How do teachers in schools from different socioeconomic classes perceive their students’ future?

This article offers a qualitative examination of how teachers working in schools serving students from different socioeconomic backgrounds define and envision their students’ futures. This examination is significant in light of extensive empirical findings regarding the effects of specific teacher–student relationships on students’ academic achievement and well-being, as well as the established links between future orientations, academic performance, and psychological variables. To address this research objective, 40 in-depth interviews were conducted with teachers in private elite schools (high socioeconomic status; high SES) and disadvantaged public schools (low SES). The findings reveal striking differences in the ways teachers across socioeconomic contexts speak about, imagine, and cultivate their students’ future orientations. Teachers in high-SES schools stressed their students’ open futures, expressing confidence that they would “conquer the world” (a form of colonization of the future), describing a distinguished future, and predicting that their students would enter prestigious professions suited to their exceptional subjectivities. In contrast, teachers in low-SES schools depicted their students’ futures in bleak terms of risk, viewing educational engagement in the present as critical to their rehabilitation and highlighting a causal relationship between the students’ current circumstances and their future—conceptualized in this study as a predetermined future. The Discussion reflects on the potential implications of these differences for the reproduction of privilege and inequality. Moreover, varying future orientations may be seen as potential expressions of cultural capital.