“Optimism can become a trap when it encourages investment in promises about the benefits of education that cannot be realized for all.” (Sellar, 2016)

To all intents and purposes, the implicit and orthodox model of educational ideas is unavoidably optimistic. In fact, the future seems to be the basis for educational thought. We look ahead, plan ahead and are propelled by a desire for progress. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for signals that reassure us that progress is occurring. We seem to want the future and we want it to be better. This is all very optimistic.

What I wonder is how teachers come to perceive the future. In an educational context, how is it that we develop an attitude towards an unknown prospective event? Our work is heartfelt, requires significant energy, thinking and criticality and so we like to know that all we do has purpose. However, do we pause to consider who is influencing the purpose? Who or what is driving our endeavours, and to what end? Are our voices, ideas and professional experiences heard and playing an integral role in shaping educational futures, irrespective of external forces? To feel critically engaged in educational directions is to feel some sense of agency. To feel we are contributing to a contrived future is disempowering, despite being surrounded by the rhetoric of optimism and solutions. The professionalization agenda feels like it is becoming a brand, pushed along by brands promising confidence and security.

Propelled by the language of positive psychology, optimism has become alluring, marketable and a playground where corporates, philanthropists and technologies are cashing in. Simultaneously, alarming statistics are circulated at governmental level, across journalism and around conference circuits causing broad concern and paranoia that our education systems are little more than ‘an old hope’s bitter echo’ (Berlant, 2016: 414) and we require complete rupture to fashion a new horizon. This call-to-arms sets in motion an assault on the profession from beyond the schools and classrooms where education is taking place for supposed mediocrity and poor performance. The door creaks open for the market to flood in. Yet as Charlotte Pezaro points out, so much of the system (policies, practices, standards and processes) has been constructed to channel our intentions and efforts to a reduced range of research, evidence and practices which are marketed as the best hopes for an educational recovery. The division between the reality of educators and the claims of politicians or solution vendors does little to elevate teacher agency, engender professional trust and encourage criticality when it comes to teacher’s decisions about practices or educational tools and strategies.

Feeling optimistic about the future can be problematic when we realise that those calling the shots are steering at distance and we have partial or full reliance on limited or uncritically accepted resources or ideas for improvement. Teaching impels us to engage at ethical levels, and it is hard to accept that some are compelled to fabricate who they are and what they do to contribute to someone else’s vision of the future we do not believe in. Worse still, is that we may continue to persuade students and ourselves of the continued existence of a possible future we don’t believe in or that is unobtainable. Sustaining this set of beliefs can feel like a personal disavowal and lead to an acknowledgement of our own duplicity and complicity.

This brings me back to Sellar’s quote: “Optimism can become a trap when it encourages investment in promises about the benefits of education that cannot be realized for all.”

Within this statement I would suggest ‘investment’ (focusing the attention) and ‘all’ should be the focus of our meditations. I am not suggesting that educational thought is nebulous and educators are negligent in their intentions, I am suggesting that a whole industry seems to have been allowed to evolve around the concept of optimism and services us with so many choices that it is tough to not be ‘in on it’. They may claim to avert us from bleak futures by equipping students and teachers with what they need to navigate uncertainty, but ‘all’ are certainly not reached.

I am left wondering how education might escape the optimism trap. Pessimism offers an inherently unpromising alternative. This is why I wonder if educational thought is stuck. Its limit can be found at the beginning, gazing to the future. Equally, looking backwards doesn’t necessarily take us forwards. Are we at an impasse that is being exploited to advance an ideology, a wider national agenda, policy, commodity or experiment that promises us certainty when there is little consensus about what we are being saved from or what certainty is?