In this paper I explore the potential of reparative futures thinking for reimagining education beyond the institution of the modern school. To do so, I bring together scholarship from the ‘reparative turn’ in the social sciences with the long tradition of critiquing schooling in the sociology of education. Most recently in this tradition, Ball and Collet-Sabé (2021) draw on Foucault to argue convincingly that the modern school is an ‘intolerable institution’ bound in its very epistemology to reproduce conditions of future uncertainty and inequity. This position, however, still begs the pragmatic question of how it is possible to think education beyond the modern school in complex societies where mass education will likely figure in the future. I explore this question through my 2014-15 ethnography of a US public high school. Through the story of seniors at Bronx High, I demonstrate how schooling is profoundly oriented towards particular anticipatory practices - namely, a modernist reckoning of the future that is both illusory in its promises and unsustainable in its ambitions. Bronx High exemplifies the deleterious impacts of living in a future-oriented present that appears wilfully detached from injustices of the past. However, the day-to-day actions of teachers and students reveal complex, multiple engagements with future-reckoning, including what I identify as examples of reparative futures-thinking.