Trying to Teach in a Season of Great Untruth

Book excerpt: These essays address contemporary issues in teaching, curriculum and pedagogy through tensions arising from the processes of globalization and empire. Of particular significance are the prejudices of Homo Oeconomicus or Economic Man (sic) that reduce the most profound of human relations, like those between the young and their elders, to an evermore constraining grammar of profit and loss. The predations of empire in turn divide the world into a site of war between friends and enemies, winners and losers. The times are dangerous, and educators need to speak to the world from the wisdom of their experience of standing with the young, for whom alone the future may still be open.