A proactive player of the future? Working life discourses in the Finnish upper secondary school curriculum

Abstract The present study examines the educational speech that appears in the upper secondary school curriculum. Teaching and the organisation of teaching is guided by the written reality of the curriculum.The Foucaultian approach is applied to study the discursive events, i.e. expressions presented as true. The study is based on the interest in the role of education policy and working life in the construction of the general Finnish upper secondary education curriculum. As an educational policy management document, the curriculum creates an aim for the reality of teaching and learning. It maintains values related to upper secondary education, in this case for career orientation, as discourses of task, fluency, anticipation, and activation. The working life discourses emphasise efforts to accelerate transitions in working life, bring forward career-related decisions, and glorify success and activity. This article discusses the emphasis the working life in the curriculum has for the ideal of Bildung in contemporary upper secondary school education.


Introduction
Globalisation has brought the educational policy decisions of different countries closer together.As a result, countries tend to have similar education-related problem areas as well as means to solve them.Although globalisation is unifying the characteristics of education, national characteristics are also becoming more prominent due to international comparisons of learning outcomes such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Sahlberg, 2015, p. 140).The educational policy reflects the ideals of productivity and efficiency (Ball, 2016, Neumann et al., 2020) that have been incorporated into curricula at the international level (Goodson, 1995).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Asta Järvinen, is a guidance counsellor working in upper secondary school.Järvinen is a member of the Pedagogical Tact research group (UEF).Her research interests include educational policies and their impact on young people.Ari Sivenius, is a senior researcher at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Eastern Finland.Sivenius leads the Pedagogical Tact research group (UEF).His research interests include the methodology of human sciences, politics of education, and practical wisdom in education.
Internationalisation, combined with the appreciation of the economy, has led to an increased influence of markets and economics on education arrangements in education policy (e.g., W. M. Apple, 2019).Sahlberg (2015, pp. 142-143) calls the Global Educational Reform Movement, or GERM for short, an international movement for the exchange of policies and educational practices.Characteristic features of GERM are inter-school competition, standardisation of learning, emphasis on reading and numeracy at the expense of recognizing students' individual abilities, and competition for school places.In a competitive environment, teachers focus primarily on improving learning achievements and subject management (Hedegaard-Soerensen & Grumloese, 2020, p. 640).GERM reinforces the Anglo-American curriculum tradition in curriculum developing work.GERM emphasises the creation of precise guidelines for equality, equity, and the effectiveness of education, as well as the importance of external standardisation in improving learning outcomes and teachers' teaching methods (Sahlberg, 2015, pp. 149-150).
Indeed, it could be argued that education lives on several small initiatives and movements.Together, these form a discourse emphasising standardisation, quality, competencies, and progress (Ball, 2016(Ball, , p. 1052)).Neoliberal education policies are seen to increase teaching focused on producing competencies (Hedegaard-Soerensen & Grumloese, 2020).According to Sahlberg (2015), GERM has not gained a foothold in Finland.However, some researchers disagree on the topic.Today, Finnish curriculum thinking and the administration of education also show international ideals, such as competition for resources, responsibility for the results of education and standardisation (Saari, Salmela & Vilkkilä, 2017, Soini, Pyhältö & Pietarinen, 2021).Finland has traditionally had the principle of a local school, but the choice to study in a non-local school has become more common.However, Finns have reservations about school choice, and it is considered better for public authorities rather than the market to determine school choice (Saari, Salmela & Vilkkilä, 2017, Sahlberg, 2015, Varjo, Lundström & Kalalahti, 2018).School choice is seen as an opportunity to pick an educational institution based on investing in certain subjects or considering individual tendencies (Varjo, Lundström & Kalalahti, 2018, p. 491).
Although signs of international competition can be seen in Finnish education policy, they are not as prominent in Finland as in some other countries.Finnish upper secondary school teachers feel they are free to carry out their teaching as they wish if students get satisfactory results in national exams (Erss, Kalmus & Autio, 2016, p. 596).Krokfors (2017, p. 251) states that Finnish curriculum thinking is based on the German subject pedagogical tradition, but the Anglo-American tendency to emphasise educational psychology among educational theories has also gained a foothold in Finland.One reason for this change can be seen in the transition from a welfare state to a competitive society.Competitive curricula emphasise quality assessment.Moreover, competence requirements in mathematics, science and literacy take up space in curricula from arts (Komulainen & Rajakaltio, 2017, p. 227).Especially in English-speaking countries, such curriculum thinking has long been popular.Outside the school system, especially the technical and commercial fields have influenced the presentation of subjects in curricula (Goodson, 1995, p. 185; see Uleanya, Rugbeer & Duma, 2018).In Finland, the situation seems to be good, as Finnish teachers have considerable responsibility for decisions regarding teaching, assessment, and course content (Tahirsylaj, 2019, pp. 173-176).Compared to several other countries, Finnish teachers feel that their activities are less limited by standardised examinations and curriculum objectives (Erss, Kalmus & Autio, 2016, p. 595).
In this study, we are interested in the role of education policy and working life in the construction of the Finnish upper secondary education curriculum. 1 Thus, the subject of research is the Basics of the Upper Secondary School Curriculum 2019, which was introduced nationwide in the autumn of 2021.We look at working life discourses in the context of career theories and the life stage of emerging adulthood.We ask what kind of reality of working life orientation is produced by the curriculum text.

