Speculative Pedagogy: Education, Entrepreneurialism and the Politics of Inclusion in Contemporary Sweden

In this paper the authors focus on the consequences of economies and cultures of speculation in the field of education. Education is one of the arenas where the logics of speculation are being played out. It is argued that the major shifts in educational policy over the past decades in Sweden derive from what Ian Baucom aptly called "speculative epistemologies". The field of education is contemporaneous with the wider recasting of society, economy, politics and culture that is premised on the neo-liberal calculus of accumulation and value maximization. In this context, education could be understood in terms of "speculative pedagogy". Speculative pedagogy stands for education that strives to both capitalize knowledge, schooling or learning and realize immediate returns from knowledge, schooling and learning. Speculative pedagogy is used here as an umbrella concept to denote profit driven education and the various educational philosophies, theories and practices in education that are based on notion of valorization, capitalization and immediate returns to education, such that the primary role of education is reduced to augmenting marketable value (personal, economic, aesthetic, national, etc.). Following the classical logic of "Game theory", speculative pedagogy is about learning how to calculate risks, under highly uncertain conditions. Trusting other players is a liability. Each player bets for him/herself, and expects everybody else to do the same. The basic idea being that one can only be a winner at the expense of others. Neo-liberal educational policies provide the necessary political and institutional environment where speculative pedagogies are enacted and can flourish. (Contains 74 footnotes.)