The Future of Education: Reimagining Its Aims and Responsibilities

Draft book overview, last updated 19 July 2023 The Future of Education: Reimagining Its Aims and Responsibilities Forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2023 Editors Dr Jonathan Beale Dr Christina Easton Research Affiliate, Human British Academy Postdoctoral Flourishing Program at Fellow, University of Warwick Harvard University 1. Overview 1 I. The gap in the literature this book aims to fill 2 II. The book’s themes 3 i. How the book’s themes reflect recent and current debates 3 ii. Debates generated by school and university closures 4 iii. Education’s role in anti-racism 5 iv. Relations between education’s role in challenging prejudice and its broader aims 7 v. Community engagement, social action, and the aims of education 8 vi. Human flourishing and the aims of education 11 2. Conference 14 3. Editors’ biographies 14 4. Contributors’ biographies 15 5. Structure of volume 19 6. Chapter abstracts 20 Section 1: The Aims of Education 20 Section 2: The Responsibilities of Education 23 Section 3: The Future of Education 25 1. Overview This volume will be a study of new developments and important topics in contemporary philosophy of education. The book will be thematically divided into three sections, reflecting some of the principal areas of current debates in the philosophy of education and the most pressing issues facing education today: (1) the aims of education, (2) the responsibilities of education and (3) the future of education. Chapters will consist of state-of-the-art research from leading experts on the philosophy of education, all of whom have a wealth of teaching experience, in schools, universities, or both.  I. The gap in the literature this book aims to fill There is a gap in the literature for an edited book on this growing field of philosophy, especially one that focuses on the three areas with which this book is concerned. This is for at least three reasons: (i) education has been recently presented with new and increased challenges which are not currently addressed in detail in the existing literature on the philosophy of education; (ii) an accessible and affordable edited book on the philosophy of education has not been published for over a decade; (iii) there is increasing interest in this field. Concerning (i), the context of education has changed dramatically over the past three years, with the emergence of major new challenges facing education, some of which have exacerbated existing problems. Over the past three years, education has received a heightened focus in the media in relation to two issues in particular: school closures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and heightened concern with structural and institutional racism. The first of these has exacerbated one of the longstanding major challenges education faces: educational inequality. It also risks exacerbating other issues education has faced for many years, such as the increasing prevalence of mental health problems among young people. The second of these has given rise to debates concerning the role of education in addressing structural and institutional racism, which have been especially focused on questions concerning the content of curricula. Two other major global issues facing education, the importance of which have also been emphasised in the past three years, are the climate crisis and the dangers of misinformation. Various steps and initiatives have been proposed in recent years to address the above issues, including the need to improve schools’ access to technology; ‘decolonise’ curricula; focus more on teaching well-being in schools; teach critical thinking in schools to prevent the emergence and spread of misinformation; and focus the aims of education more towards meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.1 All of the above issues require that we look in more detail at the aims and responsibilities of education, working towards a fair, inclusive future for education which addresses such pressing global challenges. Concerning (ii), in the past decade, only one edited volume has been published on the philosophy of education: the International Handbook of Philosophy of Education, edited by Paul Smeyers and published by Springer in 2018. That, however, is not a readily available resource: with 99 chapters over two volumes and costing hundreds of pounds, it is a reference source for libraries. The other most recent edited volumes on the philosophy of education were published over a decade ago: The Philosophy of Education: An Introduction (edited by Richard Bailey, Bloomsbury, 2010); The SAGE Handbook of Philosophy of Education (edited by Richard Bailey, Robin Barrow, David Carr & Christine McCarthy, SAGE, 2010); and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, edited by one of our contributors, Harvey Siegel (Oxford University Press, 2009). A new edition of Randall Curren’s 2008 Companion to the Philosophy of Education is forthcoming from Blackwell, but this volume will have a different purpose and distinctive 1 For an example of projects aiming to focus education on meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, see the British Council’s ‘Connecting Classrooms’ and ‘Promoting Gender Equality in Education’ programmes, viewable here. 2 content to that book, and as such is not a competitor with this volume (Curren’s book is discussed below, §3). Yet – and concerning (iii) – there is growing interest in the philosophy of education. Several books have been published on central themes in the philosophy of education in the past two years, such as Kristján Kristjánsson’s Flourishing as the Aim of Education (Routledge, 2020), Valerie Hannon & Amelia Peterson’s Thrive: The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Anders Schinkel’s edited volume on Wonder, Education, and Human Flourishing (VU University Press, 2020) and John Hattie and Steen Nepper Larsen’s The Purposes of Education (Routledge, 2020). General introductions and encyclopaedias have also been published in recent years: Michael A. Peters’ Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Springer, 2020) and Ansgar Allen and Roy Goddard’s Education and Philosophy: An Introduction (Sage, 2017). The latter of those is the most recent monograph offering a concise introduction to the philosophy of education. A new monograph on the philosophy of education is forthcoming from Laura D’Olimpio and Jane Gatley, for Palgrave’s ‘Philosophy Today’ book series.2 D’Olimpio is among our contributors. Bloomsbury are publishing a book series on the philosophy of education, the first five of which were recently published: Ruth Cigman’s Cherishing and the Good Life of Learning; Andrew Davis’ A Critique of Pure Teaching Methods and the Case of Synthetic Phonics; William H. Kitchen’s Philosophical Reflections on Neuroscience and Education; Anders Schinkel’s Wonder and Education; and John Tillson’s Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence (all 2020). More are due to be published this year and next, including a monograph by one of this volume’s editors, Christina Easton: In Defence of Teaching Democratic Values: Implications for Pedagogy, Policy and Practice. The series editor for the Bloomsbury book series is Michael Hand, another of our contributors.3 II. The book’s themes There has been heightened debate about some central questions in the philosophy of education since the Covid-19 pandemic, both in academic circles and among the general public. These have focused on three areas in particular: the aims, responsibilities, and future of education. This section outlines some of the possible themes to be explored throughout the volume. i. How the book’s themes reflect recent and current debates The first section of the book focuses on the aims of education, and will include chapters addressing education’s aims and purposes in the world after Covid-19. The second section focuses on the responsibilities of education, with chapters addressing topics such as the responsibilities placed upon individuals, institutions and states to reduce inequality – both in and through education, as well as at the socioeconomic level, nationally and internationally. It will also consider the ways in which education has a responsibility to foster the well-being of students, what exactly this means, and how this is best done. There are increasingly influential approaches towards education that focus on enhancing well-being, such as the ‘positive 2 For information on the Palgrave series, see here. 3 For information on the Bloomsbury series, see here. 3 education’ movement, which applies positive psychology’s well-being theory in education,4 and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, which defines flourishing as a state of ‘complete human well-being’ and aims to support flourishing in education.5 This section will include perspectives on the changes in responsibilities brought about by the pandemic – both the changes educators have had to make and the changes that should be made, such as providing greater provision for mental health. Questions concerning the role of the educator will be addressed throughout the book, explicitly and implicitly. The above issues all raise questions about the future of education, which has been a major topic of debate over the past three years and is the focus of the third section. For example, there have been calls for educational institutions to employ additional measures to challenge racism and many institutions have done so, but there remains much debate over how this is most effectively done. ii. Debates generated by school and university closures Debates have been generated partly as a consequence of the huge changes in educational approaches that have needed to be suddenly implemented worldwide in response to the crisis, to try to continue providing education remotely to that half of the world’s student population who have been out of school or university, many of whom still are.6 This has required fundamental changes in approaches towards teaching and learning for many educators, students and institutions, at all educational levels. It has also led to education gaining much more attention in the media, with debates arising on important questions in the philosophy of education. BBC Radio 4 ran a five-part series in July, ‘Rethink Education’, on the future of education post-pandemic.7 The cancellation of national examinations in the UK for the past two years has generated significant discussion about the purposes of educational assessment and how it should be fundamentally changed to better reflect the aims of education.8 Former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson’s speech in July 2020 on further education reform sparked much discussion after he claimed that ‘the purpose of education is to give people the skills they need to get a good and meaningful job’ and ‘to unlock an individual’s potential so they can get the job and career that they crave’.9 Debates about the 4 On positive education, see below (§II, vi, pp. 10-11). 5 Tyler VanderWeele, ‘On the Promotion of Human Flourishing’ (Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, 31, 2017), p. 8149. On the connection between VanderWeele’s account of flourishing, which underpins the work of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, and education, see his video presentation ‘Flourishing and Education’ for the University of Oxford’s Seminar Series on ‘Education, Purpose, and Human Flourishing in Uncertain Times’, 1 Feb 2021. 6 See UNESCO, ‘Half of world’s student population not attending school: UNESCO launches global coalition to accelerate deployment of remote learning solutions’, 19 March 2020. 7 See here for the program’s website. 