Perspective of social construction of curriculum
As discussed above, education policy guides the education system using administrative documents.They contain principles that school staff implements in the everyday running of the school.There are also demands to increase the emphasis on mathematical subjects in Finland.The need has been explained to be partly due to the lack of skills of those seeking engineering education.Nonetheless, this development is not strongly present in the core curriculum of basic education introduced in 2016 from an international perspective (Komulainen & Rajakaltio, 2017, p. 227).Still, there are signs of an increase in the importance of mathematics and literacy in the development of upper secondary education.With the reform of student admission in higher education, which was finally introduced in the spring of 2020, the importance of the matriculation examination grades of mathematics and Finnish language and literature take precedence over several other subjects The student admission criteria have now been revised, and they will be introduced in higher education in 2026.
According to Neumann et al. (2020, p. 706), the baccalaureate was also reformed in England in the 2010s, emphasising the so-called core subjects mathematics, science, languages, and history at the expense of social and art subjects.At the same time, schools have begun to influence students' choice of subjects, and the teaching of subjects seen as less important has been reduced.As a result of the change, some teachers have experienced increased pressure to improve student achievement (Neumann et al., 2020, pp. 713-714).Therefore, W. M. Apple (2019, p. 12) states that the neutrality of teachers in the school system is impossible from the perspective of both the distribution of cultural capital and economic and cultural production.
Our research on the curriculum of upper secondary education is based on the Foucaultian ideas of the relationship between knowledge and power and Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism.The curriculum text of upper secondary education creates institutionalised power with its language as a document that defines the contents of the Finnish education system.The curriculum creates an institutionalised order and roles for upper secondary school personnel who apply the curriculum in everyday life at school.The use of language in the curriculum text affects the teacher's work and the school community's performance.The curriculum guides the construction of frameworks for different activities: language use directs attention to certain contents or phenomena, and by being silent about one thing, it inevitably ignores something else.In our study, language use as an act includes also the exercise of power as it shows what kind of education is constructed and who is allowed to speak, as well as what kind of interpretation of speech is considered correct and acceptable at any given time (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, Foucault, 1969, Foucault, 1971).
According to Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 94), roles represent and help maintain institutionalised social order.From the perspective of institutional order, in upper secondary education, roles represent institutionally organised knowledge.Each role contains socially defined information and reinforces the social order.For example, an educational society exists because the actors involved in it are aware of it.Likewise, it can be stated that an individual's consciousness is socially constructed.In this way, both the institutional order of the educational society and the roles people adopt in it are objectified (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 96).In order to achieve an institutionalised status, knowledge must first become generally accepted.Berger and Luckmann (1966, pp, 85-86) talk about the sedimentation and traditionalisation of knowledge, which mean the preservation of knowledge in people's consciousness in a certain memorable form.Sedimentation occurs between individuals if they share similar life experiences, which enable the accumulation of similar knowledge for these individuals.In a group consisting of individuals who share similar experiences, it is easier to reproduce information to new generations than in a group whose members do not possess similar experiences.In this case, knowledge becomes a tradition (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, pp. 85-86).
The curriculum functions as one such producer of social knowledge.It serves as a document that defines and governs Finnish upper secondary education's practices and contents.Due to its position, the curriculum text uses linguistic means to create what is to be achieved in the contents and methods of education.At the same time, it creates roles for teachers and students in which they must act to achieve the teaching goals.Based on the highlighted contents of the national curriculum, local curricula are drawn up.They are implemented in schools in turn.These nationally defined goals are applied in practice there.Therefore, the school system is a tool for an individual's socialisation to become a member of society, with the goal of raising students to become full members of society.The curriculum used in school contributes to this process by defining what knowledge and skills children and young people should learn during their schooling.In addition, it creates roles for teachers, which they must fulfil within the scope of the tasks defined by the curriculum.
In upper secondary school, an individual learns skills related to performing in school, which will help him succeed later in his educational path.The curriculum is a document created as a product of education policy.It reflects the social atmosphere of the time in which it was produced, and the knowledge and skills that were considered important during that time.Accordingly, some less valued topics and methods remain hidden in the curriculum.An order of values emerges between the visible goals of the curriculum and the ignored topics.It reveals which kind of competence is revered and which kind is considered less valuable.
Both teachers and students are supposed to act within the boundaries set by the roles created by the curriculum.These institutional roles are not always pleasant for the person acting in the role.The roles determined by the curriculum require certain ways of operating within the school system, but the roles can also extend outside the school world.By applying the curriculum at school, the aim is to socialise pupils and students to become valued citizens.

Methodology: searching for connections of discursive events
We approach the written curriculum text as discourses.We rely on and apply our approach to interpreting the ideas put forward by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
These pre-existing forms of continuity, all these syntheses that are accepted without question, must remain in suspense.They must not be rejected definitively of course, but the tranquillity with which they are accepted must be disturbed; we must show that they do not come about of themselves, but are always the result of a construction the rules of which must be known, and the justifications of which must be scrutinised: we must define in what conditions and in view of which analyses certain of them are legitimate; and we must indicate which of them can never be accepted in any circumstances.(Foucault, 1969, translated by Sheridan Smith, 1971, pp. 25-26) Discourse is tied to its era and to a particular context.For this reason, we deal with the discourse in the context of Finnish upper secondary education.We aim to construct the terms we use in such a way that their background factors and justifications can be identified and the ways in which the term used can be defined.Like Foucault, we examine the working life orientation as a discursive event.By this, we mean the linguistic whole of the upper secondary school curriculum, which consists of the expressions used (see Foucault, 1969, p. 39).Theoretically, in addition to Foucaultian thinking, we approach the material from the perspective of Berger and Luckmann's (1966) social construction.The text of the curriculum reaches and creates institutionalised power in its language, as they are the documents defining the teaching content of the Finnish education system.
