Educational Ills And The Im Possibility Of Utopia

As a bold provocation to reimagine what the philosophy of education might mean in the 21st century, this book responds to the exhaustion of present theoretical models and indeed the degradation of fabulative thought in its current prospectus. The contributors, from Asia, the Americas, and Europe, proffer a frank response to the everyday reality of the classroom where teachers compete with electronic devices for the attention of students whose minds are literally elsewhere, cocooned in the noospheric ether. Outside of lecture halls the world is suffering the rise of fascism, panic, and anger driven by precarious employment, and a looming fatalism and resignation in the face of ecological calamity. These developments have led to an avalanche of psychical woes afflicting young people ranging from trauma, the loss of hope and, in extremis, violence and suicide. The concerned and committed writers of this volume therefore raise the timely question of the return of utopia as a fitting, desperate, and indeed necessary response to the ecological, existential, and pedagogical crises spreading across the planet. At this most crucial juncture in human history, the excellent contributions to this book offer singularly unique perspectives regarding the possibility/impossibility of utopia. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Is the self or subject discontinuous across technological platforms? Do technological developments increase inequality and exploitation? Is the new media landscape creating a dangerous distraction from the climate crisis? Connecting the work of critical postmedia studies to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of schizoanalysis, this book marks a bifurcatory shift in the radical theory on technology. A range of critical perspectives are explored by international authors who engage with ecology, ecosophy, climate change, the postmedia condition, and the Anthropocene. Answering the above questions, editors Joff P.N. Bradley, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, and Manoj N.Y. frame the volume's chapters as urgent responses to unbridled technological advance and impending climate disaster. Using ecological philosophy as a core focus, the volume analyses new media, technologies of the self, the power of algorithms, and technologies of resistance, to outline a materialist paradigm capable of addressing crises across the cultural, biological, and informational spheres. Through contesting economies built on desire and destruction and questioning the infiltration of capitalism in all of its spheres of negative influence, the editors review recent technological developments in light of Deleuze and Guattari's earlier seminal theories to make bold new connections and critiques in the study of media, philosophy, and the environment.

This book aims to gain a better grasp of how education, both inside and outside school, is shaped by our understanding of time. Over the last decennia, both education and policymaking have undergone radical changes, transcending them far beyond the historical limits of the modern nation-state where their contemporary shape originated. The often-discussed shift from government to governance in education policy, together with the crystallization of newly emerging spaces of transnational education, are illustrative in this respect. The national grammar of schooling is set out to arrange time in class hours, schooldays and yearly cohorts. Its curricula establish what the past should teach to future generations. But when education shifts perspectives towards transnational, European or even global levels, this past increasingly seems to lose relevance when understood as continuity and as tradition. Instead, in education as in policymaking, the discontinuity expected to result from a future deemed open and undetermined becomes an endless resource for the development of new political and educational (re)forms. How are contemporary education and education policy creating and reacting to particular forms of presents, pasts or futures? How do specific forms of education (such as lifelong learning) relate to our shifting understandings of time? How are progress, acceleration and time related in educational reform processes? Through showing the contingency of time-making in educational practices, the contributions to this book seek to answer these questions and thus open avenues to think education and time anew. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This is the second volume of research into the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler and its interconnections with the philosophy of education. Building on the first edited collection, Stiegler’s philosophy is introduced to scholars in the field of the philosophy of education in the hope that researchers dig deep into his philosophy and apply it to their own educational context in order to produce new forms of knowledge, that is “negentropic” forms of knowledge which may counter the endemic crises we see in educational institutions in towns, cities and villages across the planet. This second volume throws down the gauntlet to others to find new ways to contest toxic forms of digital life inside and outside education and to challenge entrenched and conservative ways of teaching and learning in the 21st century. The writers in this volume from Australasia, Europe, and across South, Southeast and East Asia do a remarkable job of translating Bernard Stiegler’s sometimes complicated language into ways which are interpretable, applicable and communicable to those who witness, day in day out, in their schools, universities and institutions the struggle to capture the hearts and minds of young people. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book is the first of its kind to critically examine the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler from the perspective of the philosophy of education. The editors of this book firmly believe that in the coming years Stiegler’s philosophy will assume increasing importance and influence in both digital studies and the philosophy of education as his thought is a prism through which to understand how we live and work, and a means to anticipate what the future may hold for us all in the time of the Anthropocene. They are of the view that Stiegler’s work will have a permanent impact on the intellectual terrain of the twenty-first century as his majestic conceptual architectonic will shape political, social and pedagogical debates in the coming decades. With this in mind, the contributors of this book take up his gauntlet to understand the risks and opportunities of the digital pharmakon and its impact on the educational milieu. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book explores the increasing emergence within educational institutions, such as schools and universities, of large, flexible spaces whose design is underpinned by cutting-edge principles and technologies. These changes in educational facilities have spawned a range of new terminology. For example, terms such as ‘modern learning environments’, ‘innovative learning environments’, ‘flexible learning environments’ and ‘new generation learning spaces’ have gained currency in recent years. The development of flexible learning spaces, while suggesting design creativity, also points to the desire by governments to influence educational outcomes. The displacement of traditional classrooms also presupposes varied teaching and learning approaches, calling on teachers to work in teams and to de-privatise their practice into spaces that are transparent and porous. These developments in the area of educational facilities suggest critical questions regarding the origins and purposes of these changes in educational thinking and practice. Questions must also be raised about the links between conception, design intention and spatial practice. Underlying these questions are competing views on the design of education facilities. This volume gathers a range of international authors who theorise these questions at the intersection of building design, pedagogy and educational policy. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.