8 For a collection of blogposts by academics, educators and policymakers on rethinking educational assessment in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, see the ‘Rethinking Assessment’ initiative, which was inaugurated last year. For an article on the initiative, see Amy Gibbons, ‘Scrap “national disgrace” GCSEs, experts urge’, TES, 27 September 2020. 9 For the full text of the speech, see FE Week, 9 July 2020. 4 purpose of education have been fuelled further by the urgency placed on re-opening schools amidst the UK’s third lockdown. The weekend before schools in the UK recently re-opened, the Financial Times published an article entitled ‘What is the point of schools?’.10 There has also been increasing debate over the ethical question of how we balance the need to close schools to reduce the spread of Covid-19 against the importance of continuing to provide high-quality education for young people. Philosophical discussions have also surrounded the heightened responsibilities placed upon individuals, institutions and states to alleviate the educational and economic inequalities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.11 iii. Education’s role in anti-racism Education has also gained attention in the media through debates generated by the Black Lives Matter protests. These have created heightened discussion of the importance of tackling racism through education, through measures such as decolonising curricula, developing more thorough anti-racism strategies in schools and universities, and implementing strategies to limit the dominating power of white parents in educational systems. On the final of these points, several public schools in the USA have taken steps to limit the power of white parents, such as Success Academy Charter Schools, which do so by limiting the power of all parents, and the Boerum Hill School for International Studies in New York, which has employed such thoroughgoing anti-racist measures that it was recently described by the New York Times as ‘the racial justice school’. Boerum focuses on achieving what the school’s principal describes as ‘true equity’, striving to achieve not merely diversity, but integration, and takes constant action to be on alert for and to confront racist habits and ideas whenever they may emerge.12 Both Success Academy and Boerum provide mandatory bias and sensitivity training for staff, but there are debates over how effective such strategies can be. The UK government recently scrapped unconscious bias training for civil servants in England and urged other public sector employers to end this type of training, claiming there is no evidence that it changes attitudes.13 How the process of tackling racism and other forms of prejudice in and through education is most effectively undertaken is a subject of heated debate. While some educational institutions have begun processes of fundamentally decolonising their curricula, others are strongly opposed to this and are advocating for different approaches towards educational reform which 10 Lucy Kellaway, ‘What is the point of schools?’, Financial Times, 5 March 2021. For a more recent discussion of the purpose of schools, see Tim Brighouse’s blog post for the British Educational Research Association, ‘What is the purpose of school and who should control it?’, 19 January 2022. 11 See the Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Impact of school closures on the attainment gap: Rapid Evidence Assessment’, 2 June 2020. The global projections from that report ‘suggest that school closures will widen the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers, likely reversing progress made to narrow the gap since 2011’. According to their research, the ‘median estimate indicates that the gap would widen by 36%’ (p. 4). On what the pandemic has shown about the roles and responsibilities of schools, see Laura McInerney, ‘Education was never schools’ sole focus. The coronavirus pandemic has proved it’, The Guardian, 14 April 2020. 12 See episode four of the New York Times’ documentary ‘Nice White Parents’, the transcript of which is here (13 August 2020). 13 See Sean Coughlan, ‘“Unconscious bias training” to be scrapped by ministers’, BBC News, 15 Dec 2020. 5 nonetheless aim to challenge prejudice and discrimination. For example, a book was recently published on the educational approach taken at Michaela Community School in London, one of the most successful yet controversial state schools in England.14 The school’s headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, writes that the school prides itself on its ‘alternative view on education’ – one that emphasises the importance of a school’s entire culture being the way in which educational aims are best achieved. While that is uncontroversial, the culture Michaela fosters has generated significant controversy: a culture at ‘the heart of ’ which are what Birbalsingh describes as ‘small c conservative values’ rather than values that ‘reflect the progressive values of the 21st century’. Birbalsingh warns the reader that they ‘might want to sit down before reading’ the chapter in the book entitled ‘Why schools should still teach dead white men’, written by one of the school’s deputy heads.15 Many former students have written to their almae matres over the past year and a half petitioning them to decolonise curricula and make greater efforts towards diversity and inclusion. Decolonising curricula involves actions such as providing students with a more holistic education, including far greater attention to the history of colonialism and empire; teaching children what structural and institutional racism are, their impact and how they have formed; and including more people of colour within curricula. Debates about decolonising curricula and developing robust anti-racist cultures in educational institutions are important issues concerning the future of education. Recent debates include members of the UK Parliament arguing that critical race theory has no place in education, with the UCL Institute of Education responding with concerns that the government risk ‘proscribing’ certain resources and bodies of work from classrooms and stifling debate and critical thinking in education.16 Critical race theory is among several schools of thought criticised in a recently published bestselling book, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020). The authors argue that what they call ‘applied postmodernism’ has displaced other approaches towards activism and scholarship in several fields, including critical race theory and postcolonial studies, which, they argue, shows that such fields are underpinned by, as Steven Pinker put it in his endorsement of the book, ‘surprisingly shallow intellectual roots’. However, the book has received critical responses from some media outlets that generally take a right-wing stance. For example, in his review for The Telegraph, Tim Smith-Laing wrote that the book fails to fulfil the ‘values of rational, evidence-based argument’ that it praises and its arguments ‘do not add up to anything like Pluckrose and Lindsay’s apocalyptic characterisations’.17 While it is uncontroversial that education and educators play an important role in anti-racism, we see from the above that the question of how this should be done is a subject of heated debate. This book aims to provide a space for discussion on how this should be done, and we intend to include several voices in the debate as to how education can best challenge racism. 14 Katharine Birbalsingh (ed.), Michaela: The Power of Culture (Woodbridge: John Catt, 2020). 15 Birbalsingh, ibid., Introduction. 16 See Sally Weale, ‘Education experts counter government attack on critical race theory’, The Guardian, 13 Nov 2020. 17 Tim Smith-Laing, ‘“Postmodernism gone mad”: is academia to blame for cancel culture?’. The Telegraph, 19 Sept 2020. 6  iv. Relations between education’s role in challenging prejudice and its broader aims Teaching students about prejudice and discrimination concerns not only education’s moral and civic aims, but also its broader and more fundamental epistemic aims. Emily Robertson, one of our contributors, offers a convincing account of the ways in which the civic and epistemic aims of education intersect.18 Her account illustrates connections between the aims and responsibilities of education. Knowledge is a social enterprise: much of our knowledge relies on other people, such as the articles we read by journalists, the judgements we rely upon from experts and the knowledge we learn from our teachers. Yet, another important aim of education is to develop independent and critical thinking skills – those necessary to becoming an autonomous, rational agent and a responsible citizen. At this juncture, Robertson identifies a tension: how do we balance the gaining of knowledge with becoming autonomous thinkers? In other words, how does one learn to think for oneself when knowledge depends on others?19 Acquiring accurate knowledge and becoming an independent thinker involves attention to the social and political conditions of knowledge. This includes an awareness of the ways that institutional prejudice can prevent us from gaining accurate knowledge and the ability to identify the reasons why certain epistemic claims are questionable because of institutional prejudice. Knowledge we claim to have can be a result of or influenced by forms of injustice such as oppression, exploitation or institutional racism. The various privileges many of us enjoy can prevent us from seeing instances of institutional prejudice that have arisen from deeply embedded power structures, or can prevent us from seeing their full significance. Historical narratives, for example, are told from particular perspectives within cultural and historical conditions, and are influenced by the institutional prejudices within particular times and places. In gaining accurate historical knowledge, we need the skills to identify the relevance of such factors to the historical accounts we receive and are taught. For instance, we need to be able to distinguish propaganda from information that comes from a politically independent source; we need to be critical of accounts of the women’s suffrage movement written only by men or the civil rights movement written only by white people. And we need to be aware that prejudice takes a form where it becomes embedded within societal structures, such that eradicating forms of prejudice requires uncovering, challenging, breaking down and changing those structures. Epistemic issues concerning the social and political conditions of knowledge also concern the means people have to express themselves and the seriousness with which their knowledge claims are taken. This concerns what Miranda Fricker has called ‘epistemic injustice’:20 unfair treatment relating to issues concerning knowledge, understanding and participation in 18 Emily Robertson, ‘The Epistemic Aims of Education’, in Harvey Siegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 1. 19 Robertson, p. 13. 