Global Education in Crisis

This book argues that global education has largely been silent on the key issues driving inequality and injustice, reflecting a creeping deradicalisation of the field and an abandonment of its radical origins, particularly the Freirean pedagogy of reflective action toward positive social change. McCloskey suggests that global education is too detached from horizontal social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Indigenous land rights, and the Tax Justice Network and too pre-occupied with top-down policy making. He shows how and why global education can engage more with climate justice, the rise of the far-right and racialized violence, neoliberalism, class conflict, extreme poverty and political disconnection by connecting with wider social movements. He argues that a pedagogy of renewal is needed to position the sector in the urgent debates that are central to our future and go beyond the Sustainable Development Goals which dominate the international development and global education policy landscape. The book includes chapters on the crises enveloping our world including the genocide in Gaza, climate breakdown, class, decolonization, race, migration and neoliberalism. By applying global education’s radical pedagogy to the causes of democratic drift and creating new civil society partnerships with movements that share its values and aims, the sector can renew itself.