Uncertainty as Ignorance? Governing Futures of Education

Abstract

Purpose

At what point does a humble and/or realistic acknowledgment of unknowing tip over into ignorance-making of a misleading or dangerous sort? This article tackles this question by examining invocations of “uncertainty” that circulate in educational futures literature.

Design/Approach/Methods

Through a critical reading of a selected set of education futures publications from leading global actors (e.g., OECD and UNESCO) it aims to unpack the ways that certainty/uncertainty govern the future by installing norms and disabling certain possibilities while enabling others.

Findings

The paper finds that not-knowing plays an important role in education futures work, with significant consequences that demand thoughtful, critical analysis of each concrete situation.

Originality/Value

Calculating certainty and taming chance has had a long (if checkered) career in educational planning. This is well recognized in the literature. However, less attention has been paid to “calculations of uncertainty,” specifically to the ontologies of indeterminacy that are generated through educational planning and policy that pretends to account for what is “known” and “unknown” about the future—which is the intellectual project of this article.

In a news briefing on February 12, 2002, then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield addressed reporters’ questions about evidence that might show that the government of Iraq was supporting terrorist groups. Coming 5 months after a group of militants associated with the Islamic extremist group, al Qaeda, had hijacked airplanes and carried out coordinated suicide attacks against symbolically significant targets in the United States, this news briefing fit into a larger pattern of the George W. Bush administration's efforts to build a false case ¹ that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” and that its connections to terrorist groups posed a substantial threat to the United States. For his part, Rumsfield (2002) waxed philosophically,

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

He went on to say that it is the last category, “unknown unknowns,” that tended to cause the greatest difficulties (“to free countries,” at least). Rumsfield's so-called “matrix” has enjoyed a popular afterlife. Today, it crops up in corporate and policy circles, often with no connection to its role in the obfuscations that led to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Nonetheless, it should serve as a powerful reminder of the possible dramatic, real-world consequences that a politics of indeterminacy can have.

The play of un/known un/knowns figures in Rumsfield's 2012 post-administration memoir and was expanded into a riveting documentary produced by Errol Morris. In a series of New York Times blog posts, Morris (2014) dug deep into the logic of these epistemological proposals and suggests that the first use of “known unknown” dates to 19th-century romantic poetry. Keats invoked it in reference to the sovereign power of love and, later on, Robert Browning used it as a metaphor for the unknowability of the mind of man. With good reason, the knowledge of unknowability has the potential to fascinate us. It can also transform us and shape what we set out to do. Moreover, in some instances, the knowledge of unknowability can be generated, cultivated, and reified. This transit from a form of knowing to something specific that exists in the world speaks to the diverse possible ontologies of indeterminacy. This article focuses on the different forms that indeterminacy takes in futures work in education, which—as we will see—are intimately entangled with the particular assemblage of practices and discourses being brought to bear on the problem of relating educational actions to probable, predicted, possible, and preferred futures.

Calculating certainty and uncertainty in education

In his classic 1970 text What is educational planning? Phillip Coombs, the founding director of UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), spoke of a growing consensus that education the world over urgently needed ingrained systematic analysis that would plan for internal system changes as part of making schools and other educational institutions more effective, efficient, and responsive. “Planning” was an activity for everyone involved in education, from teachers to government leaders. It was to produce “built-in, continuous process of educational self-renewal” (Coombs, 1970, p. 58). This approach to calculation bore the imprint of cybernetics, the dominant American approach to “systems” thinking in the postwar years. As defined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener (1965), cybernetics was a science of control and communication that allowed for the management of complex systems in one part by paying attention to feedback loops. Systems theory provided a symbolic model for codifying a hypothesized set of relations (Popkewitz, 2020) and a strategy for managing certainty and uncertainty.

Coombs (1915–2006) was an American professor of economics who helped establish UNESCO's Paris-based institute after having led education programs at the Ford Foundation and served as Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Affairs under President John F. Kennedy. Importantly for Coombs, navigating change well was to be at the center of planning. He strongly faulted the immediate post-World War II educational impulse to expand existing educational models “as rapidly as possible—curriculum, methods, examinations and all—with a view to accommodating a larger number and proportion of the youth population” (Coombs, 1970, p. 24). With rare exception, education leaders were propagating the existing and prior systems and institutions they knew, and Coombs argued that there was inadequate adjustment to new circumstances. This included student protests and transformations in the political, economic, and cultural realms. He also faulted “internal” characteristics of existing education systems, such as wasteful imbalances, where growth in one area could not be met in another (e.g., in the transition, say, from lower to upper secondary). Coombs called for renewed attention to the interface between school and society, pointing to the merit bottleneck (Sobe, 2021) of unemployment among the educated and to “the wrong kind of education,” by which he meant the contemporary irrelevance of old curricula and teaching methods.

