School, images of the futures and social processes in classrooms

Futures studies express a deep concern for the negative effect school education has on young people's images of the future and their proactive attitude to the future. Here, images are regarded as cultural maps and the article attempts to outline a model of interaction in the classroom, which may be useful for understanding how school practices affect images.Given the cultural perspective on images, the analysis focuses on the social processes that organise the creation, negotiation, and distribution of cultural inventories in the classroom, including the meanings and meaningful expressions about future.Whenever a culture is understood to be a collective phenomenon, it needs a sociology. When this sociology is left implicit, the danger is greater than it is a weak sociology.Ulf Hannerz