 1999; Smythe, 2017), we argue that the spread of privatization in education can be understood and conceptualized as a virus. In this context, neoliberalism is conceived as the pathogen (i.e. the overarching disease-causing agent) and privatization as one of many viruses connected to the neoliberal disease pathogen. As a virus, privatization contaminates public education institutions and government policy, reconstitutes a mutated version of education, and echoes a zombie viral infection itself (Blake, 2015). Zombies can be considered a creative leap, but the heart of science fiction is the mirror it holds up to the horrors of contemporary society: ‘Science fiction is, at its base, about what we think might become of us, for better or worse, and about how we get there given where we are right now’ (Kupferman, 2020b: 6).

The zombie has been utilized as a metaphor for neoliberal models where the nature of its being: ‘abject hybridity of the zombie – dead yet living’ (Blake, 2015: 27) signified the perseverance of dead ideas in economic theory such as market-based solutions (Quiggin, 2012) or zombie banks operating in an undead state following financial crisis (Harman, 2010). The etymology of monster (Latin: monstrum) is ‘that which reveals’ and ‘that which warns’ (Cohen, 1996: 38) and is especially fitting for the significance of the zombie as a critical metaphor for a collapsing and seemingly living dead neoliberal economic model that keeps pestering the public sector (McCormick, 2012). In education, the zombie has been used to signify the precarious academic labour force trapped by audit culture in higher education or educational practices devoid of critical thinking as zombie pedagogies (Whelan et al., 2013). The exploding rise of zombies in popular culture and scholarly work seems to ‘have tapped into a deep-seated anxiety about society’ (Drezner, 2014: 4). Traditionally, stories about zombies tend to end in either the complete elimination of zombies or the apocalypse of humanity; there is no co-existence (Drezner, 2014). We believe that this offers a good starting place of familiarity to understand our imagined future of how privatization, conceptualized as a virus, will continue to spread in the Swedish educational system. Using the concept ‘zombification’ we imagine the possible future development of privatization in Swedish upper secondary and higher education over the next 100 years. We focus on upper secondary and higher education since these two levels of the educational system allow for complementary perspectives on the spread of privatization. Upper secondary education has already experienced large moves toward privatization in both policy and practice. In contrast, the privatization virus has moved at a different pace in higher education and is less pronounced.

The article is structured accordingly. First, we discuss the basis of our zombification framework by conceptualizing the zombie and the spread of infection. Second, we explore a possible future scenario of the zombification of Swedish education. This is based on our imagined understanding of how the spread of privatization could look if the ongoing infection process comes to term, from infection to the end stage. We begin with a section where we offer some guidance on how the text should be read. Thereafter, the scenario is organized in three parts, where important current and pre-factual drivers of change are described. The three parts represent stages of infection, and the symptoms of the privatization virus are described from now to an ‘image of the future’ (Aligica, 2010). Next, we draw connections between the scenario and our conceptualization of the zombie and spread of infection to discuss a possible image of the zombification of Swedish education. While our portrayal of privatization may illustrate a dystopic future, we use the epilogue to introduce a sense of hope by discussing what can be learned from this futures analysis.

Conceptualizing the zombie and the spread of infection: imagining an educational apocalypse

It's human nature to seek even the smallest comfort in reason or logic for events as catastrophic as these. (Doomsday, 2008: 00:53)

To conceptualize the zombie and the spread of infection, we draw on the dystopic portrayals of viral outbreaks in the post-apocalyptic worlds of Doomsday (2008) ¹ and 28 Weeks Later (2007). ² These films explore the effects of a virus as the catalyst of societal upheaval and human collapse, which are fitting embodiments of our current pandemic anxieties where the containment of COVID-19 has failed, the global financial system is struggling and climate change is enduring. The infected in these films are not dead per se, but either infected by a virus turning them into rage-filled beings spreading the virus to all humans they meet (i.e. 28 Weeks Later) or infected by the deadly flesh-eating reaper virus trapped in the military containment of Scotland that eventually turns some of the survivors into violent cannibals (i.e. Doomsday). These zombies represent a new paradigm in zombie-lore, where zombies are more heterogenous than before and their motives have been re-interpreted. While still represented and considered as zombies, the post humans infected by the virus in 28 Weeks Later are not true revenants in that they do not die to transform and re-animate, and they do not crave brains specifically. In these films, the primary characteristics of ‘zombies’ and the infected are rage, both in an overtly aggressive behaviour but also in the rapid onset of the viral infection itself. They are driven by uncontrollable urges to destroy and infect people and crave human flesh for sustenance. Otherwise, they starve without it. They also retain some agency compared to previous generations of zombies. In that sense, they are more similar to humans than traditional zombies, and it has been argued that this increases the plausibility of the viral infection (Knickerbocker, 2015).