In this study, we consider that the curriculum serves as one such producer of social information: a document that defines and dominates Finnish teaching, its practices and contents.Due to its position, the curriculum text also produces values through linguistic means of what is desired in the content and means of education.At the same time, it creates roles for teachers and students where they must work to achieve teaching goals.Based on the evaluations of the national curriculum, local curricula are drawn up, which in turn are implemented in schools.In schools, these nationally defined targets are applied in practice.According to Berger and Luckmann (1966, pp. 85-86), the school system is thus an instrument of socialisation to become a member of society, with the aim of educating students to become full members of society.Curricula in schools contribute to this process by defining what knowledge and skills should be learned by children and young people during their schooling.In addition, as mentioned above, it creates roles for teachers to fulfil within the framework of the tasks defined in the curriculum.
In this article, our discursive research approach could be described as our attempt to identify the world produced in the upper secondary school curriculum text by revealing its regularities.On the other hand, factors related to the backgrounds of texts, such as the intentions of the producer of the text, are not the aim of our study.It is to interpret the connections between expressions and their interrelationships.We believe that by studying discourses, it is possible to observe the regularity produced in the curriculum text, i.e. discourses (Foucault, 1969, p. 41).As a subject of study, the new upper secondary school curriculum text forces us to consider the era in which a particular discourse was produced, which we understand to limit our interpretation within the limits of our era (see Foucault, 1969, p. 37).
In our Foucaultian manner of reading the curriculum text, the discourses we present are linguistic expressions we discovered in the text.This is always limited by our frame of reference.Thus, our interpretation of the expressions constructs a discursive formation (see Husa, 1995).We argue that, from a curriculum perspective, discursive practice is a set of rules that emerge in tradition-in time and context-that limit what can be said about something.Discourse is also a social practice as the curriculum produces and reproduces meanings for the mission of upper secondary education.Therefore, our interpretation expands connections between power and knowledge in terms of the emphases in the working life discourses in upper secondary education.
The curriculum text is powerful as a discursive document defining educational content.As we have presented, the curriculum creates institutionalised order and roles for teachers who implement the curriculum as teaching on a practical level.We understand that discourses involve the exercise of power as they shape our world according to certain interests.Discourses are like selective lenses through which the world appears in a certain way.At the same time, the lenses filter out things that do not conform to the norms created by hegemonic discourses (Kainio & Sivenius, 2022).
As we have presented, roles build and maintain the institutionalised social order (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 94).From the perspective of the institutional order of upper secondary education, roles represent institutionally organised knowledge.Each role contains socially defined information and reinforces the social order.The educational society exists since it is socially structured and individuals are aware of it.Thus, the institutional order of society and the roles people adopt are objectified (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 96).Information becomes sedimented and traditionalised, i.e. information remains in people's consciousness in a form that can be remembered.Language facilitates the implementation of the role of the curriculum in defining teaching.Without linguistic means, the curriculum could not contain means of management.

Findings and discussion
In the following, we describe the findings of our research by answering the research task we set, what kind of reality of working life orientation is produced by the curriculum text.In the dialogue between theoretical thinking and the curriculum text, we first outline the linguistic construction of the emerging working life discourse in upper secondary school's educational responsibility.After this, we focus on describing the discourses of fluency, anticipation, and activation revealed in the curriculum, and we consider their significance for the ideal of Bildung in high upper secondary education in our time.

Working life discourses fulfilling the mission of upper secondary school
Finnish upper secondary education has an educational and teaching function.It includes enhancing students' civilisation and ability as well as providing eligibility for higher education.By teaching critical and independent thinking, upper secondary education aims to produce responsible and proactive individuals.[-] upper secondary education aims at the student's ability to understand large-scale entities and to accumulate knowledge and authority related to humanity, society, and the environment (Finnish national agency for education, 2019,p.16).The curriculum shows cultural values and purposes, which Autio (2013, p. 18) describes as the key point of Bildung in growing into a human being.At the same time, the curriculum emphasises the role of each actor, i.e. teachers and students, in the conflicting pressures of working life orientations in learning ideologies (see, for example, Mäkinen & Kujala, 2017, p. 285;Smith, Gamede & Uleanya, 2019).
The "quality" of education has been thought to improve the extra-curricular management of teaching and curricula as well as increase competition between students.There has been an underlying idea of glorifying the school of the past, i.e., seeing the school system's former features as effective and desirable.This includes admiration for authoritarianism and the free market (M.W. Apple, 2016, p. 17).Some researchers state that the above line of thinking poses problems in the field of education.Neumann et al. (2020, p. 715) argue that the conservative education policy risks producing curricula that reproduce the social order by emphasising the position of the white cultural elite in relation to ethnic minorities and lower social classes.The curriculum text directs the activities of school staff and thus can be seen as influencing the development of young people's ideological thinking (see also Pinar, 2004, Uleanya, 2022).This can also be seen in the work of a teacher, whether the teacher wants it or not.Hamburg and David (2017) state that several European countries have increased entrepreneurial education, and that demands structural changes in the education systems.
