Inequality of becoming: childhood, futurity, and the governance of time in algorithmic societies

Contemporary debates concerning educational inequality in digital societies have focused predominantly on access, connectivity, participation and digital skills. These remain important concerns. Algorithmic societies, however, raise a different educational question: how predictive infrastructures reorganise the temporal conditions through which children learn, imagine, judge and become. This article develops the concept of inequality of becoming to explain how educational inequality increasingly extends beyond differential access to technology towards unequal access to the conditions of becoming themselves. Drawing together scholarship on digital inequality, temporality, algorithmic governance, childhood and educational futures, it argues that predictive systems increasingly organise becoming time through anticipation, recommendation, intervention and optimisation. A developmental framework of interconnected inequalities of becoming traces how algorithmic societies reorganise the conditions of becoming from childhood environments to their ontological consequences, while temporal, developmental and ontological stewardship are developed as an educational response. The defining educational inequalities of the twenty-first century may concern not only access or attainment, but unequal access to the temporal conditions through which human futures remain open.