The zombies’ and infected individuals’ aggressive but purposeful consumption of human flesh, while retaining some agency and sentience, speaks to a more insidious and chaotic nature. Where old-fashioned zombie typologies depict slow rotting hordes of creatures without individual awareness, the wilful feasting of humans and the ensuing violent destruction of modern zombies is a more fitting metaphor for an infection of privatization. Like the zombies consume human flesh for personal gain (i.e. sustenance), privatization consumes all aspects of education to deliberately secure profits for the organization co-ordinating education. The symbolic significance of these infected beings also delivers commentaries on the inaptitude and corruption of societal structures, as the films reveal that the (real) villains are not the infected (Walter, 2017) but is actually the government. As put in Doomsday, the government intended to let the virus ‘eat away the dead flesh’ (Doomsday, 2008: 01:35:33) by letting the poor become infected and ordering the military to shoot everyone when containment was breached. The reason being that the soldiers were unable to differentiate the infected from the uninfected.

These films illustrate how the destruction of social formations is fuelled by the infected but is premised on societal defects such as political failures, capitalist economic forces and imbalanced power relations. Important pre-conditions need to be in place to ensure a successful infection, for example susceptibility and the absence of local defences (Nimmerjahn et al., 2004). Deputy Prime Minister Michael Canaris in Doomsday acknowledges that early on when he says: ‘Fact remains, this is our fault, we made it happen … We created the perfect breeding ground for a virus to take place’ (2008: 21:12). In effect, these defects created a society vulnerable to disease, and the perfect conditions for a virus to take hold and spread.

Similar defects can be found in the Swedish education system. For instance, Sweden has historically adhered to the Nordic model of education, which is characterized by a publicly funded comprehensive education system premised on equity. However, the model was not without faults. While the system may have worked well for some student groups, there was never a point in history when the education system was equitable for all students (Beach, 2018). Now, with over 30 years of policy reform, legislation and political decisions that have prioritized profits over people and safeguarded freedom of trade in education, inequalities between student groups have only been exacerbated. Like the societal defects portrayed in the films, this disturbing contradiction of national goals for equitable education and support of marketized, private ideals have made the system vulnerable and susceptible to neoliberal infection by way of privatization. In other words, policy reforms, legislation and political decisions that enable the attachment of privatization are understood as preconditions for the neoliberal disease pathogen to take hold and ‘attach’ in the educational system.

The films can tell us a lot about the spread of viral infection. For instance, the films depict vulnerability as a necessary pre-condition for a virus to take hold. In 28 Weeks Later, viral attachment to a new host occurs when bodily fluids from an infected enter a healthy individual. The newly infected transform into a zombie not in days or weeks, but in minutes, which shows just how rapidly a virus can assemble and replicate in a new host. Like the zombies, a defining characteristic of viruses is destruction (Tajouri, 2020). In advanced infection, viruses destroy healthy cells, which eventually leads to cell death. In an advanced zombie viral infection, zombies feast on healthy individuals until society, as it was previously known, meets its death. To summarize, three stages of infection can be surmised from the films: (a) attachment and penetration; (b) replication and assembly; and (c) advanced infection. These three stages form the basis for our zombification framework, which structures our imaginary of the possible future development of privatization in Swedish education.

The zombification of Swedish education

The following sections describe the viral spread of privatization in Sweden from its current state in the year 2021 to an imagined chronic and advanced diseased state in the year 2121. In this scenario, we describe the process of how education as we know it is becoming diseased to the point of succumbing to an educational apocalypse of privatization. The scenario is organized by the three stages of infection in our zombification framework.

The first stage, attachment and penetration, refers to the early contagion of privatization, which spreads and affects both the material conditions of the educational system in terms of the economic model and arrangement of education as well as the content, values and goals of education. This stage describes the state of privatization in upper secondary and higher education as of 2021 and some key events leading to the current arrangement. We base our description of this stage on empirical research and government reports.

The following stages are based in pre-factual thinking and describe our imagined future of the spread of privatization. The second stage, which is set in 2051, refers to the replication and assembly of the virus, which leads to private providers, and their ideas and practices, engulfing governmental policy and public institutions. Simultaneously, vital components are reconstituted, causing harmful structural transitions to the system by replicating diseased private entities and principles. The last stage, set in 2121, depicts the outcome of the zombification process. This stage reflects an advanced infection, where privatization has successfully disrupted the previous structures of the educational system and the system has been completely transformed into a private utopia. The scenario culminates with education being designed, organized, governed and provided by a private conglomerate.