Although they may seem that way, the linguistic means used for teaching and learning actors such as teachers and students are not neutral.The guidelines for planning, organising, and implementing teaching are socially constructed and form the criteria for good and poor performance (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966, Foucault, 1969).The prevailing learning ideologies define the ways students are talked about in the curriculum text (W.M. Apple, 2013, pp. 45-46).In the national core curriculum of basic education in 2014, the teacher is presented as a learning instructor and learning planner.Simultaneously, the usage of passive dissolves the points that bind the teacher's actions.Similarly, the role of the student is in some respects contradictory in the curriculum text.The student is offered both an active and a passive role in the curriculum (Mäkinen & Kujala, 2017, p. 285).Thus, the ways of using language reveal the underlying set of values and politics in the curricula and teaching.Therefore, curricula are not neutral documents.
The upper secondary school's traditional set of values is described as follows: The set of values of the upper secondary school curriculum is built on democracy and the Finnish ideal of Bildung, according to which studying and learning renew society and culture (National core curriculum, 2019, p. 16).The curriculum seems to emphasise Bildung.The expressions used in it reflect the underlying Bildung thinking, in which the goal of teaching is the accumulation of civilization.Bildung is the ability of individuals and communities to make decisions through ethical reflection, peer position, and informed judgement.Bildung includes the ability and will to deal with the conflicts between human aspirations and prevailing reality ethically, compassionately, and seeking solutions.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 16) Indeed, Bildung is seen as an empathic encounter with fellow human beings and as cooperation in seeking solutions to universal problems.Similarly, the understanding of large entities and the desire for instructive activities are seen as features of Bildung.Bildung manifests itself as a concern, open-mindedness, a broad perception of reality, and a commitment to positive change.The civilisation ideal of high school is the pursuit of truth, goodness, beauty, justice, and peace (National core curriculum, 2019, pp. 16-17).Finally, the basics of the upper secondary school's ideal of civilisation are presented, on which the contents and goals of upper secondary education should be built.
However, work-oriented speech begins to dispel the Bildung discourse we outlined above.Among OECD countries, young Finns spend a substantial number of years after upper secondary education without enrolling in higher education studies (OECD, 2019; see, e.g., Varjo, Kalalahti & Silvonen, 2020, p. 5).At the same time, working life is considered to be undergoing change, with fragmented careers, increased part-time employment, and job insecurity (Standing, 2011).Factors increasing the fragmentation of an individual's career include gender, youth, low level of education, place of residence and field of work.Women are more at risk than men to end up in precarious jobs, as are young and low-skilled people (Pyöriä & Ojala, 2016, pp. 362-363).
Due to these factors, it is expected that future workers need to be flexible in order to be able to adapt to the current needs of working life as effectively as possible (Standing, 2011).According to Varjo, Kalalahti and Silvonen (2020, p. 15), increasing the individual focus of guidance in schools is one of the ways to meet the needs of working life.However, a study that mapped Finnish working life from the 1980s to the 2010s found that working life has not become significantly more uncertain over the studied period.In contrast, the study does not rule out the possibility that people may experience increased feelings of job insecurity (Pyöriä & Ojala, 2016).According to Goodwin and O'Connor (2007, p. 570), risks, individuality, and uncertainty have been part of transitions from school to higher education or working life in previous decades as well.
The school has been seen as a solution for acquiring competencies that are considered necessary for working life (e.g., Hamburg & David, 2017, Hedegaard-Soerensen & Grumloese, 2020, Varjo, Kalalahti & Silvonen, 2020).Guidance counselling in schools has begun to focus on lifelong learning.It outlines the structural factors that will shape educational and career paths in the future and the attitudes that the "labour market citizen" of the future should have.Guidance counselling has expanded the competencies it produces to include skills outside the school context, i.e. guidance counselling has shifted in the direction of life planning (Varjo, Kalalahti & Silvonen, 2020, 15).In addition, the perception of a career has expanded.It can be thought of as starting to form when an individual begins to look for information about different possibilities.Making a career choice includes clarifying professional self-image, researching professional knowledge, the decision-making phase, and preparing to implement the decision (Savickas et al., 2018, p. 148).
Several different models have been developed for career planning and career formation, considering various aspects related to career and lifecourse.Careership theory emphasises the combination of social and cultural factors with personal choices, a subtle model of learning, and the integration of personal preferences into unforeseen coincidences.This way of thinking allows the individual to be in charge of decision-making about their own life.At the same time, it recognises that there are limitations to decision-making and the individual cannot anticipate everything that will happen in their life (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997, p. 32).In the careership model, the individual is considered to be a responsible actor, in addition to which external factors influence the career.In recent years, life design has gained popularity to meet the need for simultaneous change in individuals, society, and the economy (Savickas et al., 2009, p. 242).The goal of life design is to help the individual develop a flexible approach to professional transitions, help them identify the most important roles in their own life, make it easier to identify and focus on their own interests, and support the individual's efforts appropriately.The purpose is to develop an individual's career transformation and help them anticipate future changes in their own life (Savickas et al., 2009, pp. 245-246).Hodkinson and Sparkes (1997, p. 39) have discovered that some career and work-related transitions are defined by societal structures, while some originate from an individual's own initiative or from outside coercion.Crucial features of the transition from school to work include individuality and a lack of straightforwardness (Goodwin & O'Connor, 2007, p. 562), and sometimes taking a step back (Goodwin & O'Connor, 2007, Hendry & Kloep, 2007).At the beginning of the decision-making phase of career-related choices, an individual may want to keep as many options open as possible, which can delay decision-making (Savickas et al., 2018, p. 147).Education policy aims at making guidance counselling at school support young people's self-direction (Varjo, Kalalahti & Silvonen, 2020, pp. 13-14).
