Education at the End of Time
The 21st century looks quite different in reality to the predictions made by science fiction writers. Instead of a world dominated by flying cars and androids, we have found ourselves living in the wake of a global pandemic, experiencing an increasing frequency of natural disasters, battling political turmoil and global refugee crises, all set against the backdrop of the climate emergency and the mass extinction of species, including, eventually, our own. Meanwhile, we send off our kids to school to prepare them for a future that we as grown-ups increasingly come to fear. In this setting, what is the role of education at the potential end of the world? What societal as well as personal role does education play when our hopes for the future may need to be drastically readjusted?
Education at the End of Time addresses these questions and explores the role of education in current society not in a limited sense of formal schooling, but rather in terms of what it means to live and engage with a world that is at the brink of collapse. Yet, it falls not into fatalism, but to account for a journey that leads to a (re)discovery of the world beyond the modern notion of development and personal realization. It offers an a journey to open up new perspectives for how to think of education as a way out of a path set towards the end of the world.
Stefan Bengtsson is Senior Lecturer of Didactics at the Department of Education, Uppsala University, Sweden
Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Denmark
Dylan McGarry is Senior Researcher at the Environmental Learning Research Centre at Rhodes University, South Africa