Three themes are discussed within each stage of infection in order to illustrate how the state of education changes with the spread of the privatization virus. The themes are (a) values and goals, (b) funding and economic structures, and (c) arrangement of upper secondary and higher education. The purpose for choosing these themes was to give an image of the overarching structural changes in the education system.

Hybrid-education: attachment and penetration of the private into the public

In this stage, we describe the state of privatization in upper secondary and higher education as of 2021 and the developments leading to the attachment and initial infection of the privatization virus.

Upper secondary education 2021

In the last 30 years, upper secondary education ³ has been extensively reformed by implementing school choice, vouchers and private providers. This has been powered by political beliefs of efficiency through competition and the superiority of private delivery. Over time, this has led to public schools adopting market rationales and importing business-like strategies (Allelin, 2019). Neoliberalism transforms the relationship between society and individuals (Hursh, 2017) and this agenda is visible in the mission statement from the 2011 curriculum, which imposes on schools the need to instil competences for future entrepreneurship and self-employment in students. These policy changes arguably characterize a ‘good’ student as: ‘a selfish student who is flexible, problem-solving, collaborative and perpetually involved in a self-monitoring responsibilisation process and the accumulation of education capital’ (Beach, 2018: 101). A central idea in Swedish legislation and educational policy is providing equitable access to education for students. The role of the state is safeguarding national goals of equity and overseeing the municipalities as local organizers of schooling. However, persistent social and educational inequities are widening and can increasingly be related to parental background characteristics such as income, occupation and educational level (Gustafsson and Yang Hansen, 2018; Swedish Government SOU 2017:35). The upsurge of school segregation from 1998 and onwards, with respect to student composition and academic achievement between schools, was found to be a key foundation of declining educational equity (Yang Hansen and Gustafsson, 2019).

Admission in upper secondary education is based on the choice of school the students make, previous achievements (merit rating from primary school) and the competitiveness of other applicants applying to the school. Upper secondary education is partitioned into 18 national programmes with a theoretical or a vocational profile. Students’ choices of educational pathways, particularly recruitment between vocational and theoretical programmes, are tied to family background (Mellén, 2017). Six of the theoretical programmes are preparatory for higher education, which means upon graduation the students fulfil general entry requirements for admission to higher education institutions. A recent government report argued that the needs of the labour market and corporations should be important determinants in programme planning and in determining the kinds of programmes students should be encouraged to choose (Swedish Goverment, 2020a).

The post-reform school market is characterized by a significant growth in educational (primarily private) provisions, while the geographical availability of these is increasingly varied between places (Fjellman, Yang Hansen and Beach, 2019). Urbanization, increased student commuting and establishment patterns of private schools have been linked to a rapid decline of schools in rural and sparsely populated areas when local public schools are outcompeted (Fjellman, 2017) . Schools are funded through vouchers that are financed by students’ residential municipality and state funding (students do not pay fees). The motivation behind the voucher reform involved financial efficiency of public funds, but no positive effects of efficiency have been found (Böhlmark and Lindahl, 2015).

Private providers consist of teacher and parental co-operatives, religious organizations, venture capitalists and conglomerates but 89% of schools are run by corporations (Friskolornas riksförbund, 2021). The private schools are largely located in urban areas as private providers have only established schools in 33% of 290 municipalities. In 2020, there were 1307 school units ⁴ (34% privately owned) in upper secondary education and approximately a third of students go to a private school. Applications to start private schools are regulated through the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. While there are no formal demands on who can apply, the proposed owner must adhere to school legislation, curriculum and miscellaneous rules in education. To be eligible for funding through the voucher system, the school also has to be open to all students who apply to it. However, private schools are linked to direct and indirect cream skimming of students. Their preference for school locations in population-dense and high-income places with larger groups of well-educated, high-income families indirectly targets specific students (Angelov and Edmark, 2016; Edmark, 2018). Direct strategies are argued as for-profit private providers targeting high achieving students with the most lucrative profit margins (Pålsson, 2015).