Emerging adulthood has been one of the hallmarks of the initial stages of working life in the 21st century.Emerging adulthood describes the gradual transition from adolescence to adulthood.Those in the stage of emerging adulthood have varying living, studying, and working situations.The life stage involves looking for one's own worldview and questioning the worldview of one's childhood and adolescence (Arnett, 2000, Vehkalahti, Armila & Sivenius, 2021).According to Bynner (2005, p. 370), emerging adulthood is a phenomenon mainly in industrialised Western countries in which people study for a long time.Arnett (2000, pp. 477-478) considers emerging adulthood to be a period during which an individual gradually transitions into the roles that culture places on the adult.Bynner (2005, pp. 377-378) argues that societal structures have an impact on emerging adulthood, as in most cases only those in a privileged position can afford to delay their adulthood.Critics find the life stage of seeking an identity harmful, as being out of work for the first 30 years of one's life is costly for society.As a result, emerging adulthood has been shown to be a self-regulating phenomenon, which has been addressed by national governments in Europe.Signs of this can be seen in the limitation of study periods and the increase in tuition fees at universities (See, e.g., Hendry & Kloep, 2007).The discourses hidden in the curriculum (see Foucault, 1969) seem to emphasise the aspiration for young people to become productive parts of society (also Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

Fluency discourse as a tool for producing effective transitions
The curriculum text contains expressions about lowering the barriers between transitioning from education to working life and promoting flexible transitions between different areas of life: Teaching provides students with information and experiences about education, society and working life to plan their own future, further education, and future work (National core curriculum, 2019, p. 59).Education and working life form a continuum in which the transition from one stage of life to another takes place naturally.The curriculum text supports the idea of accelerating access to working life by obliging students to develop their own studying skills.The text promotes continuous career planning as a tool for transitioning from upper secondary school to higher education and working life.This aspect reveals signs of life planning skills (Savickas et al., 2009).
Students are offered the opportunity to complete some university courses already during their upper secondary studies.Young people may have difficulty taking up career planning tasks (see Goodwin & O'Connor, 2007).The curriculum text guides systematically the learner's future planning by addressing educational opportunities, labour market, and societal issues.This represents Savickas's (2012, p. 15) idea of building a career as a process that involves increasing selfawareness and knowledge of professions.The curriculum text also emphasises selfdetermination, self-reflection skills, and continuous self-development (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, Foucault, 1969) as part of applying for working life during one's upper secondary school studies.
The student understands the importance of commitment to one's learning, which strengthens one's self-determination.Upper secondary school instruction helps students to identify and develop proficiency in learning strategies that are appropriate for them.During upper secondary school, the student develops a solid skill and will for continuous and renewed learning.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 59.) In the curriculum text, we have discovered an ethos of excellence that requires one's continuous self-improvement (Simola 2001, p. 291), as upper secondary school students must learn to identify their strengths and areas for development as well as to take responsibility for themselves and their own learning.Continuous learning is seen as a skill of renewal.It involves acquiring new knowledge and skills, and guiding future choices based on them.The curriculum produces a negative perception of static as it requires a strong will of self-development of a student.Thus, the readiness to learn new skills appears to be the key to flexible and rapid transitions (see also Vehkalahti, Armila & Sivenius, 2021).In this, we see an underlying attempt to shorten the lifestage of an emerging adulthood as defined by Arnett (2000).
Therefore, experimentation and searching for oneself are meant to be earlier in the individual's life course.
When training for working life, the areas of transversal competence include interaction competence, multidisciplinary and creative competence, societal competence, ethics, and environmental competence.As a part of or in addition to these, emphasis is placed on life management skills, cooperation and teamwork skills, language and cultural skills, motivation to learn new things, flexibility, the ability to assess and develop one's own skills, and an understanding of the impact of changes on working life.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 26.) The training speech forms an image of upper secondary school as an intermediate stage and emphasises preparation for other aspects of life.Training is seen to provide an upper secondary school student with the ability to manage a wide range of skills needed in working life.In addition, training can be seen to develop an individual's self-reflection skills.They affect a student's ability to learn to develop their own skills amid changes in working life.As Standing (2011) states, flexibility and adaptability are important characteristics of employees in the future.This idea is reflected in the curriculum's view of the changing working life, where training is seen to respond to changes.Therefore, the training speech reflects the observation of Varjo, Kalalahti, and Silvonen (2020) that school and guidance counselling are seen as solutions for the development of working life skills needed in the future.Although Pyöriä and Ojala (2016, p. 364) consider the fragmentation of working life a myth in Finland, the curriculum maintains the notion of change in working life.The student's entrepreneurial and working life skills are deepened in various subjects as part of the study units and guidance counselling, as well as in other upper secondary school activities by developing diverse forms of cooperation between upper secondary school and working life, and between upper secondary school, companies and the third sector.The subjects and transversal competencies, as well as extracurricular activities that can be included in the studies, open up prospects for a meaningful life in which work is one of the key parts.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 25.) Upper secondary school studies have also been changed in other respects to resemble university studies.Previously, students studied courses, but according to the current curriculum, studies are built of modules of 1-3 credits from which either the subject's own or the subjects' joint study units are constructed (National core curriculum, 2019, p. 10).In addition to being similar to university studies, the curriculum repeatedly emphasises entrepreneurship alongside working life skills.For this reason, entrepreneurship appears as a separate part of working life, as if it were not part of working life skills but had its own separate entity, which includes different skills than working life skills (cf.Hamburg & David, 2017).Learning these skills must pass the subjects and guidance counselling and be a part of working life cooperation.Working life skills are linked to activities that can be studied both in and outside of school and accepted as a part of upper secondary studies.This demonstrates the extent of fluency discourse in the curriculum.Learning working life skills takes up space within subjects and expands from there to out-of-school contexts.Developing collaboration between school and working life moves learning outside the school environment.
