Whose success counts? Children’s lifeworlds and the moral–economic politics of educational achievement

Educational success is commonly defined through measurable performance within globalised assessment regimes, where comparative metrics and high stakes testing shape policy discourse and public understandings of achievement. Such frameworks privilege quantifiable attainment and narrow success to institutional performance. While extensive scholarship examines structural determinants of academic outcomes, considerably less attention has been given to how children themselves construct the meaning of success when invited to imagine their futures. Drawing on qualitative learning dialogue data from Year 4 students in Melbourne, generated within a multi-site research project examining children’s lifeworlds across three global cities (Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore), this article analyses children’s responses to a career aspiration prompt. Framed through lifeworld and scholarly habitus perspectives, aspirations are interpreted not as predictors of occupational outcomes but as forms of future-oriented identity work. Findings demonstrate that children construct success through hybrid moral–economic logics in which care, financial security, curiosity, challenge, recognition and mobility are negotiated simultaneously. Rather than reproducing singular cultural scripts or internalising institutional metrics, children synthesise relational and economic narratives of adulthood circulating within transnational educational fields. The analysis demonstrates that dominant separations between moral and economic framings of achievement obscure how children themselves understand success as moral–economic future identity work shaped through situated lifeworlds.