While the private educational conglomerates and the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (an organization for companies in the business sector in Sweden) regularly lobby for ‘positive effects’ of school choice and privatization in campaigns, commercials and in governmental reports, the public continue to be critical towards private providers and the generating of profits in public services (Lindblad et al., 2018). It is also an important question of democracy and transparency. To illustrate, the Public Access to Information and Secrecy act, which stipulates the public’s right to obtain official documents produced by authorities, does not include private organizers of education (Swedish Government, 2018). Only public schools are included. ⁵ Political proposals to include them are repeatedly rejected and voted down (Killgren, 2020; Swedish Government, 2015a). Instead, providing data and information to the public, researchers or policymakers on private schools ⁶ is considered to be damaging to their competitiveness and the data is protected as trade secrets (Swedish Government, 2020a). Thus, any kind of large-scale detailed analysis of the effects of private for-profit ownership in education have not been made and continues to be impossible. Not even examiners that write governmental reports have access to it (e.g. Swedish Government, 2020a). A new judicial decision enforced the withholding of data on private ownership, and since public and private schools are to be treated equally, data (after 2019) on public schools will no longer be published on the website of the National Agency for Education. ⁷

Teacher salaries and the number of qualified teachers in private schools run by larger conglomerates have been found to be significantly lower than the national average, but also compared to other private providers (Killgren, 2021). In 2018, approximately 9.89 billion SEK of total municipal funding of upper secondary education went to private providers (Swedish Government, 2020a). Two of the largest educational conglomerates reported approximately half a billion in profits together in 2019. However, due to the data secrecy, there is no way to estimate exact profit withdrawals by ownership and the impact of these on resource distribution between schools.

Higher education 2021

In the last 50 years, the Swedish higher education system has greatly expanded. Following a series of reforms, higher education grew from just a handful of universities located in and around large cities to a system encompassing different types of higher education institutions located in regional centres and smaller towns. As of 2020, there were 48 recognized higher education institutions in Sweden that varied greatly in size, from small institutions with little more than 100 enrolled students to larger institutions with roughly 45,000 (UKÄ, 2020). In the Nordic countries, Sweden included, higher education has generally been perceived as a public good and a responsibility of governments. Of the 48 recognized higher education institutions, there are universities (15 public, two private), university colleges ⁸ (12 public, one private), and small and specialized education providers ⁹ (four public, 14 private) (UKÄ, 2020). Although several private institutions ¹⁰ exist, approximately 90% of higher education students attend public institutions (UKÄ, 2020).

With the system expansion, access to higher education for student groups with different backgrounds increased and the number of enrolled students grew. Admission to higher education is based on merit through achievement in grades at the upper secondary level or scores on a standardized admissions test. Equal opportunity in access to higher education is valued, so an important strategy to achieve this has been to disavow tuition fees in order to remove economic barriers to participation. This period is also marked by a shift in policy focus from broadening recruitment to broadening participation (Swedish Government, 2017), emphasizing the view that diverse groups of students should not only apply and enrol in higher education but also receive support from higher education institutions so that they might successfully complete their studies. However, the seemingly altruistic ventures of broadening recruitment and widening participation masks the underlying competitive motivations of higher education institutions and their leaders.

With expanding enrolment, the education and research carried out within institutions get increased exposure nationally and internationally. This has led some Swedish higher education institutions to employ different strategies to appeal to and recruit students. For example, in 2013, Uppsala University, one of Sweden’s largest and most research-intensive universities, merged with Gotland University College, which was a small institution that had an education focus. The merger had three purposes: (a) to ensure the continuation of higher education in the Gotland region by taking advantage of Uppsala’s ‘brand’ and competencies in research and education; (b) to pool resources in order to sustain small education and research fields (e.g. archaeology); and (c) for Uppsala to take advantage of Gotland’s knowledge and experience in distance education. (Ljungberg and McKelvey, 2015).

In Sweden, higher education is mostly offered on-campus, though student participation in distance education has grown and there are calls from the government for further expansion of distance education (Swedish Government, 2020b). According to the most recent statistics from the Swedish Higher Education Authority, 19% of all students study completely at distance while 4% participate in blended on-campus/online learning (UKÄ, 2020). The education that is available at a distance is mostly in the form of individual courses rather than whole programmes. The distance education offerings also tend to be centred in teacher education, healthcare and vocational education (Swedish Government, 2015b) , underscoring values in learning for the labour market rather than learning for the sake of learning. Further, distance education is not as widely offered at the well-established, research-intensive universities such as Uppsala University (UKÄ, 2017). Hence, by expanding distance education, the research-intensive universities have the potential to broaden their reach to untapped student markets in a way that is more cost effective than campus education.

Since the allocation of government funding for first and second cycle education (e.g. education leading to bachelor and master’s degrees) is performance based, there is incentive for higher education institutions to attract new full-time students. Funding is allocated based on the number of full-time equivalent enrolled students and on the number of credits they achieve. All institutions get the same government per capita allocation, but the amount that is allocated differs by field of study. For example, technology and engineering receive more than the social sciences (UKÄ, 2020).

