A Tale of Many Futures: Children in Finland and India Envision the Future of Education

While conversations around the future of education focus on AI, robots, and VR, they often overlook how children imagine futures within their own educational worlds. We conducted participatory speculative design workshops with 92 students (ages 12–14) in two contrasting settings: an autonomy-oriented international school in Finland and an exam-driven, high-stakes public school in India. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed that pedagogical ecologies, rather than national cultures, shaped children’s technological imaginaries and future orientations. Students in Finland envisioned pragmatic, technologically advanced, yet human-centered classrooms, whereas students in India prioritized curricular choice, emotional safety, and systemic fairness. In the workshops in India, we observed that speculative possibilities expanded with careful scaffolding but remained tethered to current realities when scaffolding was disrupted. We argue for "plural design futuring" grounded in children’s lived experiences and contribute methodological insights into scaffolding as a critical condition for participatory future-making. Our findings demonstrate how local educational cultures fundamentally shape the possibilities of speculative design.