The future of education and work in the ‘New Old World’: pensée unique once again or is there any alternative at all?

Abstract

In this essay we will try to explore (1) the economic, political and cultural origins of the ‘future of education and work’ neoliberal élan; (2) its main agents and structures in terms of institutional-designing, policymaking or multilateral-organizing; and, (3) how the European Union project—both the ‘New Old World’ (London: Verso, 2009) or the ‘Ever Closer Union’ (London: Verso, 2021)—is closely linked to its most important core-planning of some kind of what Coelho and Freitas (Roteiro, 44:3, 2019) called a discursive ‘future-devising’, new hegemonic wager. Modern imperialism as a specific arrangement in the interior of global capitalism—a socio-metabolic mode of control—faced at least three different forms of theoretical and methodological criticisms in the past quarter of a century. We will first try to relate its outcomes most of all towards the worlds of work and education. Secondly, we intend to formulate the outlines of the principal organizations and constructions, informed by these neoliberal reconfigurations, mainly the stratagems and programmes that sealed its destiny in European territory. Then, we will investigate the newest aggiornamenti, ‘European Union Recovery Instrument’—around, for instance, digitalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution—and the ‘European Year of Skills’ (2023). Finally, we will try to offer some alternative formula to it developing from the established foundations of what Freitas and Coelho prognosticated in a series of recent works crafted a quatromanni.