In the model of the Hebrew Patriarch Moses—and as the prophet of any proper new religion knows well—one best begins by decrying false idols (Latour, 2002). Coombs singled out the “manpower planning” approach as one of the most unreliable and misleading strategies of the preceding, immediate postwar decades. In this scheme, education systems were to be optimized to produce graduates that best meet an economy's projected labor market needs. But in actuality, planners caught up in the world of employment classifications and manpower ratios faced the impossibility of actually making reliable forecasts. They faced “myriad economic, technological and other uncertainties” (Coombs, 1970, p. 41), which meant that forecasts of longer-term vocational requirements were fuzzy and not particularly trustworthy. Only needs close at hand could be reliably known—by which point, it was too late to integrate this knowledge into educational planning.

Educational planning, as it was birthed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by figures like Phillip Coombs and through organizations like UNESCO and the OECD, was an effort at making change and innovation a continuous process. Educational planning can be thought of as a technique (dispositif) that operated on what was seen as known and unknown about the future through a calculative apparatus. This apparatus becomes very apparent in Coombs's statement that

the effective planning and management of a modern educational system requires also a minimum of critical indicators which regularly reveal to all concerned what is happening to major variables and relationships within the system and to crucial relationships between the system and its environment. (Coombs, 1970, p. 58)

Half a century later, it may be striking to readers accustomed to “data” being positioned as hard and fast, inflexible facts that Coombs speaks of “indicators” and clearly understands them as indicative, as pointing the way towards something (Porter, 1995). It is questionable whether our current data governance regimes represent any progress. But more to the point, the elevation of relationships and the importance of revealing this to “all” merits our attention. Educational planning at this founding moment was extremely open to evolving, specialized understandings built collectively by multiple actors. Seemingly to preserve its flexible, ongoing, and distributed refinement, Coombs pointedly asks that planning not become a discipline with its own “new box on a university chart” (1970, p. 12).

What is most important for present purposes is that we have moved far beyond the positivist frame one might attach to 19th-century efforts to operate in zones of certainty. Of course, aspirational positivism had a long lifespan across the 20th century, particularly in educational research (c.f., Phillips & Burbules, 2000). But, in fact, we misunderstand the history of statistics and regimes of data governance if we ignore the engagement with indeterminacy at play in what Ian Hacking (1990) famously labeled “the taming of chance.” Certainty is often put forward as one of the bugaboos of modernity (Machado de Oliveira, 2021) but, in fact, it can be argued that probabilistic reasoning is a more deeply ingrained feature of the “modern” world. For example, actuarial thinking is a powerful, landscape-structuring form of calculation that shapes and imposes social realities. The lucrative field of risk management demonstrates the ways that uncertainty has been effectively monetized in our contemporary world—with Ulrich Beck having proposed at least as far back as 1992—the concept of “risk society” to characterize the cross-domain pervasiveness of risk calculations in many parts of the world.

Coombs's cybernetic-influenced, systems-oriented educational planning proposals might be seen as democratizing indeterminacy by accepting it as an ongoing feature of education systems to be worked into operations at all levels. He rejected the technocratic solutions put forth by the “manpower planning” paradigm with an argument about known unknowns (calling for the realistic recognition that too much was actually uncertain to be able to embed anticipated labor force needs in specific, timely, educational interventions). Certainty has not been abandoned, but Coombs recognizes that education planning is “like education itself, more art than science” (Coombs, 1970, p. 61).

Profiteering and profiting with and amongst unknowns

Global financial markets provide some of the clearest examples of leveraging advantage with and amongst unknowns. However, as we will see, the education policy world—particularly as recently experienced during the COVID global health pandemic—shows some of the same patterns and dynamics.

Financial markets play on the flow of information. From the earliest human inscriptions—for example, on clay tablets or ostraca pottery shards—we have evidence of futures markets and anticipatory calculations in play (Swan, 2000). Such positions are often labeled “derivatives” in that they derive from a real transaction of actual goods or services. Derivatives operate at a layer of abstraction. In the simplest terms, we are talking about bets on the future performance of some underlying asset. Today, derivatives are a huge part of our world: Some analysts place the value of the derivatives market at ten times the global GDP. The 2008 global financial crisis is largely blamed on the irresponsible use of these instruments, which—as many painfully learned—can assume extraordinary levels of complexity and astonishing “virtual” layers of removal from the actual financial assets or exchanges. In principle, derivatives can be used as an insurance scheme for those to whom uncertainty is a threat (e.g., farmers at the mercy of whatever global commodity prices happen to be at the time of harvest). Nonetheless, derivatives also create a perverse profiteering incentive for some actors to actually work towards accelerating uncertainty. Increased indeterminacy is in fact a driver of additional risk management business. In these instances, uncertainty has become something to be exploited and leveraged (Esposito, 2013), not something to be avoided and protected from.