20 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7 communication.21 More specifically, epistemic injustice is the notion that a person ‘can be unfairly discriminated against in [their] capacity as a knower based on prejudices … such as gender, social background, ethnicity, race, sexuality, tone of voice, accent, and so on’.22 Taking into account the essentially social nature of knowledge and the importance of developing independent thinking skills, and that both involve attention to the social and political conditions of knowledge, brings us to an important place where education’s epistemic and civic aims meet. It could be argued that the ultimate epistemic aim of education is to reach a coherent set of justified, true beliefs about the world, reached by exercising intellectual virtues and skills such as sound reasoning, critical thinking, rational judgement and careful deliberation. If such processes require attention to the social and political conditions of knowledge, then meeting the ultimate epistemic aim of education requires the development of civic virtues that prepare one to be a responsibly engaged citizen, aware of the structures underpinning society, including those that are unjust. Robertson argues that this is where education’s epistemic and civic aims meet. She argues that education should therefore promote an understanding of our ‘role as citizens, as well as knowledge producers, in supporting effective and just social pathways to knowledge’.23 v. Community engagement, social action, and the aims of education The civic aims and responsibilities of education do not only operate in the direction of educators towards students. Educational institutions and students also play an important role in community engagement and social action. Consideration of the aims, responsibilities and future of education should also pay attention to those areas. Where schools offer students opportunities to engage in social action, this is typically as part of a school’s extra- or co-curricular programme. However, some educational programmes include social action within core curricula. For example, one of the required components in the International Baccalaureate (‘IB’) Diploma Programme is ‘creativity, activity, service’, which ‘requires students to undertake an unpaid and voluntary exchange’. The motivation behind this is that such an exchange provides students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills to community service in a way that complements their academic study. The broader aim of this exchange reflects that of the IB in general: ‘developing students who will make a meaningful contribution to the world, both during and after their education’.24 A strong case could be made for community engagement and social action occupying a place within core curricula in other popular forms of school assessment in addition to the IB, particularly in the world after Covid-19. The pandemic has drawn attention to the importance of the relationship between educational institutions and their wider communities. This works in both directions: the ways in which educational institutions and students can support wider communities, and the community support required by schools, students and families to address 21 See Ian James Kidd & José Medina (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 1. 22 Morten Fibieger Byskov, ‘What Makes an Epistemic Injustice an “Injustice”?’, Journal of Social Philosophy Vol. 0 No. 0 (Spring 2020), p. 1. 23 Robertson, pp. 13-14. 24 International Baccalaureate Organisation, ‘Community Service’ (2019). 8 the issues brought about by the pandemic. Covid-19 has presented three major challenges for schools: a widening attainment gap between economically disadvantaged children and their peers; learning loss; and heightened emotional and social needs. The level of learning loss and emotional and social support will be greater for disadvantaged students. Learning catchup should not come at the expense of a focus on emotional and social support; indeed, excessive focus on the former could exacerbate the need for the latter, by increasing stress and anxiety. Schools cannot meet these challenges alone. Support is needed from governmental and non-governmental organisations. Effective community support is also vital. A promising proposal on the kind of long-term community support needed has been proposed in a recent initiative by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). Laura Partridge, former Associate Director of Creative Learning and Education at the RSA, writes that we need to create a ‘child-centred system’ of ‘collaboratives’: operational networks of ‘collective responsibility for children across schools, youth work, social work, health, criminal justice and the voluntary sector’ across UK localities. Collaboratives aim to create a shared sense of responsibility over creating better futures for children and to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. Their broader aim is ‘to create a framework for vulnerable children that will make the whole system more attentive to the wellbeing of all of our children’.25 On this model of collaboration, schools are placed ‘at the heart of a wider community network protecting the safety, welfare, health and wellbeing of pupils’. This is a difference in degree, rather than kind, from existing forms of collaboration between schools and local communities. For example, teachers already play an important role in identifying concerns and making referrals to children’s services – a role that was extremely difficult to continue to fulfil during lockdowns. To occupy the other important roles within collaboratives, Partridge recommends measures such as re-introducing family workers to support schools.26 Proposals such as the RSA’s collaboratives initiative illustrate a way that there may be fundamental changes for education on the horizon. The need for wider community support to address the challenges raised by Covid-19 illustrates another way that the aims, responsibilities and future of education are intertwined. An approach towards education that ties together community engagement, social action, challenging prejudice and developing student well-being with education’s fundamental aims and responsibilities has been proposed and implemented by educationalist Jeff Duncan-Andrade. Duncan-Andrade argues that the purpose of education should be ‘youth wellness’, defined as a child’s entire well-being. To fulfil this purpose, he argues that ‘every school should make a promise to every family, that when you drop your child off to us in the morning and turn your back and walk away, our promise to you is that when you come back to pick them up, your child will be more well than when you dropped them off ’. While he admits that this promise is impossible for all schools to fulfil for all children, he argues that this should nonetheless be regarded as the ultimate purpose of education, towards which all schools aim.27 Aims can be useful even if they cannot always be achieved: an aim can serve a useful purpose when it 25 Laura Partridge, ‘No School an Island’, Medium, 1 June 2020. 26 Ibid. 27 See Duncan-Andrade’s interview on the purpose of education with the Turnaround for Children’s 180 Podcast, 23 Sept 2021. 9 functions as an ideal to which we aspire. Similarly, as we saw above (§i) the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard defines human flourishing as ‘complete human well-being’ – ‘a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good’28 and education is one of the means through which this state can be reached, even though reaching this state is extremely difficult for many people. To develop youth wellness, Duncan-Andrade places primary importance on the relation between students and the communities in which they live and study. He argues that to develop youth wellness, we need to completely rethink and rebuild public education on a foundation of ‘community responsiveness’.29 This reflects an educational approach developed by Duncan-Andrade, educationalist Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales and clinician Glenda Macatangay, which they call ‘community responsive wellness’. This aims to develop student well-being by focusing on the co-operative relationship between students and schools, on the one hand, and the communities in which students live and schools are situated, on the other. Community responsive wellness is defined as an approach towards education that is ‘cultivated and sustained through healthy relationships that are responsive to the lived experiences and the historical and material conditions that shape them’. It aims to enhance the well-being of students and the broader wellness of the communities in which they live and schools are situated by focusing on cultivating three areas in particular: first, ‘inner-self ’ – ‘a strong sense of culture, identity, and agency’; second, ‘interpersonal’ – ‘a rootedness and commitment to showing empathy toward family, community, and peers’; and third, ‘interconnectedness’ – ‘positive interrelatedness to ancestors, place, land, and the natural world’. This all aims to develop a greater experience of ‘place, power, purpose, awareness, resilience, empathy, hope, love, and joy’ among students and within the schools and the wider communities in which students live and study.30 Duncan-Andrade co-founded the Roses in Concrete School in Oakland, California, described as a ‘community responsive lab school’ which is guided by the principles of community responsive wellness. The school focuses on racial and social justice and teaches a curriculum that includes art, music and performing arts, STEM subjects and dual language all within an ethnic studies framework.31 Through this community-focuses approach towards developing youth well-being through education, the school aims to address the extremely difficult challenges faced in a community with a very high level of crime, including a high murder rate, in which many people grow up to experience post-traumatic stress disorder.32 Duncan-Andrade’s proposal illustrates another way in which the aims, responsibilities and future of education are intertwined, and can be directly related to community engagement, social action, challenging prejudice, and improving well-being, both of individual students and the communities in which they study and live. 28 VanderWeele 2017, p. 8149 29 For an overview of Duncan-Andrade’s vision for how we should rethink and rebuild public education, see his 2012 article ‘A Glass Half Full’ (Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, 2012 (27)). 30 For the definition of ‘community responsive wellness’ quoted here, see the ‘Wellness Theory’ webpage of the Youth Wellness Movement. See also the Community Responsive Education Group, co-founded by Duncan-Andrade, Tintiangco-Cubales and Macatangay. 31 For further information on the Roses in Concrete School, see here for the school’s website and Duncan-Andrade’s webpage at the California State University. 32 See Duncan-Andrade’s 2011 TEDx talk, ‘Growing Roses in Concrete’. 10  The sections of the book on the aims and responsibilities of education also intersect with philosophical issues concerning character, values and citizenship education. For example, if an aim of education is to reduce socioeconomic inequality, then one of education’s aims is both moral and political. Progress can be made towards fulfilling that aim by fostering civic virtues in students that provide them with the character skills that support its fulfilment. Fostering civic virtues presupposes certain values, such as the value of justice, manifested in, for instance, a recognition of the importance of supporting those in less privileged positions in society than one’s own and contributing towards society’s common good. This is a way in which citizenship and values education are also inextricably linked. vi. Human flourishing and the aims of education As we have just seen, the aims, responsibilities and future of education should relate to and support the fulfilment of the ultimate aim of education – if, that is, education has a single overarching aim or set of aims. It is widely believed that education’s overarching purpose is to support human flourishing. UNESCO propose that flourishing is ‘the central purpose of education’.33 The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues state that ‘flourishing is the widely accepted goal of life’ and ‘is the ultimate aim of character education’.34 Positive psychology holds that flourishing is ‘the goal of education’.35 One of our contributors, Harry Brighouse, argues that ‘education should be guided … directly by the value of human flourishing’ and ‘should aim to improve children’s prospects for leading flourishing lives’.36 Former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan emphasises the role of education in supporting flourishing with a quote from a book published by the Church of England which opens by asking, ‘What is the purpose of education?’, and answers: ‘Education is … at its heart, about human flourishing’.37 On all the views above, flourishing is held to be either the aim of education or at least among its central aims. This view is becoming increasingly widespread, as are educational approaches that aim to support the flourishing of students. The founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and others have developed an educational approach that applies the principles of positive psychology in education which has become known as ‘positive education’. Positive education aims to complement learning and enrich education with positive psychology, by teaching the skills to build psychological well-being. On this wider vision of what education should do, young people learn the skills needed to succeed in their careers while also developing the skills needed to enhance their own well-being. Positive education aims to teach the latter 33 Doret de Ruyter, Lindsay Oades & Yusef Waghid, ‘Meaning(s) of Human Flourishing and Education: A Research Brief by the ISEE Assessment’ (UNESCO, 2020), p. 1. 