Higher education and aspiration

This special issue highlights the rise and significance of aspirations in educational policy globally, yet provides an important sociological critique of the discourses surrounding the concept and its effects. The seductiveness of the very idea of aspiration obfuscates its darker side, which is the promotion of a discourse that locates educational success and failure in an individual’s (in)capacity to imagine a suitable future, and in their motivation to achieve it. When success is construed as a matter of choice reduced to imagination and ‘daring to dream’, the importance of the structural issues plaguing global education systems and societies are conveniently discounted. Failure to succeed is simply presented as failure to aspire, and consideration of the need to challenge societal conditions is precluded.