In a powerful analysis of the epistemic assumptions that framed much of the educational response to COVID, Prachi Srivastava (2022) has shown how indeterminacy could, at times, function to legitimize inaction and provide a veil of cover for inadequate education policy responses. Srivastava writes,

The severity and scale of the pandemic, causing near universal mass disruption of education, cannot be underestimated. However, it is simplistic to state that there are no applicable knowledges. This is dangerous discourse. (Srivastava, 2022, p. 5)

She points out that the “we do not know” policy discourse privileges a certain kind of technicist data and research. It underplays or entirely ignores the decades of educational research on pedagogy, learning, governance, and community action. The result is that local and grassroots organizations, “as well as traditional systems of organizing learning and education,” (p. 6) are denigrated and denied the capacity to generate relevant knowledge.

Looking specifically at the Finnish case, Parviainen et al. (2021) argue that political decision-making during the COVID crisis occurred precisely at the intersection of knowing and not-knowing. In their account, the Finnish prime minster, Sanna Marin, had an unusual capacity to express a complex epistemological orientation and navigate decision-making that recognized what was not yet known. Parviainen et al. salute this kind of “epistemological humility” and the comfortable alternation between knowledge and ignorance seen in the Finnish government at the time. Alternate possibilities common in the political sphere are (1) to emphasize facts and end up in a trap of overconfidence, (2) to underestimate experts and politicize expertise, or (3) to adopt a probabilistic language that calculates uncertainty and certainty. The shortcomings of the first two are self-evident. The third mitigates against the sometimes necessary urgency of action, for “in the midst of a crisis, endless calibration slows the decision-making process” (p. 241). Parviainen et al. argue that in contrast to these three possibilities, a very different temporal politics played out in Finland, where humility, partial knowledge, and action were comfortably fit together.

The crush of EdTech “solutions” during COVID can be seen as another kind of political play on indeterminacy. What had been a mere hypothetical possibility before the pandemic—that schooling could be replaced with individual electronic devices through which “learners” (who were no longer “students”) could proceed along their educational journeys—was put forward in some influential circles as the default alternative, since, allegedly, nothing else was “known.” This meant that organizations like UNESCO (2020) had to struggle to remind the global education community that many parts of the world (both high-resourced and low-resourced) were extremely well served by low-tech and no-tech solutions to pandemic school closures. Here, the “not knowing what to do” policy discourse was as contested as any education policy field can be. COVID's “forced opportunity” of navigating with and amongst new unknowns serves as a useful reminder of how critical knowledge contestation is to framing assumptions—and of the importance of the temporal dimension of knowing/not-knowing (Parviainen et al., 2021).

From not-knowing to ignorance

Agnotology is the study of ignorance-making, and an area of research that has enjoyed considerable attention in recent years (e.g., Angulo, 2016; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). According to some, willful or manufactured ignorance is, in fact, quite common in today's world—and is increasingly recognized as a factor not to be overlooked in the analysis of public policymaking (Hannah et al., 2023). Classic examples include questioning the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change, the blind spot of medical study of the female orgasm, and the creation of “public doubt” by the tobacco industry around the harmful effects of smoking.

To this list, we should add uncertainties about the future. In other words, alongside paying attention to what is unknown and uncertain about the future, we should carefully note what is being said about unknowability itself, perhaps even what about the future is being made unknowable, and what effects this has. As we saw, above, in the examples of Philip Coombs's work on educational planning and in COVID responses, invocations of uncertainty govern the future by what they enable and disable and how they define the terrain of governance. These ontologies of indeterminacy are made visible through the projections of what is known and unknown about the future, as well as what is suggested as the right thing to be done about it.

The central, thorny question that must be addressed then becomes: At what point does a humble and/or realistic acknowledgment of unknowing tip over into ignorance-making of a misleading or dangerous sort?

How should uncertainty guide futures work in education?