Another source of competition is for international students. Over the years, international students have come to be viewed as not only important for international development but also as ‘products’ that could be exchanged in an international education market. Their recruitment is important for the global image and competitiveness of higher education institutions and to sustaining innovation in domestic labour markets (Åkerlund, 2020). Additionally, international students originating from outside the EU/EEA and Switzerland are a source of income. While international students are not cash-cows like in some other countries (e.g. the USA and UK), the fees collected from international students have increased by about SEK100m each year (US$12m, €10m) since the international student tuition policy was implemented in 2011 (UKÄ, 2020).

In addition to competing for students, higher education institutions also compete for research funding. As of 2019, funding for research and doctoral education came from a number of sources, including direct government funding (70%), external public sources (6%), external private sources (15%) and other sources, including international organizations (e.g. the EU) (8%) (UKÄ, 2020). Unlike direct government funding of research and doctoral education that is generally not performance based, external public funds are available to institutions on a competitive basis through research councils and from other public funding agencies located in regions and municipalities. Over time reliance on these competitive forms of research funding has grown due to a redistribution of direct funds to the research councils and foundations. At the same time, direct funding to institutions became more thinly distributed as the number of higher education institutions grew ¹¹ (Ljungberg and McKelvey, 2015). There are also external private sources of research funding, though research funding from corporations is not extensive.

The increasingly competitive environment between higher education institutions, coupled with a reform that gave institutions increased autonomy over their internal management and administration (Swedish Government, 2009), has led to increased institutional and financial autonomy and oversight. Within higher education institutions, this has meant that strategic and administrative units have expanded (Agevall and Olofsson, 2020) and have been given greater power, alongside the expansion of bureaucratic processes and the adoption of market-oriented approaches to organizing higher education (Puaca, 2020). Comparatively, these changes resulted in a loss of professional autonomy for academics and were replaced with increased accountability measures and a commodifying mission to prepare students for the labour market (Puaca, 2020).

Private replication and assembly: market cannibalism of education

This stage is set in 2051 where the privatization virus has replicated at rapid speed and latched on to new areas in upper secondary and higher education.

Upper secondary education 2051

In the last years, the Nordic model has nearly disappeared with lowered and differentiated rates of student achievement and expanding school segregation in upper secondary education, leaving no further political support for the traditional goals of a comprehensive public-school organization. Labour market entrance was made an important national goal of education guided by aims of equality of opportunity and obligations of productivity. These were specifically highlighted in the 2049 curriculum. While students still enjoy the right to choose schools, the upper secondary programmes are planned yearly and are based on a long-term labour market prognosis where unprofitable subjects are adjusted and excluded from the national curriculum and local curricular. Students are proportionally assigned a place in a programme, based on chosen school, achievement in primary education and projected professional trajectory. Choosing the ‘right’ school has proven more important since school proximity to businesses is an important determinant in what programmes schools are assigned each year. While the strategic programme planning has reduced unemployment rates after graduation, school segregation is further compounded by geographical place and local labour market.

A partial removal of educational responsibilities from municipalities followed public outcry after the exposure of fiscal negligence in the funding of school vouchers, which resulted in a substantial lowering of public funding of education. The government tasked external audit agencies with overseeing a reformed voucher system to guarantee future financial stability in the educational sector. An increased outsourcing of the educational provision followed, together with financial difficulties that prompted mergers of public and private upper secondary schools. A national government initiative instituted individual tuition and fees, triggering a boost of much needed finances covering substantial amounts of institutional overheads. However, the negative effects of enforcing tuition on individual students and families included a significant drop in recruitment in upper secondary education from lower income and minority families and a general decrease in graduation rates. Additionally, more students began struggling with the burden of large debt from an earlier level of schooling than before. These effects were especially prominent amongst lower achieving students who struggled with reaching graduation, as support for students with special needs were cut.

The mergers between public and private schools also proved detrimental to the goal of having a diversified group of educational providers in the school market, as well as aims of bettering the geographical availability of school provisions. Instead, these mergers and lack of legislative prohibitions on monopoly forming made it possible for educational conglomerates to acquire smaller public and private schools at alarming rates and at lower costs, thus cannibalizing large shares of the school market. In aiming to secure financial efficiency in schools, savings strategies included shutting down smaller high-cost schools in neighbourhoods and municipalities with small student birth cohorts, reducing staff density at schools and increasing class sizes.