34 Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, ‘Framework for Character Education in Schools’ (2017), p. 1. 35 Martin Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing – and How to Achieve Them (London: Nicholas Brearley Publishing, 2011), p. 97. 36 Harry Brighouse, ‘Education for a Flourishing Life’, Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Vol. 107, Issue 1, 2008), p. 60. 37 Chris Wright & Bill Watkin, Schools for Human Flourishing (2016), p. 1, quoted in the introduction to Morgan’s Taught Not Caught: Educating for 21st Century Character (Woodbridge: John Catt, 2017). 11 without compromising the development of the former.38 Positive education has become embedded in several educational institutions. A book has been published by Oxford University Press on the success of positive education at Geelong Grammar School in Australia (where ‘positive education’ was coined), where positive education is intertwined with all aspects of school life.39 They have expanded positive education to also aim to develop physical well-being, in addition to psychological well-being. It is similarly embedded at the Shipley School, the pioneer Pre-K to 12 school for positive education in North America. Their approach connects positive education with the third and fourth of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.40 Since 2019, Dubai College have run a programme of positive psychology interventions throughout the school.41 In 2017, the University of Buckingham became Europe’s first ‘positive university’, with all students and academics receiving positive psychology training.42 Seligman cites a trial of a positive psychology intervention in the UK prior to 2011 which involved 100 teachers and 3,000 students.43 Since then, there have been many more positive psychology interventions in schools and universities worldwide.44 The accounts of flourishing developed by positive psychology and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard fundamentally differ from the neo-Aristotelian approach towards flourishing developed by the Jubilee Centre, in that the former two define flourishing in terms of well-being, whereas the latter defines it in terms of happiness and the fulfilment of potential, reached through the cultivation and exercising of the virtues that constitute good character.45 Both positive psychology and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard aim to enhance an individual’s well-being as much as possible. While positive psychology focuses on individual well-being and is sometimes criticised for being overly focused on the role of the individual in fostering their own well-being and not giving enough attention to community or societal 38 Seligman, Flourish, p. 78. For a more recent overview of positive education, see David Bott et al., ‘The State of Positive Education’, Report for the World Government Summit, 2017. 39 Jacolyn Norrish, Positive Education: The Geelong Grammar School Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On positive education at Geelong, see also Seligman, Flourish, pp. 85-93. 40 For an overview of positive education at Shipley, see here. On the approach towards and success of positive education at Shipley, see Noof Aljneibi et al., ‘Positive Education at the Shipley School’, Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) Service Learning Projects, 15, 2018. 41 On positive education at Dubai College, see ‘Dubai College wins an International School Award for its new bespoke Positive Education Programme’, Teach Middle East, 1 Feb 2020 and Kelly Clarke, ‘Dubai school begins weekly mental well-being classes for pupils’, The National: Abu Dhabi, UAE, 8 October 2019. 42 For a critical response to the University of Buckingham’s initiative, see Carl Cederström, ‘Why we should think critically about positive psychology in our universities’, The Guardian, 7 Feb 2017. 43 Seligman, Flourish, p. 81. For an overview of positive psychology interventions up to 2011, see Seligman, Flourish, pp. 35-8 and 85-93. 44 For a recent review of positive psychology interventions and evidence-based activities that have been shown to promote well-being, see VanderWeele, ‘Activities for Flourishing: An Evidence-Based Guide’, Journal of Positive Psychology & Wellbeing, Vol. x, No. x, pp. 1-13, 2019. 45 For the Jubilee Centre’s account of flourishing, see their ‘Framework for Character Education in Schools’. 12 well-being, and subsequently ignoring systematic challenges to well-being, the Human Flourishing Program also focuses on community and societal well-being, defining flourishing both as ‘a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good’ and as ‘societal good’, broadly construed.46 Insofar as their accounts have a role in education, they aim to support the maximisation of students’ well-being, individually and – to varying degrees, depending on the model of flourishing employed and how it is adapted in the educational context – collectively. The Jubilee Centre’s approach has also been influential in education and embedded in a school’s entire educational approach. The University of Birmingham School, founded in 2015, adopts an educational approach rooted in the Jubilee Centre’s character education framework. The school’s vision and ethos are expressed as ‘Rethinking education, helping tomorrow’s citizens flourish’,47 which it aims to do by focusing on character development.48 Other conceptions of the ultimate aim of education relate directly to the view that education’s aim is to support flourishing. For example, while Duncan-Andrade does not describe his view in terms of supporting flourishing, his argument that the ultimate purpose of education is youth wellness clearly connects common conceptions of human flourishing in several ways. For example, youth wellness is defined as a child’s entire well-being, which Duncan-Andrade argues can only be developed through attention to both individual and community well-being; similarly, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard define flourishing as ‘complete human well-being’ and as ‘societal well-being’. Duncan-Andrade takes a different approach towards a theme related to the aim of education being human flourishing, while still directly connecting the aim of education with well-being but also connecting it with issues concerning equality and injustice, particularly those concerning race. The view that the aim of education is to support human flourishing has recently been challenged. David Carr argues that flourishing does not illuminate any significant educational concerns or issues, and that the increasing attention towards flourishing as a guiding principle for educational practice is therefore misguided.49 Several of the chapters in the first section of the volume will form a dialogue with one another about whether flourishing should be considered the aim of education, and if so, in what sense it should and how it should relate to education’s other aims. This is outlined below (§9, pp. 21-2). We will encourage authors to draw out and critically assess possible curriculum or policy implications that may follow from counting flourishing as an aim or the aim of education, and Beale’s chapter will explicitly address this issue. Some such curriculum changes have been made at schools implementing positive education, such as Geelong Grammar School, and there may well be policy changes in the future. For example, in addition to the views on flourishing as education’s aim expressed by Nicky Morgan and the Church of England mentioned above, in the House of Lords in 2017 the Archbishop of Canterbury moved a debate on ‘The Importance of Education in Building a Flourishing and 46 See VanderWeele 2017, 8149 for the first quote and 8153 for the second. 47 See the University of Birmingham School homepage. 48 See the section of the University of Birmingham School’s website on character education, which references the Jubilee Centre’s ‘Framework for Character Education in Schools’. 49 David Carr, ‘Where’s the Educational Virtue in Flourishing?’, Educational Theory, Vol. 71, Issue 3 (June 2021), pp. 389-407. 13 Skilled Society’.50 The Church of England’s Education Office are continuing to develop their research on the role of flourishing in education and held their annual conference in 2021 on this theme.51 A book on this theme was recently published by Andy Wolfe, Executive Director of Education at the Church of England and Lynn Swaner, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at the Association of Christian Schools International: Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2021). Human flourishing illustrates another way that the themes of this volume intersect and can collectively contribute towards a common goal. This goal need not be flourishing, though; the same could be said for other theories about the ultimate aim of education, or theories that hold that education should have multiple overarching aims. 2. Conference We held a two-day hybrid conference from 16-17 September 2022, where some contributors presented drafts of their chapters and received feedback from an audience comprised of other contributors and delegates. The conference was held at St Antony’s College, Oxford and was kindly sponsored by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. 3. Editors’ biographies Jonathan Beale is a Research Affiliate at the Human Flourishing Program in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, where he co-leads the Program’s Flourishing Network, and a Peak Performance Coach for the Flow Research Collective. He has previously held positions as Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2021-22), Researcher-in-Residence at Eton College (2019-21) and Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard (2011-13). At Oxford, his research on the role of human flourishing in education supported the Templeton World Charity-funded project on ‘Education, Purpose, and Human Flourishing in Uncertain Times’. He is co-editor of three books for Routledge: Wittgenstein and Scientism (2017), The ‘BrainCanDo’ Handbook of Teaching and Learning (2020) and Wittgenstein and Contemporary Moral Philosophy (2024). He has published articles on philosophy and education in academic journals including Ratio and media outlets including the New York Times. He co-hosts a podcast on human flourishing, Flourish FM, sponsored by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard and the Department of Education at Oxford. Christina Easton is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick, working on her project ‘Opening minds: A new analysis of tolerance for the classroom’. She is also Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Christina’s work has been published in journals such as Philosophy and Theory and Research in Education. Her monograph In Defence of Teaching Democratic Values: Implications for Pedagogy, Policy and Practice is under contract with Bloomsbury. She has co-authored Critical Religious Education in Practice (Routledge, 2019), a book primarily aimed at teachers and trainee teachers. Christina has 50 For the report on which the debate was based, see here. 51 See here for the programme for their conference on 23 November 2021. 