The Future of Education

Authoritarian regimes keep their sights trained on educational institutions and curricula with the expectation that disfavoured and oppositional ideas and actions are fomented in the pedagogies and public spheres of higher learning. The rise of illiberalism and the current and expanding crisis of democracy are rooted in the erosion of education and educational governance where irrefutably, ideas have always been regarded as dangerous to projects of social and political containment and repression. Education that is ideologically encumbered is of course, no education at all. As Samantha Hill has argued, “Ideological thinking forecloses our ability to discern by flattening the plurality of the human condition, destroying our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, right and wrong.” (Hill, 2018)[1] This alarming permeability and ultimate ascendency of untruth and unseriousness isof course, elaborated through and enabled by a seeming limitlessness of social media. Indeed, the frequency and embeddedness of disinformation and the cynical manipulation of narratives-presented-as-facts are commonplace in the velocity and powerful reach of AI. Education unencumbered is anathema to authoritarianism. Our broad purpose as educators is to instigate positive social change and to model the responsibilities of citizenship, no matter what the discipline. To repurpose an idea from Marshall Berman, our aim is to help our students to find their aspirations in their learning experience; to see their capacities as not only present but also resonant in the world; and to recognize themselves as “participants and protagonists” in the thought, the culture, the politics of their own times (Berman, 1982)[2]. The premise of this paper is that these issues and contestations must be taken up with urgency by educators, articulated in our philosophies of education, and actualized in teaching and learning. As the most innovative and influential work toward the advancement of education as a democratic prerequisite has long been driven by educational philosophy and the politics of education, so current and emergent applied educational philosophy is vital in fortifying democratic principles. In a world of precarity where the students we encounter are anxious and unsettled, the classroom, the front line of pedagogy, must be continually revised and renewed to exemplify democratic educational, and more broadly, democratic societal principles.