For much of its history, the notion of talent has been associated with the idea of ‘careers open to talent’. Its emancipatory promise of upward social mobility has ultimately radically transformed the distribution of advantaged social positions and has had a lasting influence on the very idea of social status itself. Besides its inextricable link with equality of educational opportunity, the notion of talent also came to be associated with some of the most pressing contemporary issues as diverse as the ‘war for talent’, brain drain, immigration policies, talent management, global meritocracy, the ‘excellence gap’, the ‘ownership’ of natural resources, ability taxation, etc. Nevertheless, while central to egalitarian conceptions of distributive justice, the notion of talent remains to a large extent absent from the voluminous literature on these issues. Unlike concepts traditionally associated with distributive justice, such as fairness, (in)equality, equality of opportunity as well as justice itself, the notion of talent has received only limited examination. This volume brings together a set of contributions discussing some of the most pressing problems and challenges arising out of a reductionist understanding of talents’ anatomy, a distorted characterisation of their overall distributive value or talents’ non-voluntaristic nature and many other issues revolving around talents, which existing conceptions of distributive justice in education leave either neglected or outrightly ignored. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

On the occasion of the centennial of Paulo Freire’s birth in September 2021 and of fifty years since the initial publication of his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this book focuses on how scholars continue to reinvent his work across geographic and thematic contexts. Reinvention is specifically used because Freire vehemently opposed simply repeating his work, calling on scholars to instead meaningfully recontextualize it. The book illustrates how without critical, contextual reinvention, teaching cannot lead to praxis – students’ critical reflexivity about how to make a better world and sustainable planet. The chapter authors’ explorations of past, present, and future-looking praxis, including their own, offer foundations, histories, possibilities, challenges, and examples of reinventing Freire’s work. It is work that counters fatalistic teaching that reproduces and justifies oppressions. In Pedagogy of Indignation, Freire stated that students should be educated to “dream of constant reinvention of the world, the dream of liberation, thus the dream of a less ugly society, one less mean-only dream of human beings' silent adaptation to a reality considered untouchable.” Readers will have the opportunity to understand how reinventions of Freire’s work continue to commit to these crucial goals. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.