Dvir, Yuval; (2024) The Rise, Work, and Fall of the Future-Oriented Pedagogy Unit in Israel. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The Future-Oriented Pedagogy Unit (FOPU) was established by the Israeli Ministry of Education (MoE) in 2015 and operated for five years. It generated policy papers and pedagogic recommendations through a 'futurology' mechanism that relied on a participatory 'scientific' anticipation method. This thesis analyses the rise, work, and fall of FOPU through semi-structured interviews with FOPU's team members and analysis of its publications. It tracks the motivations and perceptions of persons engaged, and the forces which shaped the unit's agenda. The thesis positions the FOPU's appearance in the setting of an Open Policy Window (Kingdon, 1995) in the Israeli MoE. It then critically examines the unit's approach to education’s future within the country's immense and deepening socio-political struggles. The use of the future, referred to as Anticipatory Governance, is a mode of education policy-making that sets promissory gains drawn from future predictions. The OECD, among other international organizations, leads the promotion of anticipatory governance in disseminating its shifting agenda globally and has employed crisis narratives as the basis for promoting a route to salvation. Anticipatory governance raises foundational questions concerning the attempt to colonize the future by various actors and the validity of policies relying on predictions of what is essentially unpredictable. This study suggests that FOPU represented a distinctive approach to operationalizing anticipatory governance which I term the ‘avoidance’ (of reality). While administered and funded by the MoE and influenced by the OECD, FOPU policies disregarded the pressing crises affecting Israeli education and focused on the global and non-specific proposals for reform rooted in a progressive ideology. This avoidance of reality was facilitated by a technical and methodological-driven approach to anticipating the future, which bore limited resemblance to the anticipatory models outlined in the literature. What emerged was a vision that focused on the global and ignored the local.

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