Defining the Future: An Interrogation of Education and Time

This paper examines notions of ‘educational time’ with particular reference to the work of Basil Bernstein. It focuses closely on the 1967 Plowden Report as a particularly appropriate policy case study to demonstrate how different constructions of time can exist within the same document. It then develops educational models originally mapped out by Bernstein, arguing that a full understanding of the areas of consensus and conflict amongst these models is vital if we are to understand how teaching professionals think about the future. The paper addresses the following questions. How does time affect education? What influence does this have on educational outcomes? How does this relate to public policy initiatives? Assuming a tacit, collective understanding of time and the future can undermine the very policy intentions a government might be seeking to promulgate. Introduction Is time a socially constructed phenomenon? How different social groups conceptualise time is an interesting concept for investigation, not least because different conceptions can appear to coexist simultaneously. This can cause tension between different sectors of society. This paper considers the implications of such a phenomenon for education. Government policy documents invariably invoke an account of education in time as a rhetoric device to legitimate educational change and convince others of the imperative need to change in the way being advocated. Today, much is made of the idea that education must adjust to the requirements of a new ‘knowledge’ or ‘learning’ society that marks a radical break with past times both socially and educationally. This type of historicist device is employed in virtually all major educational policy documents over the past fifty years. The Plowden report (1967) usefully reminds us that we have heard much the same kind of thing often before and this fact raises the issue of rhetoric and reality. The frequency of these urgent proclamations is such that if read sequentially such documents suggest that we have entered a new era in each decade of the past half century! The combination of urgency and the sense that there is no alternative, conveyed by such rhetoric, attempts to persuade us that this is the case. Additionally, it also obscures the fact that not everyone has the same understanding of what is meant by the term ‘future’, and it fails to take into account the very different ways that notions of ‘time’ affect education, in relation to the child and the acquisition