From inevitable disaster to Ineradicable possibility: Critical pedagogies of ecocide, educational privatization, and new technology

Abstract

From climate disaster to the specter of nuclear annihilation to the rise of fascism and destruction of democracy to the advent of AI and other potentially destructive technologies, a number of material threats are matched by symbolic threats that undermine the capacities of people to respond. The war on public and critical education and the public sphere, the erosion of investigative journalism, ideologies of cynicism, and the crises of critical theoretical tools and literacies undermine individual and collective agency to respond to these threats. The result of these material threats and crises of agency is political paralysis, cynicism, and despair.

This article focuses on three material and symbolic disasters: (1) climate crisis and natural disaster; (2) the privatization of public education in continuing and new digital forms as part of the broader rightist war on the public; and (3) the rise of authoritarian anti-democratic movements. The threats posed by these phenomena are bolstered by ideologies in education that are profoundly deterministic, fatalistic, and anti-agentic. The first section briefly details these intertwined threats and the ideologies about them. The second section makes the case for modes of education and pedagogy that inform the understanding and agency of teachers, citizens, and other meaning making actors to challenge these threats and pursue public and democratic values and build institutions of care and security.

Keywords:

• Critical pedagogy
• educational privatization
• politics of education
• sociology of education
• educational policy

Notes

1 For indexes of educational gag orders and book censorship see for example, Pen America’s website pen.org.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth J. Saltman

Kenneth J. Saltman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatiztion, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (MIT Press) and The Disaster of Resilience (Bloomsbury).