2023/12/01 by Paul Standish · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Health Professions · #Healthcare innovation and challenges #Health Policy Implementation Science #Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/jopedu/qhad084
The journal is delighted to include the following suite of articles on the theme of ‘Questioning Progress in Times of “No Future”: Orientations for Education’. The suite has been convened and co-ordinated by its authors as a collective endeavour, and we thank them for providing us with the account of their project on which this introduction is based. Written against what they perceive as a backdrop of growing pessimism and anxiety, if not hopelessness in relation to the future, the symposium deals with an idea that, although it used to be a central goal of modern education, has increasingly been rendered obsolete: that is, the very idea of progress. Their discussion is oriented by Bruno Latour’s claim that this sentiment of hopelessness is a product of the contemporary sense that we no longer have a place to call our ‘land’, ‘soil’, or ‘home’ (Latour 2018). Far from having a single source, this experience is the result of a complex knot of diverse interrelated developments: mass migration, the extinction of species, the pollution of the natural environment, climate change, the rise of political populism, distrust in science (e.g. antivaccination movements), the automatization of work, and so on. These phenomena contribute to a corrosion of the solid, commonly shared, and generally unquestioned hope for the future that the West has inherited from modernity. The equally modern understanding of education as nurturing the potential of the new generation to contribute to social, cultural, political, and economic progress is put into question, too. When faith in a brighter, more rational, just, and prosperous future runs the risk of disappearing into thin air, there are unavoidably implications for education. In fact, so closely has this become tied to notions of development and growth, of emancipation and hope, and—precisely—of progress itself that it seems to undermine the very idea of education. The contributors to this symposium make preliminary attempts to explore these issues.