In Search of Responsibility as Education

Hannah Spector is Associate Professor of Education at Penn State University, The Capital College, USA.

"Hannah Spector’s forceful philosophical inquiry, In Search of Responsibility as Education compels readers to contemplate the meanings and enactment of individual and collective responsibility in an increasingly uncertain and precarious time. Assuming responsibility for the world and others, Spector generates much needed relational, ethical and other-oriented educational forms of thinking towards acting. Resisting abstraction, Spector merges political and education philosophy, in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Maxine Greene, to re-insert philosophical forms of insight, persuasion, thought into the public sphere characterized by a growing anti-intellectualism infecting contemporary political and social life. This exemplary study of the educational value and potential of responsibility is a must read for educational philosophers, scholars and students of philosophy, teacher educators, and teachers and all those committed to rethinking the role of philosophical thinking towards stewarding the next generation into a more habitable, just, and sustainable world." – Aparna Mishra Tarc, Associate Professor, York University, Canada"Hannah Spector’s In Search of Responsibility as Education comprises a well-researched and hard-hitting series of essays that unflinchingly explores our responsibility towards pressing contemporary issues in curriculum, most tellingly, genocides and ecocides. At once brooding and prescient, Spector probes the several sides and dimensions of responsibility: a concept frequently invoked yet little understood, especially given a modern, thoroughly bureaucratized society. How is responsibility possible under such conditions? Who shall be responsible for thinking and acting? The book will serve as a powerful instigator of complicated conversations in secondary and post-secondary classrooms within and outside of education." – Teresa Strong-Wilson, Associate Professor, McGill University, Canada"This a gem of a book by one of North America’s great Arendtian and education scholars. It represents a repository of inspiration for education scholars who think with Arendt on the pressing political issues of our time. Importantly too, Spector’s written words are suffused with Arendt’s horizons of the possible and the recognition that as scholar activists we are all implicated in the act of political responsibility. This book could not be more pertinent at a time when politics, education, and the environment are in crisis." – Jo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge, UK

• Introduction: Meanings of Responsibility in Context 1. Bureaucracy, Responsibility, and Education 2. The Imagination as Teacher 3. Exceptionally American Visions: On Human Rights and Genocide Education 4. Curriculum of Common Sense in Times of Plague 5. A Responsibility Like No Other Epilogue to Postscript: Mortality: "The Miracle that Saves the World"?