An analysis of two recent policy documents from two leading intergovernmental institutional players in the global education futures field will help us sort through these tangled politics of indeterminacy. Updating its education scenarios work from 2001, the OECD issued a 2021 report titled Back to the Future of Education: Four OECD Scenarios for Schooling. In the same year, UNESCO released a high-level report, Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education, produced by an international commission chaired by the President of Ethiopia, Sahle-Work Zewde (Sobe, 2022). Several years in the making and built on the inputs of over a million people worldwide, UNESCO's report includes multiple pronouncements about the state of the world as being one of “increasing uncertainty.” The 2021 OECD text makes the same gesture and repeatedly characterizes the current world as marked by “a high degree” of uncertainty. Nonetheless, despite this congruence, the proposed, best responses to such a perceived state of things differ significantly between these two global, agenda-steering policy documents.

The OECD scenarios-based futuring exercise rests on the premise that “attempting to predict or forecast the future is of limited benefit in a world of high uncertainty” (OECD, 2021, p. 13, emphasis added). All the same, Back to the Future of Education fits squarely within the category of education futures work preoccupied with what education might look like in the future. Keri Facer (2021) notes that this type of work on the production of images, designs, and plans for the future can be immensely powerful in that it mobilizes sociotechnical imaginaries that can then be very difficult to disrupt. According to the OECD, being “future-fit” (2021, p. 11) comes from the very ability to identify plausible future scenarios, explore impacts they could have, and identify potential policy implications. The exercise is driven by the projection of “uncertainty.” Further, the OECD argues that its approach to uncertainty also differentiates its scenarios approach from other education futures projects. According to the report, over the past two decades, the majority of futures work has coalesced around aspirational visions and roadmaps of desirable futures. And, while the 2021 text acknowledges such approaches as “powerful” and as successful for setting agendas and sparking dialogue, it argues,

[B]y focusing on the delivery of a desired future, those approaches do not prepare systems for unexpected shocks. They do not take into account that the future likes to surprise us. (OECD, 2021, p. 11)

In this thinking, preparation for uncertain futures means preparing for unexpected, disruptive change. (Quite probably, we are seeing the fingerprints of the 2020 COVID-caused school closures in this—despite the fact that others have pointed out that nearly every scenarios exercise over the past 30 years included a global health pandemic that shut down societies and economies.) In the OECD presentation, scenarios develop individuals’ abilities to disagree and deliberate, as well as reflect on their own assumptions. They also allow a holistic picture to emerge and enable organizations to create a shared understanding and align actions. In other words, uncertainty has been styled into a warrant for the development of the “right” tools, dispositions, and behaviors that will allow individuals and organizations to best weather whatever happens to come up. So, while it might appear that the OECD scenarios are, what Facer (2021) would characterize as a capacity-building agentic preparation, in fact, uncertainty is enthroned in such a way that the “future-fit” character of this 2021 OECD report is better considered the artifact of an adaptive preparation paradigm.

By contrast, the UNESCO (2021) education futures project clearly falls in the envisioning of “desired futures” category. Though presenting itself as “neither a manual nor a blueprint” (UNESCO, 2021, p. iii), the Reimagining Our Futures Together report puts forth a clear aspirational vision. For example, in lockstep with UN planetspeak, the hoped-for world will be “peaceful, just, and sustainable” (p. 1). Additionally, bias, prejudice, and divisiveness will have been unlearned, and “an ecological understanding of humanity that rebalances the way we relate to Earth as a living planet and our singular home” (p. 4) will have been embraced.

Taking the position that “no trend is destiny” (2021, p. 3), UNESCO's report puts forth a vision of locally and democratically made futures. Instead of being a roadmap, the text is styled as an “invitation” (pp. 5, 15, 146, 158, etc.). It aims to mobilize and encourage groups of people to imagine, deliberate, and work together. In this instance, a politics of indeterminacy is couched in extremely agentic terms, and disruptive transformations are framed as usefully unknowable in their ultimate directions/outcomes, as such:

The planet is in peril but decarbonization and the greening of economies are underway … [T]he world has seen a backsliding in democratic governance and a rise in identity-driven populist sentiment. At the same time, there has been a flourishing of increasingly active citizen participation and activism that is challenging discrimination and injustice worldwise. (UNESCO, 2021, p. 3)