The curriculum defines school activities' goal as the meaningful life in which the work is included.In the curriculum text, work is seen as a key factor of an individual's life.Thus, the text reinforces the role of entrepreneurship and productivity in a student's endeavours (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966, Foucault, 1969).This differs from the principles of life design (Savickas et al., 2009), which seek to accept the view that work does not belong to the meaningful contents of everyone's life.
The fluency discourse reveals the curriculum's focus on working life: the transition to working life must be rapid and uninterrupted in the career path.Therefore, cooperation is established with working life actors and especially companies during upper secondary school studies.Career choice is meant to be clarified to students during upper secondary school by providing information about professions, clarifying an individual's perceptions of themselves, and encouraging decision-making and preparing for the implementation of a decision (Savickas et al., 2018, p. 148).This also refers to the notion of emerging adulthood in which career-related transitions are often located in the late twenties (Arnett, 2000).Constructing a career in upper secondary school can be seen to work to shorten the phase of emerging adulthood and accelerate transitions in an individual's life (see Bynner, 2005, Hendry & Kloep, 2007).

Meeting the needs of working life as an anticipatory discourse
The curriculum text expects upper secondary school students to learn to recognise the needs of working life in the future.Simultaneously, they are expected to develop their own skills based on their observations.In many ways, the anticipatory discourse resembles the fluency discourse.The difference between the discourses is mainly in the emphasis: the fluency discourse emphasises the rapidity and ease in moving from one stage of life to another, while the anticipatory discourse emphasises preparation for the future rather than rapidity.
The student becomes acquainted with new forms of work, entrepreneurship, and economic activity in order to form an idea of what kind of skills are needed now and in the future.The student is offered learning experiences that encourage open-mindedness, initiative, entrepreneurship, cooperation, responsibility and constructive problem-solving in accordance with the principles of a sustainable future.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 25.)The curriculum text describes the student's role as an independent actor, which is also understood as their role in the future working life (cf.Berger & Luckmann, 1966).Based on the information they have collected and learned, the student should learn to draw conclusions related to changes in working life (Standing, 2011).The image of working life is shown to be international and changing in the curriculum text.In addition, the curriculum develops an understanding of the knowledge and skills required of a future employee.The development of these characteristics in upper secondary school is intended to be practised as the student is provided with learning experiences that encourage skill-enhancing activities.
The curriculum states that "the teaching and other activities of the upper secondary school are organised in such a way that students have equal and diverse access to information about the working life's opportunities and trajectories for their own future and higher education studies" (National core curriculum 2019, 25).When talking about diverse opportunities, an image is maintained of an individual's ability to influence one's placement in working life if one works for one's future.According to Franceschelli and Keating (2018, p. 9), belief in one's own potential is featured in British young people's perceptions of the impact of hard work on their own success.In the curriculum, this way of thinking is implemented in Finnish education.According to the curriculum text, the student must gain experience of different forms of working life in one's studies and use these experiences as a basis for gaining working life skills.According to the curriculum, the student should be able to get an idea of the requirements of future working life and to be able to meet them by getting acquainted with new forms of work and entrepreneurship.Hodkinson and Sparkes (1997, p. 32) consider an individual to be able to influence their own future, but at the same time consider those factors that are detached from the individual that still affect the career.The curriculum considers external factors as an individual's ability to prepare for uncertainty.
In addition to the role of the student, the curriculum defines upper secondary school's institutional role.Upper secondary school is assigned to provide learning experiences, i.e., in practice, learning services, in which case learning is seen as a service.Broad-mindedness, proactiveness, entrepreneurship, cooperation, responsibility, and problem-solving represent the principles of a sustainable future and its ideal of individual global responsibility, self-reliance, and strong agency.These strengthen the focus on working life and planning for the future in the curriculum.According to the findings of Varjo, Kalalahti, and Silvonen (2020), upper secondary school is meant to increase an individual's self-knowledge, e.g., based on which competencies needed in working life can be developed.The role of the education system is also to provide opportunities for selfdevelopment and future choices that increase equality and equity.Therefore, the student's ability to plan and manage their own future must be developed with the support of the upper secondary school, but at the same time increasing the student's personal responsibility.
Based on the view of reality the curriculum demonstrates, success in working life requires a reaction to rapid change, creativity and the ideal of ethical sustainability, as well as an openmindedness to seize various opportunities.The curriculum sets a wide range of work-related competence goals for upper secondary education.At the same time, various functions, such as guidance counselling, are facing new challenges.
Through guidance, the student improves their ability to cope with changes in life and learns to evaluate their choices regarding upper secondary school and higher education from the perspective of future competence needs.In accordance with the goals of the upper secondary school's transversal competence, upper secondary school education takes the form of lifelong working life readiness and skills as well as broader societal competence.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 27.) In upper secondary school studies, guidance counselling is a means of creating a planned and well-reflected path for an individual to higher education studies and from there to working life.Upper secondary school seems like a stage in which to begin developing skills for a future career.Guidance counselling aims for the individual to have easy access from one stage of life to another.Thus, an upper secondary school student must achieve the ability to be flexible amid change during their upper secondary studies, which Standing (2011) sees as a key feature of the future of working life.Again, the curriculum highlights the student's ability to learn to identify future needs for competencies and to reflect on their current and future study choices.This shows the idea of Hodkinson and Sparkes (1997, p. 33) of an individual's tendency to make career-related choices rationally based on their own life history.

