The lecture series is founded on the urgent need to analyse the future of education governance with new concepts and broader social science perspectives, as the contemporary concepts of education governance are not sufficient in analytically describing all the concurrent changes that are affecting education today and in the future. Additionally, so far, these changes have been researched separately and through different research paradigms.
With the help and interference of life and behavioural sciences, as well as managerial reasoning and business initiatives, education governance is shifting towards more individually and personally tailored governance. Datafication and digitalization are used as tools to pre-empt futures in order to manage the present, with a variety of stakeholders joining forces through transnational networks to operationalize such ideas, quite often appealing to marketization and privatization in education. Managing the present requires a fabrication of a specific type of future-oriented learning subjectivities, in which structural problems, such as inequalities or lack of resources, tend to be considered as products of innate and quantifiable differences in behaviour, affects, skills, and competences, justified by behavioral and life sciences. Furthermore, the simultaneous occurrence of these changes on different scales (global, national, and local) entails even tighter economically driven governance with far-reaching implications.
By utilising, applying, and further developing the concept of precision education governance (PEG), developed in the Education & Society –research community and in its on-going Interrupting Future Trajectories of the Precision Education Governance –research project at the University of Helsinki, the lecture series looks into the future education governance by scrutinizing some of the key changes and outcomes in education through three interlinked lines of research:
a) The strengthening of global and local governance of education
b) The marketization, privatization, digitalization and datafication of education
c) Replacing educational science research knowledge with behavioural and life sciences
The lecture series provides a conceptual and more comprehensive understanding of future education governance with eminent and internationally recognized speakers. As these changes will continue to have historically significant consequences for education and society, this lecture series provides essential knowledge for all stakeholders in the field of education.
The lecture series consist of four guest lectures by renowned international lecturers and a closing panel discussion addressing future trajectories of education in a Finnish context.