14 written several articles for a general audience, including in New Philosopher, Prospect and the Times Literary Supplement. Before going into full-time research, Christina taught philosophy and religious studies at secondary schools for eight years. 4. Contributors’ biographies Harry Brighouse is Mildred Fish Harnack Professor of Philosophy, Carol Dickson Bascom Professor of the Humanities, Affiliate Professor of Education Policy Studies and Director of the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author, recently, of Debating Education: Is There a Role for Markets? (Oxford University Press, 2019, with David Schmidtz) and Educational Goods: Values and Evidence in Decision-making (Chicago University Press, 2018, with Helen F Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift). He is also editor, with Michael McPherson, of The Aims of Higher Education: Problems of Morality and Justice (Chicago University Press, 2015, and winner of the AAC&U Federic W. Ness Book Award).  Sir Tim Brighouse has been one of the defining forces shaping British education over the past 50 years. He has been a teacher and senior leader, and has worked in local authorities and higher education. He has twice been a Chief Education Officer, in Oxfordshire and Birmingham, each for a decade. He was Professor of Education at Keele University in the four years between these posts. He was the Schools Commissioner and Chief Advisor for London between 2002-2007, where he led the London Challenge. He has advised various governments on education and he set up the University of the First Age to encourage out of school activities to enrich school children’s learning. He has also been Visiting Professor at the UCL Institute of Education and Norham Fellow at the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. Brighouse has written many articles and books on education, his most recent of which is About Our Schools: Improving on Previous Best, co-authored with Mick Waters (2022). His contribution to education was rewarded with a knighthood in 2009 and he has received honorary degrees from 15 British universities. Andrée-Anne Cormier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University, Glendon Campus, in Toronto, where she teaches applied ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of law. Her research focuses primarily on issues of justice pertaining to the family, personal relationships, childhood and education policy. She is currently working on a research project, funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, on the ethics and politics of interpersonal relationships and loneliness. Laura D’Olimpio is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Birmingham, where she is also Director of Postgraduate Research for the School of Education. Laura is co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Philosophy in Schools. She regularly contributes to The Conversation, and Radio National’s Philosopher’s Zone and The Minefield. Her first book, Media and Moral Education: a philosophy of critical engagement (Routledge, 2018) won the 2018 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia’s Annual Book Award. Her second book, The Necessity of Aesthetic Education, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2023. 15 Catherine Z. Elgin is Professor of the Philosophy of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In addition to the philosophy of education, her research concerns epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of art. She is the author of True Enough (MIT Press, 2017), Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary (Cornell University Press, 1997), Considered Judgment (Princeton University Press, 1996), With Reference to Reference (Hackett, 1983), and co-author, with Nelson Goodman, of Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Routledge, 1990). Jane Gatley is a philosopher of education with interests in the aims of education, the curriculum, the value of philosophy, and teaching philosophy in schools. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Birmingham and worked there as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow. Before this, she worked as a secondary school teacher in England for seven years. Jane’s first book ‘Why Teach Philosophy in Schools’ is due to be published in 2023 with Bloomsbury. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project bringing philosophers and education specialists together to consider the role of philosophy as a research method for educational studies. This has been funded by the Society for Educational Studies. In future, she is working towards an account of the educational value of knowledge. She is a member of the Philosophy for Education Society of Great Britain, and holds responsibility for the South Wales branch which will run a series of seminars starting in TB2. Jane is also the chief examiner for the International Baccalaureate’s philosophy diploma course. Michael Hand is Professor of Philosophy of Education and University Director of Postgraduate Research at the University of Birmingham. He edits the IMPACT pamphlet series and the Bloomsbury Philosophy of Education book series. Michael’s research interests are in the areas of moral, political, religious and philosophical education. His books include A Theory of Moral Education (Routledge, 2018), Education, Ethics and Experience: Essays in Honour of Richard Pring (Routledge, 2016), Patriotism in Schools (Wiley, 2011), Philosophy in Schools (Bloomsbury, 2008) and Is Religious Education Possible? (Bloomsbury, 2006). David Johnson is Sub Warden and Professorial Fellow of St Antony’s College, and University Reader in Comparative and International Education in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. He convenes Oxford’s Centre for Comparative and International Education and recently held the position of Chen Yiden Global Visiting Fellow at Harvard.  Johnson is a Chartered Educational Psychologist who studies learning and cognition and is particularly interested in tracking learning progression in national education systems over time. Johnson is a consultant to the World Bank and has led national learning assessments in Sudan and Nigeria, curriculum renewal in Rwanda, and time series studies of learning in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Sudan. He was until recently the Programme Research Lead for the ESRC-DFID Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems research programme. He studies the impact of uncertainty on education and has directed research on this topic for the Aga Khan Foundation funded research programme on Education and Uncertainty. He recently launched a research programme on ‘Education, Purpose, and Human Flourishing in Uncertain Times’ with support from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. 16 Matthew T. Lee, Ph.D., is Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and Director of the Flourishing Network at the Human Flourishing Program in the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Health, Flourishing, and Positive Psychology at Stony Brook University’s Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics and a Visiting Scholar at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He previously served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity and as President of the North Central Sociological Association. His research explores topics such as flourishing and well-being, benevolent service to others, and the integration of social science and the humanities and has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the Journal of Positive Psychology, Social Science & Medicine, and the Journal of Transformative Education.  He is the lead editor of Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities and lead author of The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the Experience of God’s Love, both published by Oxford University Press.  He is co-editing a book for Routledge titled, Transcending Crisis: Carework, Emotions, and Human Flourishing.  Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is currently the Director of the Honesty Project, funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In recent years he was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project, funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and the Director of the Character Project, funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 100 academic papers as well as Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and four books with Oxford University Press: Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum). William G. Pearson, Jr., is an Associate Professor and Discipline Chair of Anatomy at the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine at Auburn University in Alabama.  Prior to VCOM Auburn he was a visiting scholar with the Harvard Human Flourishing Program. With a background in pastoral ministry, medical education, and translational science, he is interested in setting the conditions for medical students to flourish as future physicians.  He has taught medical students at the Medical College of Georgia, Boston University School of Medicine, and Harvard Medical School. At MCG served as the basic science lead for a successful LCME accreditation process.  He is currently the principal investigator on a project entitled “A Flourishing Approach to Physician Formation” funded through the Kern National Transformational Network.  In addition to publications in the field of computational anatomy, he has published works in medical education including the impact of anatomical dissection on 17 altruism, professional identity formation among preclinical students, and the social imaginary among medical students in contrast to the local community.  Emily Robertson is a dual associate professor emerita from Syracuse University, where she was a member of the Cultural Foundations of Education Department, School of Education, and the Philosophy Department, College of Arts and Sciences. She is a philosopher of education whose work focuses on epistemology and education, the development of rationality as an educational ideal, and democratic education. Robertson was interim dean and associate dean of the School of Education at Syracuse. She is a past president of the Philosophy of Education Society. In 2017 she published (with Jon Zimmerman) The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues In American Schools (Chicago University Press). Recent articles include her 2015 American Education Studies Association Kneller Lecture, ‘Testimonial Virtue’ (Educational Studies) and ‘The Epistemic Value of Diversity’ (Journal of Philosophy of Education). Harvey Siegel is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Miami. He is the author of Relativism Refuted (Reidel/Springer, 1987), Educating Reason (Routledge, 1988), Rationality Redeemed? (Routledge, 1997), Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation (with Adam Laats, Chicago University Press, 2016), and Education’s Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is the editor of Reason and Education: Essays in Honor of Israel Scheffler (Kluwer/Springer, 1997) and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Oxford University Press, 2009), and has authored over 200 papers in epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of education, and argumentation theory. A selection of his papers in philosophy of education have been edited and translated into Polish by Piotr Kostyło and colleagues under the title Myślenie Krytyczne i Indoktrynacja (Critical Thinking and Indoctrination) (Bydgoszcz, 2019). Adrian Skilbeck is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Winchester after spending many years as a drama teacher. He has recently published articles on both the climate crisis and the crisis in mental health amongst young people, in each case questioning the adequacy of current educational responses and was co-editor of a special issue on the climate crisis and sustainability for the Journal of Philosophy of Education. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Wittgenstein and Education and has recently submitted a monograph on Stanley Cavell and the human voice in education for publication with Springer Nature. Paul Standish is Professor and Head of the Centre for Philosophy of Education at the UCL Institute of Education. His work is characterized by a broadly phenomenological approach to education, with particular regard to language. His philosophical work draws on an extensive background in teaching in schools and colleges, prior to his university career. He is the author or editor of some twenty books, recent examples of which are Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation (2017, Rowman & Littlefield) and Democracy and Education from Dewey to Cavell (2022, Wiley), both in collaboration with Naoko Saito, and On Not Sparing Others the Trouble of Thinking: Wittgenstein and Education (2022, Wiley), co-edited with Adrian Skilbeck. He is interim Co-Editor and was Editor (2001-2011) of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. He was Chair of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (2017-2020) and in 2021 was elected its life President. 18 Judith Suissa is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the UCL Institute of Education. Her work explores the intersections between political ideas and educational practice, particularly concerning the assumption of state schooling characteristic of much educational philosophy, theory and research, and the underlying political and moral assumptions of pedagogical relationships outside institutional forms of education. She has written about parent-child relationships, educational experiments that challenge the state system, political education, and issues of belonging and identity. Her research draws on political and moral philosophy, particularly anarchist theory, theories of social justice and utopian theory. Her publications include Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (Routledge, 2006) and (with Stefan Ramaekers) The Claims of Parenting (Springer, 2012).   Winston C. Thompson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy (by courtesy) at Ohio State University. He received his PhD (with distinction) in Philosophy and Education from the Teachers College at Columbia University. Thompson’s scholarship explores ethical and political dimensions of educational policy and practice. His work on justice and the role of education in a pluralistic, democratic society has been published in journals including Educational Theory, Philosophy of Education, Teachers College Record, The Journal of Philosophy of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Studies in Philosophy and Education. He is co-editor (with John Tillson) of the forthcoming collection Pedagogies of Punishment (Bloomsbury, 2022). Building upon a project he initiated as a Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, Thompson is currently working on a monograph entitled Justice in the Balance: Revitalizing Politics and Education.  Emma Williams is Associate Professor in Education at the University of Warwick. Her work explores philosophical issues of education including critical thinking, mental health education, and the value of the humanities. She is the author of The Ways We Think: From the Straits of Reason to the Possibilities of Thought (Wiley-Blackwell 2015), and co-editor (with Liam Gearon) of Special Issues on Philosophy, Literature and Education (Journal of Philosophy of Education) and Writers and their Education (British Journal of Educational Studies). She is Assistant Editor and is also currently serving as Interim Co-Editor for the Journal of Philosophy of Education.   5. Structure of volume Preliminaries Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Editors’ Introduction Foreword Sir Tim Brighouse 1. The Aims of Education Chapter 1 Catherine Z. Elgin: Fostering Flourishing 19  Chapter 2 Emily Robertson: Epistemic Aims of Education: Epistemic Autonomy or Epistemic Responsibility? Chapter 3 Judith Suissa: Education, Schooling, and the Logic of Aims Chapter 4 Matthew T. Lee & William G. Pearson, Jr.: Love as the Essence of Flourishing: Educational Experiments with the Subjunctive Mood Chapter 5 Michael Hand: Against Flourishing as an Educational Aim Chapter 6 Harvey Siegel: Education’s Aims Chapter 7 Jonathan Beale: What Role Should Human Flourishing Play Among Education’s Aims? 2. The Responsibilities of Education Chapter 8 Laura D’Olimpio: Education Against Extremism Chapter 9 Emma Williams: Education Without Cure: The Future of Mental Health in Schools Chapter 10 Andrée-Anne Cormier: In Defence of a Critical Agenda for Relationship Education Chapter 11 Christina Easton: Forming an Orderly Queue: Remedying Educational Inequality in the Post-Covid World Chapter 12 Harry Brighouse: The Mentoring Responsibilities of University Educators 3. The Future of Education Chapter 13 Paul Standish: Education and the New Social Contract: Climate Change and the Prospect of the Humanities Chapter 14 David Johnson: Uncertainty, Society, and the Philosophy of Education Chapter 15 Winston S. Thompson: Beyond Distribution: Future Considerations of Educational Justice Chapter 16 Christian B. Miller: Fostering Honesty: A Case Study in Defending and Implementing Character Education in Schools Chapter 17 Adrian Skilbeck: Climate, Crisis and the Future of Education Chapter 18 Jane Gatley: Decolonising the School Curriculum and the Epistemic Aims of Education 6. Chapter abstracts In addition to the connections across many of the chapters, several of the chapters will directly engage in dialogue with one another. For example, Beale’s chapter, on the relationship between education’s epistemic aims and its aim of supporting flourishing, will discuss the arguments in the chapters by Elgin (which takes a different approach towards flourishing’s role in education to the approach by Brighouse), Robertson, and Hand, as well as Brighouse’s wider work. Siegel’s chapter will challenge the arguments in Beale’s chapters, and engage with the arguments in Elgin’s, Hand’s and Robertson’s chapters. 20  Section 1: The Aims of Education Chapter 1: Catherine Z. Elgin: Fostering Flourishing One of the fruits of the Enlightenment is the recognition that there is more than one way to flourish. People rightly value different sorts of lives. An overarching aim of education should be to equip students to identify and pursue lives they consider good. Each student should acquire the capacity to frame her own conception of a good life – to recognise opportunities and obstacles, identify real alternatives and assess their value, imaginatively entertain the possibility of adopting certain goods as her own, and appreciate and respect the rights of others to do likewise. A student thus needs to develop responsiveness to reasons, moral sensitivity, social awareness, and the capacity to adopt different points of view and evaluate their affordances. The student must be equipped with the cognitive, emotional, and motivational resources needed to pursue her conception of a good life. This includes cognitive and practical skills and orientations. Chapter 2: Emily Robertson: Epistemic Aims of Education: Epistemic Autonomy or Epistemic Responsibility? Robert Dearden set the stage for autonomy as an educational aim in 1972 when he proposed a new aim that he called “personal autonomy,” which he defined as “having reasons for what one thinks and does.” While philosophy of education in the early 2000s focused on autonomy as examining conceptions of the good life, more recent work has attended to epistemic autonomy, understood as thinking for oneself. Yet it can be plausibly argued that truly thinking for oneself is incompatible with the substantial human reliance on what others tell us, i.e., on ‘testimony.’ Nevertheless, philosophers of education have proposed a variety of strategies for showing the compatibility between epistemic autonomy and testimony. In this paper, I argue that none of these strategies succeed. I propose epistemic responsibility as an alternative, and more satisfactory, educational goal than autonomy as thinking for oneself. Chapter 3: Judith Suissa: Education, Schooling, and the Logic of Aims In this chapter, I will argue that the overwhelming majority of contemporary philosophical work that explores the educational significance of central moral concepts such as justice, equality and inclusion, takes the framework of state schooling for granted. In doing so, it takes on board a set of unarticulated assumptions regarding the nation state, particularly the capitalist state. Yet the urgent political questions facing us today – including questions of global justice and impending environmental disaster – are questions requiring political imaginaries that transcend the concepts and structures of capitalist states. Drawing on work in anarchist ethics, theories of prefiguration, and Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘social imaginary’ I will defend an account of schools as sites enabling bottom-up, transformative engagement with these political questions, rather than defined by top-down, predefined ‘aims of education’ that foreclose some of the possible ways of responding to them. 21 Chapter 4: Matthew T. Lee & William G. Pearson, Jr.: Love as the Essence of Flourishing: Educational Experiments with the Subjunctive Mood What happens when we treat love as the essence of flourishing? How would we organize education differently? We must first ask, “What is the essence of love?” Surely contributing to the well-being of the other is an important part of the answer, but Kierkegaard offers this additional provocation: the essential characteristic of love is that in the act of giving love the giver comes into “infinite debt” to the receiver of love. This experience is at the heart of a creative, open space for education in a subjunctive (“as if ”) mood that encourages teachers and students to “love forth the good” in each other. Findings from a pilot study of a Learning Community and our personal reflections illustrate this movement. We found joy in discovering that love entails a duty to go beyond the call of duty and such joyful experiences may help us co-create a more deeply flourishing world. Chapter 5: Michael Hand: Against Flourishing as an Educational Aim The idea that flourishing might serve as a central, foundational or overarching aim of education has been championed in recent years by a number of distinguished philosophers of education. Indeed, the enthusiasm with which educational theorists have rallied to this cause prompts Kristjan Kristjansson (2020) to speak of ‘the new flourishing bandwagon in education’. But there are dissenting voices. Harvey Siegel (2023) contends that the advocates of flourishing have failed to provide a good argument for treating their favoured ideal as an aim of education, while David Carr (2021) maintains that the conditions under which people flourish are so different for different people that ‘the currently