Higher education 2051

Ljungberg and McKelvey’s (2015) musings about whether or not mergers between higher education institutions would be forced by the government rather than voluntary proved to be prophetic. As government funding for higher education was reduced, institutions were forced into mergers in order to consolidate resources. Physical buildings in small cities and regions were let go and the limited resources were re-allocated to improve the technological infrastructure for distance education. One could say that in the last half century, the physical presence of Swedish higher education retracted, yet its digital presence expanded.

In connection with the mergers and expansion of distance education, fewer full-time teachers and researchers were employed. This is partly because courses with high numbers of student participants were now possible. In a sense, teachers became managers of distance education courses, occasionally updating course content and responding to their customer’s inquiries. Another reason is because government supported research for the humanities and social sciences has almost become a thing of the past since most government funding was allocated to developing new technologies for distance education. Private support for research has expanded but only in fields and for projects deemed relevant for increasing profit margins.

Business-like principles of raising efficiency and revenue continued to permeate the higher education sector, and the allure of reaping profits became ever great. There were tuition hikes for international students and domestic students also began to be viewed as ‘products’. The strong government support that once existed for a subsidized higher education system has been replaced with a view that higher education is a private good and should be funded as such. While negligible at their start, tuition fees for domestic students became increasingly burdensome and are expected to be for the foreseeable future since a plan for regular tuition hikes was recently introduced. This shift toward tuition fees for domestic students also meant that admission to higher education is no longer just a matter of merit but also a matter of money.

Despite tuition fees for domestic and international students, even more students participate in Swedish higher education now than they did 30 years ago. The expansion of more flexible modes of learning through distance education made it possible to attract customers who are well established in their careers and looking to grow competence in their field alongside their work. This has opened the door to increased collaboration between higher education institutions and the private sector as tuition support schemes have started to be introduced at large corporations to offset the growing burden of tuition fees.

Advanced infection: dead yet living

This stage is set in 2121 where the zombification process of Swedish education has come to term. Privatization has caused an educational apocalypse where public education has been eradicated.

The Nescience Academy 2121

The educational reforms and changes to legislation that were carried out since the end of the 2080s and onwards, prompted a complete shift of responsibility for all levels of education from the state and municipalities to private institutions. These changes brought about a private overhaul of economic structures and a re-organization of upper secondary and higher education. National goals of equitable access to education were re-formulated as a shared responsibility between educational investors and consumers. This ensured that the education sector would be kept self-sustaining and profitable but also primarily focused on supplying productive workers nationwide.

Previous pandemics (e.g. COVID-19, Pneumonic flu of 2044 and Red death of 2100), where in-house education was temporarily re-packaged as distance education, contributed to changed views on what education is and how it should be arranged. Archaic concepts of a national curriculum, physical schools and human teachers have been substituted by flexible educational packages, personalized virtual education and artificial intelligence systems to fulfil desires for comprehensive and convenient education. The 22nd-century citizen requires educational solutions that are adapted for challenges in modern society. Following private investment in the education system, educational innovations to secure efficiency through modern technologies aimed to promote the learning potential of children to adults. Parallel with these changes, education was initially outsourced to multiple private providers. A ‘natural’ monopoly quickly developed as these providers were acquired by Nescience Ltd, as the most efficient number of firms in the market was deemed to be one. Nescience Ltd has capitalized on the current state of the education market by instituting hierarchized learning packages that ensure flexible and equal access through (a) state-of-the-art optic devices and (b) the highest quality in artificial intelligence systems. These designs ensure minimal impact to the delivery of education during future pandemics as education now depends fully on digital structures.

Forgoing the obsolete construction of place-dependent educational facilities, the opportunity to work smart and be great by being online has been realized by Nescience, which offers the obligatory opportunity of participation in the highest standard of cyber-learning. The previous physical schools and universities located in neighbourhoods across Sweden reproduced patterns of inflexible and unequal access to education through residential segregation and varying access to highly educated staff (formerly known as ‘teachers’) dispersed unevenly across geographical locations. The unpredictability of human educators due to differences in cognitive abilities, formal qualifications and educational levels, which contributed to inequalities in learning opportunities and outcomes, has since been overcome with the introduction of artificial intelligence systems. Nescience delivers universal access to the most outstanding and technologically advanced education packages through their personalized virtual education devices called Nescience Personal Optic Transmission (NESPOT). Nescience customers are fitted with a device so small they do not even notice. The device rests snuggly on the retina membrane and automatically connects to each residential transmitting network for educational access. The automated and cost-effective service guarantees 24/7 availability of educational material and continuous accessibility by personal configuration and Nescience cloud services. The content of the learning packages was selected in careful consultation with business partners in a range of fields and thereby guarantees customers will have the skills necessary to satisfy employers.

