Finding One’s Way: A Response to the Idea of an Education after Progress

Abstract

Inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, this response essay focuses on the tension between hope in the future and lost hope in the present inherent in the modern idea of progress. The backdrop of the symposium is some of the interrelated challenges that we are facing today, such as climate change, new pandemics, mass migration, and the rise of populism. Drawing on different philosophical concepts and strands, the five papers explore what it would mean to learn and educate beyond the imagery of progress. Thinking beyond, however, is never an easy task and the question becomes how to orient oneself in this new philosophical landscape without losing track of what is educationally important and meaningful. After responding to each paper, focusing on five possible connections between them (change, orientation, time, situatedness, and immanence), the essay concludes with the more general question of what place, if any, concepts as the past, conservation, and preservation have in an education ‘after’ progress.