vaunted notion of flourishing is trivial to the point of vacuity’. We might call these the missing argument objection and the vacuity objection. I argue here that there is a third and more fundamental reason to reject flourishing as an educational aim. It is, simply, that flourishing is not the sort of thing a person can acquire by learning. Flourishing, that is to say, is a good of the wrong logical kind to serve as an aim of education. I call this the unlearnability objection. Chapter 6: Harvey Siegel: Education’s Aims The most fundamental philosophical questions about education concern its alleged aims: Are there any? If so, what are they? What determines their status as fundamental aims? Is there an important difference between educational aims and educational ideals? If so, what is it? I will pursue these questions here. I will start with a review of the many aims that have been proposed. I will argue for the priority of a small cluster of basic aims. I will then challenge the ‘no aims’ view, according to which education either has no aims or is best pursued without reference to them if there are any. I will next challenge the currently popular view that the overarching aim of education is the promotion of flourishing. I will also challenge the idea that the aims are to be determined, at least in part, by social context. According to this idea, a society’s current needs determine appropriate educational aims. Finally, I will defend the view that educational aims are determined by education itself, ‘intrinsically’ so to speak, rather than how it can help further societal ends (however worthy the latter might be). That is, I will argue that society should serve education, rather than the other way around; that education sets its own proper path, and society’s task is to support its pursuit of its internally determined aims. 22 Chapter 7: Jonathan Beale: What Role Should Human Flourishing Play Among Education’s Aims? It is widely believed that education’s overarching purpose is to support human flourishing. Yet, what we might call the ‘orthodox view’ on education’s aims holds that the aim, or the primary aim, of education, is epistemic: to (i) increase students’ knowledge and (ii) advance their understanding, and (iii) develop the cognitive skills and epistemic virtues that support the pursuit of (i) and (ii), such as critical thinking skills and autonomy. Whether we hold that education has a principal or overarching aim or set of aims, it is uncontroversial that education’s goals include those epistemic aims and supporting flourishing. What is the relation between education’s epistemic aims and its aim of supporting human flourishing? This paper addresses this question. Three ways of responding are outlined. First, education’s overarching aim is to support flourishing, which is supported by the fulfilment of its epistemic aims. Second, education’s overarching aims are epistemic, which are supported by supporting flourishing. Third, education’s epistemic aims and its aim of supporting flourishing are co-beneficial. It is argued that the third response best captures the relation. The argument has empirical and conceptual premises. The empirical premise is that there is much empirical evidence for the benefits improving well-being has on learning and improving learning has on well-being. The conceptual premise is that criteria often included in theories of flourishing support the third response, and any reasonable definition of flourishing would include at least some of these criteria. Those criteria are fulfilment of potential and fulfilment in the sense of life satisfaction; character and virtue; self-understanding; autonomy; rationality; and mental and physical health. The paper argues that two influential contemporary theories of flourishing, those of positive psychology (Seligman 2011) and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University (VanderWeele 2017), are committed to the third response. Objections have recently been raised against conceiving of flourishing as a plausible educational aim, by David Carr (2021), Harvey Siegel (2023) and Michael Hand (2023). These are described and responses are put forward. It is argued that even if we accept all these objections, it is not only defensible to conceive of supporting human flourishing as a plausible educational aim, but we ought to regard it as an important aim of education. References Carr, David, 2021. ‘Where’s the Educational Virtue in Flourishing?. Educational Theory 71 (3), 389-407. Hand, Michael, 2023. ‘Against Flourishing as an Educational Aim’. Jonathan Beale & Christina Easton (eds.), The Future of Education: Reimagining Its Aims and Responsibilities (Oxford University Press, 2023). Seligman, Martin E. P., 2011. Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing – and How to Achieve Them. London: Nicholas Brearley Publishing. Siegel, Harvey, 2023. ‘Education’s Aims’. Jonathan Beale & Christina Easton (eds.), The Future of Education: Reimagining Its Aims and Responsibilities (Oxford University Press, 2023). VanderWeele, Tyler J., 2017. ‘On the Promotion of Human Flourishing’. Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, 31: 8148-56. 23  Section 2: The Responsibilities of Education Chapter 8: Laura D’Olimpio: Education Against Extremism Terrorism and extremism are not new phenomena, yet the role of the educator and educational institutions has become more prominent in recent years as the fight against terror has been pushed to the forefront of the political agenda. In the UK, the 2015 Counter Terrorism and Security Act details the duty schools have in helping prevent students from becoming radicalised and drawn into terrorism. The Department for Education’s ‘Prevent’ duty involves teaching students the skills to challenge extremist arguments, as well as a reporting duty whereby teachers must refer at-risk cases. This sees educators play a role in homeland security. How educators and schools manage this new role is of critical importance. One strategy has been to reinforce notions of nationalism and patriotism to create a sense of solidarity against external threats. In the UK, this has manifested in the teaching of ‘Fundamental British Values’, yet there is much debate as to how effective this approach is in the face of homegrown terrorism, particularly when the policies themselves offer the danger of racial profiling and encouraging Islamophobia. I argue that a more effective role for educators involves the construction of counter-narratives designed to counter extremist narratives by serving as attractive alternatives to the lure of the extremist’s vision. These counter-narratives not only illuminate and critique the worrisome aspects of extremist’s rhetoric and agenda, they also offer a positive conception of the vibrant, multicultural community of which all students are a part. By making use of drama education and dialogical classroom activities, educators may help prevent radicalisation and extremism by supporting students to engage in meaningful dialogues while co-constructing dramatic works focussed on complex themes such as racism, tolerance, fear, and violent extremism. Chapter 9: Emma Williams: Education Without Cure: The Future of Mental Health in Schools In this chapter, I consider the way that current responses to the adolescent mental health crisis in secondary schools tend towards models of correction and cure. I seek to disturb such approaches by exploring mental health education in relation to both the broader trend of ‘therapy applied to education’, and to certain problems—even pathologies—manifested in contemporary education more generally. I then suggest ways to move beyond education’s current pathology by drawing upon lines of thought from psychoanalysis and philosophy’s turn to the ordinary. Finally, I present some examples of teaching and learning in curriculum subjects, particularly the humanities, to show how these can be connected to the picture of health envisaged by psychoanalysis and philosophy of the ordinary. In so doing, I aim to anticipate current and future possibilities for education, beyond cure. Chapter 10: Andrée-Anne Cormier: In Defence of a Critical Agenda for Relationship Education Many education systems include some form of personal, social, and relationship education in their mandated curricula. But this form of education is often treated as peripheral to the overall educational mission and authorities rarely offer detailed justification for it. Yet, the best 24 justifications have implications for both what the aims of relationship education should be and for the form it should take. In this chapter, I develop an account of the proper aims of state-sponsored relationship education for pluralistic liberal democracies. First, I argue that having fair opportunities to form and maintain meaningful close relationships is a neglected yet fundamental concern of liberal-egalitarian justice. It derives from one of our most basic human interests, that of having decent close bonds with particular others and being empowered to avoid and overcome chronic loneliness. Second, I argue that high quality relationship education should, as a result, be seen as a central and indeed morally urgent aim of education today, especially considering the rise of loneliness across age groups and the prevalence of discrimination and other forms of injustices in the intimate sphere. Third, I defend the legitimacy of a critical agenda for relationship education, aimed at challenging a range of social norms and myths (e.g. about romance, friendship, beauty, and marriage) which contribute to the perpetuation of (unjust) relational and distributive inequality in the domain of personal relationships. Finally, I explore the educational demands of relationship justice beyond formal instructions: on teachers’ training, school ethos, institutional design and classroom practices. Chapter 11: Christina Easton: Forming an Orderly Queue: Remedying Educational Inequality in the Post-Covid World The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated inequalities in education. Now more than ever, family wealth enables some children to ‘queue-jump’ their way to places at elite universities and on to well-paid jobs. Many regard this situation as unfair. But does the rationale behind such objections imply that all means of increasing a person’s chances of success in the competition for university places are similarly unfair? I adopt an egalitarian, value pluralist approach and defend the view that there are sound reasons to identify some means of ‘moving forward’ in the ‘queue’ as fairer than others. Whilst ‘orderly’ (fair) queues do permit elements of luck, they exclude children moving forward as a result of family spending aimed at conferring educational advantage. I then analyse the implications of this theoretical discussion for the UK Government’s ‘levelling up agenda’ for education, as set out in a March 2022 white paper, arguing that fairness requires a more radical response to current inequalities. Chapter 12: Harry Brighouse: The Mentoring Responsibilities of University Educators In the 21st century, a university education is, for most people, a prerequisite for having interesting, meaningful, secure and securely paid employment which reliably contributes to the social good. Early adulthood is a period during which students continue to develop and orient themselves towards the world. During this time, young adults are vulnerable to various costs and harms – for example, this is the period during which mental health problems first surface for many people. Residential universities bring students together into an environment in which they are surrounded almost entirely by same-age peers, who are ill-equipped to provide all of the support that young people that age need. This chapter argues that, in addition to being obliged to ensure the education of their students, university educators also have responsibilities of mentorship toward them. These obligations are grounded both in the needs of the students and in the interests of the public good, and teachers are the bearers of the obligations largely because they are, by virtue of the 25 design of the institution, better situated than others to meet students’ needs. The chapter articulates the content of the responsibilities of mentorship, considers cases in which the interests of students and the public good are in conflict, and considers objections.  