Every customer’s cyber-learning achievement is summarized in a NESPOT score (weighted by social approval rates and amenability). The NESPOT score is comprised of measurements of cognitive abilities and the completion of the learning packages. Transitioning to advanced learning options is premised on NESPOT scores and an individual selection process executed by the AI Innovation Department at Nescience. Only those demonstrating a unique composition of cognitive and behavioural traits have the opportunity of becoming Nescience designers (i.e. ‘researchers’), leading future advancement and innovation at the Academy.

Nescience supplies a comprehensive educational experience, offering services ranging from a convenient menu of educational options through NESPOT to financial services guaranteeing coverage of tuition and fees. In contrast to earlier models of educational provision that were largely government subsidized, Nescience offers three payment options for individuals. Customers can fund the obligatory connection to NESPOT and the learning packages through (a) individual monetary payments, (b) internships at branches of Nescience post-completion or (c) enrolment in the Life-cycle Modification Buyout System (LIMBS). The Nescience internships (including room and board) spans between 10 and 20 years at selected locations, depending on the number of education packages purchased. However, the LIMBS system represents a unique opportunity for individuals to finance their learning through a mechanic extraction of life force. In this system, the life span of each enrolled customer is reduced, corresponding to the length of an internship. The extracted life force is then transformed into electricity that fuels the digital infrastructures and cloud services at Nescience. This financing model enables payment through monetary means, labour hours or life years, and safeguards educational accessibility for all Nescience customers regardless of background.

An interpretation of zombification within educational privatization: a discussion of key elements

The main objective of this article was to imagine a possible future for how privatization in Swedish upper secondary and higher education could expand from its current state in 2021 to an imagined state in 2121. In many ways, this imagined future echoed the spread of viral infection in the films Doomsday (2008) and 28 Weeks Later (2007). In this section, we relate the development of privatization that was presented in the scenario to the conceptualization of the zombie and spread of infection in the films in order to discuss and illustrate our imagined zombification of Swedish education across a 100-year period.

In the first stage, the attachment of the privatization virus varied between the two educational levels. In upper secondary education, the virus attached both exogenously and endogenously. In higher education, the privatization virus instead attached endogenously. Ideas and practices from the private sector infiltrated the processes and structures within educational institutions, and private providers acted as organizers of education. In upper secondary education, the attachment and penetration of the privatization virus infiltrated many aspects of schooling, policy and practice but also the everyday lives of students and teachers. The function of the school choice mechanism and competitive market setting was to efficiently eradicate ‘bad’ schools through students’ choices. In actuality, educational provision ended up distorted, school segregation was fuelled and the choices for socioeconomically strong families were favoured. At the same time, government continuously obstructed transparency into private providers and their schools. These strategies seem to parallel the intentions of corrupt officials in Doomsday by first letting the virus run amok and second, intending to keep the vaccine secret, meaning to ‘Leave the dying to die’ (Doomsday, 2008: 22:01), to rid society of the burden of the poor.

Like the zombies in 28 Weeks Later (2007) lost dexterity in their motor skills, dexterity in the sense of thinking and responding quickly and effectively in higher education got worse as the virus attached and the bureaucratization of institutional processes penetrated the system. However, unlike the zombies, the dexterity of higher education leadership and administration improved as they became more autonomous from the government and able to respond strategically in ways to remain competitive in a changing education market. Similar to the zombies competing for fresh humans to infect, higher education institutions increasingly pursued strategies to increase their student numbers. While this often went under the guise of public-spirited ventures, the reality was that these ventures led to private-minded gains such as increased recognition and legitimacy. Hence, in this scenario, the higher education institutions were not infecting students. Rather, the students were a by-product of the continued spread of privatization within the system.

By the beginning of the second stage, we imagined that privatization would have completely penetrated the fabric of education, that is, the values and goals, funding and economic structures, and arrangement of education. Like the rapid onset and spread of the viral infection in the films, we imagined the progression of privatization in upper secondary and higher education to also be rapid. For this reason, we envisaged only a 30-year period for the privatization virus to assemble and replicate to the point that it became difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate uninfected educational institutions and processes from those that were infected with privatization. For instance, business-like ideals of increasing revenue through tuition fees initially penetrated higher education with the introduction of international student tuition fees. However, over the 30-year period, principles from the private sector continued to assemble and replicate to the point that these principles were applied to domestic student tuition fees.