Activity discourse as a means of control in shaping a proactive individual
Civic skills, well-being, and social responsibility are repeated in the curriculum text in addition to entrepreneurship and general working life skills.These topics are reflected in the general goals of teaching and the goals of transversal competence.A high school student is seen as a strong and independent actor who develops their own initiative during their studies.At the same time, the curriculum emphasises the learning of societal agency, ethically sustainable activities, and taking care of one's own well-being.When the two previous discourses on fluency and anticipation reflect the curriculum's expectations for changing working life, the activity discourse introduces the ideal citizen and worker (cf.Foucault, 1969).
The student understands the importance of health and a healthy lifestyle and nurtures their physical, mental, and social well-being.The student adopts practices that support their wellbeing, produce joy, and recognise the communities that promote them.[. ..]Students acquire the ability to get or guide others to get access to service systems in problematic and exceptional situations.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 62.) The ideals of activity have been instilled in the well-being competence, which, in turn, is one of the components of transversal competence.The curriculum emphasises the importance of self-care in the context of the future and working life.The activity discourse includes an assumption about a student's ability to take responsibility for both their own well-being and that of their fellow human beings.This shows how holistic well-being is thought to support the ability to work.The student's resilience and recovery are considered important, as is the student's ability to recognise factors that affect wellbeing.In this manner, the student is supposed to be able to address their problems on their own.Knowing how to prevent factors that negatively affect one's own well-being and safety from happening is also a way to maintain one's ability to work in the future.Health competence can be seen as a civic skill in the curriculum.Simultaneously, the text reveals the idea of the imperative of success in the background of the well-being speech.According to Juvonen (2014, p. 263), the necessity to cope as an individual's experience may hinder the transition to independence and self-responsibility.In such a case, the intentions of the curriculum that seeks to produce competencies may turn against themselves.The curriculum includes a notable amount of content that increases the responsibility of the upper secondary school student, but no attention is paid to how to act in the event of setbacks.
In addition, the contents of various subjects emphasise critical thinking skills, growing into active citizenship, and weighing alternatives.This is combined with Arnett's (2000) conception of searching for one's own worldview in emerging adulthood, but also Hendry and Kloep's (2007) view on accelerating one's ability to take responsibility for oneself.Savickas (2012, p. 17) states that life design seeks transitions in which one is oriented towards the future in a planned, appropriate and active manner.The contents and expressions of the curriculum text represent the ideal of active planning (see Bynner, 2005).Guidance counselling is the subject that takes the most responsibility for building general working life skills: The goal of guidance counselling is to provide the student with the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills they need in life, studies, and working life.[. ..]Guidance counselling connects the upper secondary school to society and working life.It promotes justice, equity, equality, and inclusion and prevents exclusion from education and employment.(National core curriculum, 2019, p. 351.)As mentioned above, working life skills also include knowledge of the labour market.The goal of guidance counselling as a school subject is to strengthen the student's capacity, i.e. to help them make decisions on their own.Career construction is important in the activity discourse, upper secondary school strives to strengthen a skill that is making career-related decisions.The activity also includes social activism, which the upper secondary school promotes by creating connections between school and society.This is related to the careership's view of the dialogue between an individual's choices, socio-cultural factors, and society in career planning (Hodkinson & Sparkes, 1997, p. 32).Thus, the ideals of the curriculum text aim at educating the upper secondary school student to participate in working life, and to become an individual who implements justice, equality, and equity in their daily lives.
The curriculum fortifies the student's strong educational foundation as well as promotes selfdirection.In the curriculum text, the discourses reinforce the idealisation of self-reliance, self-care, and quick access to working life.They aim to shorten the life phase of emerging adulthood that emphasises self-discovery.The working life discourses do not directly represent measurability and standardisation.Nevertheless, they reflect GERM's (Sahlberg, 2015) efficiency thinking.It permeates working life discourses as a pursuit to speed up educational transitions, to take care of oneself and to produce citizens beneficial to society.Discourses can be seen as delimiting the reality formed by the upper secondary school's emphasis on working life (Berger & Luckmann, 1966, Foucault, 1969).

Conclusion
Theoretically, we have discussed that the curriculum text "modifies" the institutionalised power as a document defining the teaching contents of the Finnish education system.The curriculum imposes a moral order on its users, that is, in fact, the roles deemed appropriate for the upper secondary school educational staff, who implement the teaching according to the curricula on a practical level.
The goals of upper secondary education reveal the creation of a strong Bildung foundation for the student as well as supporting their proactive and self-determined actions.The discourses that support the glorification of self-reliance, self-care, and quick entry into working life aim to shorten the self-searching life stage of emerging adulthood.Although the working life discourses do not fully represent measurability and standardisation, they reflect GERM's tendency to highlight efficiency as accelerating educational transitions, taking care of oneself, and producing citizens who benefit the society.Discourses can be seen as delimiting the reality that emerges from the emphasis on working life in the upper secondary school.