Section 3: The Future of Education Chapter 13: Paul Standish: Education and the New Social Contract: Climate Change and the Prospect of the Humanities The social contract has always been a myth, but this has not diminished its importance and value: it has sustained the prevailing part of the politics of the modern age, and it has enshrined a conception of human nature and relationship. With the End of History, it has extended through the economic sphere in neoliberalism on a global scale. In education it has extended through cultures of accountability and performativity (and hence into the most practical matters of the curriculum), legitimated through supranational organisations such as the OECD and the World Bank. Its apotheosis has brought with it unprecedented changes in technology, especially in social media and with the competition of Big Data; these lay the way for new channels of social control and – as seems increasingly likely – new forms of social stratification. All these factors have extended through education in ways that have been only partially understood. The partly predictable coincidence of these developments with the global threat of the climate crisis shows that something has to change. At the same time, their strange coincidence with the Covid-19 pandemic has created the biggest disruption since the Second World War to patterns of work and social life, and its effects on education have been plain to see. The phrase “the new normal” has come into general parlance as an anticipation that things will never be quite the same. This chapter asks how the aims and practice of education might be reconceived in ways appropriate to this new world order – an order that seems set to expose the inadequacies of those conceptions of human nature and relationship that have characterised the social contract (including notions of political consent and social justice). It does this via a reappraisal of the curriculum in three main, practical respects: a critique of dominant practices of assessment; a consideration of some of the prospects afforded by new technology; and a recasting of the role of the humanities. Chapter 14: David Johnson: Uncertainty, Society, and the Philosophy of Education The constantly changing global political landscape invites uncertainty about the nature of society and our social, economic, and climatological futures. It seems clear that as job security and the dignity of work decline, ambivalences about our personal futures rise. Moreover, as intolerance and, more worryingly, xenophobia become more pervasive in response to forced human migration and the settling of refugees in Europe, there is uncertainty about our social and cultural futures. But the aims and purposes of education in relation to human enablement and the transformation of society have been the subject of furious debate for as long as we care to go back, and various influential conceptions have been proposed. These range from the thesis of John Comenius, a 17th-century Moravian bishop, who argued that the role of formal education was to enlighten and to civilise, and later in his life argued that its role was to transform the relations between the human mind and forms of production – from feudalism to capitalism; to 26 the views of Konstantin Ushinsky, who found, in 1857, that in England education’s role was defined as the ‘training of character’, in France as the vehicle towards ‘statehood’, and in Germany to instil Wissenschaften and the scientific method. At the same time, in Russia the mission of education was the delivery of destiny and a ‘greater’ civilisation. In postcolonial Africa, propelled in some ways by the views of the ‘de-schoolers’ who argued that formal schooling, rather than liberate, created dependency and alienation, the mission of education was variously to build ‘nationhood’. In Tanzania this took the form of African socialism; in Zimbabwe and elsewhere education aimed to return to a politics of production that sought to narrow the distinction between ‘mental’ and ‘manual’. More recently, the debate has centred on the notion of ‘Ubuntu’ in South Africa and elsewhere, to indigenous knowledge and indigenous ways of knowing. In Bhutan, the debate between the modernisers and those who value the importance of traditional knowledge for development continues to rage. What is abundantly clear is that the previously hard contours that defined the philosophy of education, shaped by a particular worldview that promulgated it, have both softened and transformed, and that such a reshaping is continuous and inextricably linked to political and economic change. Some have been bold enough to speak now of a ‘global’ mission of education. But what that is, is, as ever, subject to debate. This chapter argues that if we are concerned with remaking societies such that they are more prosperous, inclusive, cohesive, and can enable human flourishing, then we must ask what we might expect of education. The chapter examines the thinking of modern philosophy against the changing character of society and asks whether our expectations of what education can achieve to transform society are realisable. Chapter 15: Winston S. Thompson: Beyond Distribution: Future Considerations of Educational Justice This chapter explores the very concept of educational justice. Notably, this exploration suggests that the field of education might ask new justice-focused questions of phenomena and circumstances that have traditionally been regarded as solely political. Contrasting popular accounts of educational justice (i.e., political varieties of educational justice) with varieties that depend upon a distinctively educational conceptualization of justice, this chapter offers two additional forms of educational justice for future use. Thompson argues that these forms might be invoked when engaging, as either scholars or concerned laypersons, the topic of educational justice in various contexts. Chapter 16: Christian B. Miller: Fostering Honesty: A Case Study in Defending and Implementing Character Education in Schools The project of character education continues to face a number of challenges. One is with convincing educators that it should be carried out in the first place. Another is with practically outlining how it can be carried out. Much of the discussion of these challenges happens at the level of talking about virtues and vices in general. A more promising approach, in my view, is to focus on particular virtues one at a time. Here the focus will be on the virtue of honesty. It seems that the normative case to be made for educating for honesty is compelling. Honesty is clearly a virtue, and an important one. Most educators want their students to not cheat, lie, mislead, and 27 steal, among other things, and to do so for the right reasons. So the primary focus of this chapter will be on the second challenge of exploring how honesty might be promoted in school environments, ranging from early schooling all the way to advanced degrees. A few of the practical strategies to be discussed include the importance of role models, the use of moral reminders in the environment, and especially the importance of an honour code. For instance, schools which are seriously committed to the use of honour codes for their assessments show significantly lower rates of academic dishonesty than those which do not use an honour code. Chapter 17: Adrian Skilbeck: Climate, Crisis, and the Future of Education When Greta Thunberg urged us to ‘listen to the scientists’, her words often appeared to be falling on deaf ears and there was a sense of despair at policy makers in the ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’ with which she greeted the inadequacy of their responses when they did arrive. If the British government’s recent policy paper ‘Sustainability and Climate Change’ (2022) is indicative of how things now stand in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been something of a sea-change. It is no longer about side-lining scientific perspectives on climate change but giving young people (and their teachers) access to the knowledge that science has accumulated. Furthermore, the concerns of young people are acknowledged, not dismissed and recognition given to their desire to be seen as more than just the passive recipients of education. Changes to the curriculum are afoot. There is an understanding, albeit limited, that learning about the climate, sustainability and the environment can take place beyond their traditional homes in science, geography and citizenship education. It would seem that education has become serious about the climate whilst at the same time heeding Bruno Latour’s warning not to abandon the insights of science in search of something more intimate and subjective in our relationship to nature. However, Latour also argues (2021) that more important than “What can we do?” and How can we get out of this?” – questions that education might be equipped to answer – is the more perplexing question “Where are we?”, a question the pandemic has only intensified. Not only is this a question of what it means to think of our lives in terms of the local rather than the global but what it means to think of ourselves in terms of being Terrestrial and living on Earth, rather than in perpetual flight from it, the modern fantasy that has informed and been fuelled by scientific progress. Here a different set of questions emerges, about how our material needs and those of the Earth, come together within what Latour characterises as the Critical Zone, a literal area ‘between the atmosphere and bedrock’ (Latour, 2018, 78), which by extension functions as a metaphor for what is most important in our lives. Here, alongside Latour’s diagnosis, the work of Stanley Cavell can help us in determining how, in attending to language, we can best express what matters to us and create an education that takes account of our interests, a task not only for science but across the curriculum, including the arts and humanities. References Department for Education, 2022. Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for education and children’s services systems. Latour, B., 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press Latour, B., 2021. After Lockdown – A Metamorphosis, Cambridge: Polity Press 28 Chapter 18: Jane Gatley: Decolonising the School Curriculum and the Epistemic Aims of Education A decolonised curriculum moves away from established epistemic content. This means that calls to decolonise the curriculum can be seen as challenges to the epistemic aims of education. This chapter sketches out four possible epistemic aims of education: to provide knowledge for the sake of its intrinsic value; to provide cultural literacy; to maintain a healthy democratic society, and to develop students’ rationality. I argue that decolonising the curriculum does not pose a threat to any of these epistemic aims. I suggest that some accounts of the epistemic aims of education rely on an excessively rigid view about knowledge and rationality which is prejudiced against making changes to curriculum content. Once this prejudice is accounted for, decolonising the curriculum can be cast as epistemically beneficial. This leaves decolonising the curriculum as an important aspect of the future of education. 29