Likewise, the developments in upper secondary education covered a lot of ground (e.g. the profitability of education was instituted in national goals). Similar to the boy in 28 Weeks Later (2007) that sought refuge in a house of survivors but ultimately contributed to their demise by leading the zombies to them, there was no way of escaping the effects of privatization by this stage. The commander that issued the order to target everyone said: ‘We have lost control’ (28 Weeks Later, 2007: 00:54:20). The same could be said about the situation in upper secondary education. The businessification that entered the system now allowed private providers to ‘eat away’ or cannibalize the school market and engulf the remaining public institutions that were unable to survive by themselves in a hostile and financially depleted system.

In the films, the advanced stage of the viral infection brought about death to society as previously known. Instead, living took on new meaning. By advanced infection, few uninfected humans existed. For the few remaining uninfected, a sense of structure and familiarity was replaced by fear and a worry of the future to come. Similarly, in our imagined future of education in 2121, the structure of education as we knew it was dead yet learning continued to live on in a different form. Like the scenarios in the films, advanced infection represented a world without co-existence between public and private (human versus zombie). The obsessive hunt for flesh, trailed by ultraviolent destruction of the living in the films, was mimicked in our envisioned end stage by a corporation that organized and related all learning and human development to profitability and where lives were conceived foremost as workers. The existence and origin of Nescience is predicated on current trends of allowing privatization measures to be presented as solutions to long-term problems of segregation, declining student performances and an underfinanced public education. Similarly, the catastrophic events leading up to the zombie apocalypses in the films related to failures such as government corruption and societal inequalities.

In the end, the concept of equitable education was perverted. Productivity was prized to such an extent that paying for school by shortening your life span and fuelling the infrastructure of Nescience through your life force was presented as an equitable opportunity. Just as the real villains in the films are not zombies, but are instead the failing government and social structures, the villains in our scenario are not private education providers like Nescience. Rather, the villain is government policy failing to protect people over proprietors. Hence, the culminating point in our scenario of the zombification of education was when the system allowed a private educational provider to eat away at the flesh of LIMBS participants in an effort to protect profit while under the guise of creating educational opportunity.

Epilogue

Whereof what’s past is prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge. (Shakespeare The Tempest (2008, 2.1:253–254))

From the wise words of Shakespeare, we can construe that the past does not dictate the future, rather we have the possibility to mould the future with the choices and decisions we make today. Our dystopian portrayal of the zombification of education in Sweden offered a dire scenario of the future of education if we allowed privatization to permeate all aspects. However, all hope is not lost. In the films Doomsday (2008) and 28 Weeks Later (2007) we learned that while it is not possible to return to life the way it was before a viral outbreak, we learned that it is possible to build anew through humanity’s deep desire for a life worth living.

Education is steeped in tradition and there are many willing to protect the core values and institutions that make up educational systems around the world. While we cannot return to a system before privatization, we can urge educators, policymakers, and those in the private sector with educational interests to take steps toward building a new future for education. In Sweden, educational leaders and policymakers can begin by abolishing profit making in education (and all other welfare services) and by enforcing a thorough vetting of private providers and the importation of business principles and strategies in education. Rural areas have been particularly afflicted by privatization measures, where smaller local schools disappeared together with a lowering of nearby access to healthcare facilities and loss of job opportunities. Initiatives to rebuild and maintain local access to welfare in rural and sparsely populated areas need to be financed and organized by national and regional governments.

There also needs to be a form of checks and balances between the government and private education providers. First, parliament needs to vote for including private providers in legislation, such as the Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act, which stops the obstruction of public transparency of private schools. Second, researchers should be encouraged to examine the effects of privatization through accessing (what is currently prohibited) register data on private ownership, to uncover the true effects of privatization over time and on multiple levels in the educational system. In striving for democratic accountability, the public’s negative view of profits in education and the large body of current (and hopefully future) research on the effects of privatization needs to inform future political decisions on all levels of education in Sweden. Almost 30 years have already gone by where the extent of what privatization has truly meant for Swedish education has been hidden, and this needs to stop.

Finally, we recognize that many of the policies and reforms that encouraged the spread of privatization in education came about through sincere efforts by educators and policymakers to improve the system. Now, several decades later, we call on them to consider the scientifically backed consequences of those efforts and ask themselves if the current state of education was how they envisioned the future for education when those policies were initially put into place. Our guess is that for many, they had not considered the myriad of possible futures for education.

Not imagining a possible future for education does not rule out the possibility of its occurrence; rather, it means that the future of education will be fraught with uncertainty. If we can imagine a dire future, we as a collective of educators can also imagine a different future. Therefore, we call on others to continue our futures thinking and contemplate how we can create and nurture a future for education.