The fluency discourse creates the will for a rapid and uninterrupted transition to working life on an individual's career path.Therefore, cooperation is established with working life actors, especially companies, already during upper secondary studies.Career choice is meant to be clarified to students during upper secondary school by providing information about professions, clarifying an individual's perceptions of themselves, encouraging decision-making, and preparing for the implementation of a decision.This also suggests a venture to shorten emerging adulthood in which a person's career-related transitions often take place in the late twenties.Training for a career, developing oneself, and acquiring working life competencies in upper secondary school can be seen as ways to accelerate transitions.
The anticipation discourse emphasises assessing the needs of future working life skills.Knowledge of working life is a goal for both students and teaching staff.It includes information about current working life and estimates of its future in accordance with the goals of lifelong learning.Career adaptability emerges as a prerequisite for anticipation: in order to be able to adapt to a precarious working life proactively, one must be flexible and ready to change one's dreams and the way they are realised.The curriculum creates an understanding of the general working life skills that are deemed necessary in the future.Its contents aim to enable students to achieve lifelong working life skills and competencies.Planning for the future includes the idea of equipping oneself with versatile means to prepare for uncertain working life.Therefore, the curriculum aims at strengthening the upper secondary school student's agency and self-determination so that society can benefit from it as much as possible in the future.
The curriculum expects teaching personnel to be familiar with future working life so that guidance counselling may increase students' opportunities to anticipate working life.However, it can be difficult due to digitalisation that causes the future prospects of numerous professions to be uncertain.Similarly, numerous future professions are probably not yet developed.Can teachers and tutors, let alone young people, be required to predict working life?
The curriculum text shows the ideal of matching employees and jobs in a manner that demand meets supply.This sheds light on how the curriculum is meant to benefit society: the skills of individuals are to be oriented towards the needs of society.The advantage of the labour market is present in the curriculum.Teaching working life skills before university, well-being skills, and societal competence construct an individual's ability to acquire competencies for their career.
We find that the curriculum facilitates reacting to changing working life factors detached from the individual and promotes purposeful career planning.Society and working life are intertwined in career planning.Based on the picture drawn by the activity discourse, the individual must meet the goals they set.Therefore, one's own dreams must be adapted to the norms coming from outside.The curriculum aims at increasing the availability of skilled workforce and matching skilled workers to jobs.The activity discourse produces individuals who are successful, independent, and interested in society.Increasing determined self-knowledge and self-reflection skills to construct a career can be seen as a goal of the curriculum that benefits working life in general.Indeed, the needs of society take some precedence over the needs of the individual.The anticipation of working life in the curriculum, combined with the coordination of employees, and working life, puts pressure on the goals of upper secondary education.The life and career planning of individuals is seen from the point of view that benefits society in the curriculum.
As we have stated, the curriculum text guides the teachers to implement the contents.It creates social knowledge in the educational society.It determines what is supposed to be achieved in teaching and limits the possible options that can be used to organise teaching.The curriculum conveys the older generations' ideas about the ideals of learning, and transfers them to the younger generations to become a part of their thought patterns.Through the curriculum, the content valued by previous generations can be socialised for the use of younger generations.The curriculum is a product of its time, which expresses what the relevant contents of education are and why, as well as defines and represents the approved educational discourse.Thus, in upper secondary school, young people acquire skills and knowledge that the previous generations find essential.
The discourses that the curriculum text reveals illustrate the gap between the curriculum and everyday school life.The curriculum consolidates the emphasis on working life into educational reality through its discourses.At the same time, it is possible to consider whether learning to prepare for working life takes precedence over fulfilling the ideal of Bildung in upper secondary school.Is Finnish upper secondary school education transforming into an institution that decreases individual choices in students' career paths?Educational aspirations are still reflected in the value base of the curriculum, but Bildung is overshadowed by orientation towards working life.One can consider whether discourses embedded in the curriculum can make students internalise the appreciation of rapid transition to work and the student's own proactive role in career planning.
We have described "the forms of continuity" in education, which are the result of educational structures.Their rules and justifications should be studied more in detail.The curriculum produces social knowledge.It defines and governs practices and contents of education.Therefore, the curriculum text reveals what is appreciated and what should be achieved in education.At the same time, it creates roles for teachers and students in which they must act to achieve the teaching and learning goals.Curricula are products of education policy.They reflect the ideals of the time of their construction, and knowledge and skills that are considered important at the time.Additionally, some less valued topics remain hidden in the curriculum.This creates an order in which certain competences are valued and others are superseded.
How reliable is our research?We have tried to describe the expressions used within the limits set by Finnish upper secondary education as clearly as possible.The topic of this study has been the current curriculum text for upper secondary school, which we realise represents our time when this discourse has been produced, and which we understand to limit our interpretation within the limits set by our era.We have structured the working life orientation revealed in the curriculum as discursive events.We have interpreted the curriculum as a linguistic whole, the ways of speaking that we have highlighted by describing the expressions used in the document.With our discursive approach, we have found the linguistic regularities of the curriculum text, interpreted the connections between the expressions.As a result, we have drawn conclusions based on our interpretation, while at the same time revealing the information, the cultural reserve of our time, and the details that emerge from it.As researchers, we are also aware of the impact of our choices on, among other things, the theoretical approach, and the interpretation of the data.
This study examines the Finnish upper secondary school curriculum introduced in the autumn of 2021.We have found the discourses related to the formation of emerging adulthood and career planning reflect our interpretations of the reality of education in the pressures of neoliberal education policy.More broadly, our study of the discursive reality produced by the upper secondary school curriculum paints a picture of national education policy within the framework of our theoretical thinking and interpretation.In the future, it would be important to consider how decisions related to education policy and the changing aspirations of curricula are being put into practice in upper secondary school.