A similar there-is-this-but-also-this framing is applied to digital technologies and the future of work. The education futuring exercise that this approach to uncertainty seems to generate is then one of deliberation leading to strategic action. In this, strong shades of a three-horizons approach can be felt, though the technique is not explicitly mentioned in the UNESCO text. Three horizons is a futuring methodology (e.g., Leicester 2020; Sharpe et al., 2016) that involves identifying what might happen if business continues as usual (horizon one), what turbulent consequences emerging disruptions might have (horizon two), and what a long-term desired successor could be (horizon three). ² Simplifying somewhat, the challenge then becomes to “pull down” or minimize the negative aspects of both legacy and emerging features, as well as to “pull up” or nurture the positive aspects of legacy and emerging features. A call to bend the arc in desirable directions is really the essence of Reimagining Our Futures Together. In its logic, the UNESCO report presents uncertainty as opportunity. Here one might say that indeterminacy works much the same way that the concept of “historical contingency” does: It means we are not trapped but have agency. There is nothing inevitable about where we end up or will end up. In this way, uncertainty is harnessed to a vision of actions taken in the here and now as actually having the possibility of changing the world.

In many ways, both of these recent OECD and UNESCO education futures reports pivot off their conceptualizations of uncertainty. Their interventions spring from what each posits and arguably “produces” as unknowable. And, on my read, the most notable difference is that the OECD scenarios tilt towards adaptive reactivity, while UNESCO's futures project tilts towards agentic world-making.

Conclusion

The preceding discussion has not suggested any deliberate obfuscation on the part of the OECD or UNESCO education futures projects. Yet, we have seen that the stakes are high when it comes to what is considered uncertain about the future. What is perceived to be unknowable has significant consequence for what kinds of anticipatory actions are recommended for the present. While neither of these policy texts appears to be intentionally misleading, an agnotological lens is still useful for helping us surface what is being obscured in each.

The early reception of UNESCO’s 2021 Reimagining Our Futures Together report has been favorable in many quarters. However, one of the critiques that has come from critical scholars in academia is that the text has an inadequate political economy analysis of education (e.g., Elfert & Morris, 2022; Klees, 2022). This critique reminds us that there are structural factors and embedded interests to be dealt with: Education actors definitely do not have free range to “pull up” or “pull down” features of legacy and disruptive horizons however they like. What I described above as a there-is-this-but-also-that strategy serves to generate hopeful agentic capacity by approaching some uncertainties as usefully unknowable. In this sense, UNESCO's report opens itself up to a legitimate ignorance-making critique. Rather than naiveté or overlooked omission, the relegation of political economy concerns to a lesser position in the text ³ may, in fact, be a deliberate strategy and an instance of what we might call intentional “possibility-washing.”—a calculated ignorance-making whose futility or efficacy remains to be seen.

The OECD's Back to the Future report poignantly reminds us that “the future likes to surprise us” (2021, p. 11). It would be foolhardy to disagree. Yet, wrapped as it is in the language of confidence levels, uncertainty “in high degree” might be seen as intentionally producing both educational action and inaction. What I described above as an adaptive preparation paradigm fits the well-established pattern of seeing education as needing relevance and needing to react well to changes in other domains (e.g., social, political, economic). Thinking in terms of a spectrum could be useful in this instance: At the other end, education is seen as an omnipotent universal panacea and prime mover, a position whose dangers are well known. At stake here might simply be the difference between what is for one person a realistic appraisal of possibility, and for another person a status quo-serving refusal to think bigger. The real danger would come if strategic foresight narrows exclusively to the OECD scenarios model, to the exclusion and delegitimization of desired future approaches, such as is proposed in the UNESCO report.

In closing, it will be worth recalling that certain things are, in fact, known about the future. No trend is destiny, but there are many demographic and climate/environmental trajectories already “baked in.” We should have high confidence in the projections of the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and, unquestionably, we need to do more to base anticipatory actions in and outside of education on what we know from the work of these two bodies. Ignorance-making around climate and the demographics of human populations would be quite dangerous for education futures and global futures—particularly in relation to their convergence around the future climate migration, which we urgently need to do a better job of anticipating (Vince, 2022).

There is, thus, no ready-made universal formula for determining when a humble and/or realistic acknowledgment of unknowing tips over into ignorance-making of a misleading or dangerous sort. We need thoughtful, critical analysis of the epistemological, ontological, political, social, and cultural plays at stake in each concrete situation. A sensible strategy for dealing with uncertainty in the futures of education is poetically put forth in a short text UNESCO published in 2022 by Arjun Appadurai, a member of the international commission that produced the Reimagining Our Futures Together report. Let us teach, he writes, that “uncertainty is a fundamental feature of our lives and that we need to make it the wind behind our sails, rather than the storm we wish to avoid.” At the same time, let us “use education to get abreast of the curve of uncertainty, rather than pick up the pieces after the damage is done.”