Dare to Think Past the Anthropocene

Abstract

To refer education to the dates 2030 and 2050, as the UN has done via its “Education for Sustainable Development” and “Futures of Education” initiatives, is to place it in the context of the IPCC’s two key deadlines for the reduction of carbon emissions. Yet this immediately leads to a paradox: how can we even begin to conceive or imagine education after 2050 without first recognizing that the current dismal failure to approach these targets stems in no small part from an inability to foster the collective knowledge and will required to take care of this biospheric emergency – and that remedying this inability absolutely depends on a transformation of the conditions of intergenerational transmission and a critique of contemporary education? Rather than being paralysed by this paradox, we must inhabit it as the vector of a new dynamism directed towards the transformation of the way education is conceived and undertaken in the nihilistic depths of the Anthropocene. This will require a renewed understanding of the meaning of both sustainability and diversity, the relationship these bear to reason and technics, and the way this ultimately yet unavoidably calls for a new economic model.