Schooling at the Doorstep of Dystopia: On Educating for Unsustainable Futures

• In Event: Critical encounters with sustainability

Proposal

Dystopian news abounds. In Cape Town, a public preoccupation for much of the past year concerned staving off the arrival of “day zero,” the moment - for a time projected to be April 2018, then later averted - in which South Africa’s largest city was to suffer a drought so significant that its 4 million residents would have to line up to receive water rations (Mahr, 2018; Onishi & Sengupta, 2018). In Nawabshah, Pakistan, a city of over 1 million people, 2018 brought the hottest April on record, including a day with a temperature exceeding 50 degrees Celsius (Watts & Hunt, 2018). Locations at or near cities as geographically dispersed as Basra, Sidney, Madrid, and Los Angeles have all recently recorded temperatures in the high 40s, signaling the onset of a calamitous, new ‘normal’ across much of the world (Watts & Hunt, 2018). As we write this, forest fires covering more than one million acres burn in California, and span vast swaths of British Columbia (where over 600 are active in August 2018). The black carbon emitting from these fires - instigated by issues such as prolonged heat waves, exceedingly dry vegetation, unfettered population growth, car emission excesses, and persistent home building in areas prone to fire - have darkened towns and cities, and stoked legitimate fears among many of associated respiratory and cardiovascular illness, not to mention a host of attendant anxieties (Arango, 2018; Mortillaro, 2018).


In the midst of this sort of news - of which potential substitutions are endless: the global displacement of populations through war, the ongoing refugee crises, the persistent threat of nuclear arms escalations - we, two professors in a Canadian Faculty of Education, attend an educational technology conference in our city, a conference of the sort occurring across North America and beyond. We are sold a message of unambiguous optimism: about how new school-business partnerships will soon help prepare students for a life of steady and secure employment, about the potential of technology enhanced learning for promoting new forms of global citizenship among young people, and about the redemptive social and economic promises of education (Author 1 & Author 2, forthcoming). In the ensuing months, we also have occasion to enter many of our city’s schools, and see this same optimism consistently reproduced: on school walls we see countless posters affirming the power of positive thinking and personal initiative (Author 1, 2016), we see pedagogical practices that emphasize the authority of human agency over destiny, and we see school structures deeply wedded to liberal humanist ideals about meritocracy and achievement (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990).


Nowhere in these educational practices do we see any engagement with the very credible and increasingly plausible possibility that the lifespans of more and more of today’s school aged students are on course to intersect with new, pervasive, dystopian realities of human pain and suffering. Our inquiries to colleagues near and far reveal much of the same. While we see, hear, and read of many examples of curricula and pedagogy that emphasize engaged global citizenship and social responsibility (OECD, 2018; Toukan, 2018), and while there certainly exists a tradition of engaging dystopian literature in schools across much of the global North (through a familiar canon of Orwell, Huxley, and others), these practices are most often motivated by what Ayers (2013) calls “creative repair,” or “the capacity to imagine a better world” (p. xi). What we do not see and hear in schools is a more determined, more uncomfortable, but to our mind more earnest account of the realities of the current historical moment, an account divorced from long standing imperatives to imbue the ‘doing’ of education with requisite fictions about positive outcomes and evolved futures.



In this paper, a critical essay, we theorize about the viability of centering the dystopian as a legitimate sphere of inquiry in schools. Following from an introduction that puts forward and expands upon much of the above, we advance our argument in three sections.


• We begin by critiquing what we perceive to be widespread commitments to positivity and progress as endemic to the functioning of schools (Author 1, 2016). In particular, we draw on works of educational philosophy and political economy to examine how and why it is that schools in the global present are so often wedded to positivity mythologies, asking: What fictions do these mythologies offer, and why have so many educational stakeholders deemed them useful?


• Next, we assess the challenges to educational policy and the practice of earnestly enacting globally focused pedagogies of dystopian realism, both contemplating whether it is possible to imagine schools more effectively engaging current and near dystopias, and questioning whether their predominant structural arrangements leave them at all equipped to do so.


• Finally, we make an argument in defense of engaging dystopian pedagogies on the basis of what we argue are a series of urgent, ethical grounds. To not engage these pedagogies and instead acquiesce to the status quo, we argue, is to align with the systems and practices that have helped to actuate dystopias rather than with the needs and concerns of students who will inherit them.

Authors

• Roger Saul, University of New Brunswick

• Casey Burkholder, University of New Brunswick