Education and the Future: Rethinking the Role of Anticipation and Responsibility in Multicultural and Technological Societies

Abstract

This chapter uses the concept of anticipation to reposition a philosophical tension regarding the way in which educational responsibility is usually understood. The tension puts educational practice in conflict with itself, to the extent that many of its practices are self-undermining and incoherent. In addressing this philosophical tension, I first explain its basis. Following this, I argue that the tension is produced by an extrapolatory form of anticipation and futurity that is so dominant in contemporary Western society as to be considered “unavoidable” and “natural.” Finally, I present a symbiotic conception of anticipation and futurity that can reveal the uniqueness and coherence of education’s allegedly “conflicted” responsibilities and which produces an understanding of education as an event that has value “in itself.” That is, education does not serve some other higher (political or moral) purpose but has its own intrinsic value. My primary argument is that this synthesis points to the crucial importance of philosophical work that presents education in a mode outside of taken for granted, extrapolatory forms of anticipatory logic.