Toward an Imperfect Education

Sharon Todd is Professor of Education at Stockholm University and Mälardalen University. She is author most recently of Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education (SUNY Press, 2003).

“This book is thrilling! Toward an Imperfect Education is the best treatment I have seen in philosophy of education today that takes up key conceptions amid the ethos of our time. For Todd, central is modernity and its cosmopolitan character underpinned by inadequate notions of humanity and diversity; what emerges is a new view of education for a just pluralism. What I most appreciate is the call to face ourselves and our social and educational world in my term ‘flawed as we surely are.’ Todd is surely exemplary among today’s best philosophers of education who draw from across philosophy, social theory, and primarily the continental traditions and their contemporary derivations. In her own response to Kant no less, no one better synthesizes and then offers new insights from a collectivity of theorists such as Arendt, Benhabib, Butler, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Mouffe, and Levinas. An engaging and thought provoking read throughout.” --Lynda Stone, UNC "In this thoughtful book Sharon Todd argues that a commitment to justice, democracy and human rights does not need to be based upon universal values or a universal idea about what it means to be human. She outlines the contours of a cosmopolitan outlook for education that is firmly committed to the plurality of our imperfect human existence." —Gert Biesta, Professor of Education and Director of Postgraduate Research The Stirling Institute of Education Editor-in-chief Studies in Philosophy and Education

• Chapter 1 Prologue Education and an Imperfect Garden; Chapter 1a Facing Humanity: Crisis and Inevitability; Chapter 2 Rethinking Cosmopolitanism Along the Fault Lines of a Divided Modernity; Chapter 3 Not Just for Myself: Questioning the Subject of Human Rights; Chapter 4 Promoting a Just Education: Dilemmas of Rights, Freedom, and Justice; Chapter 5 Whose Rights? Whose Freedom?; Chapter 6 Educating Beyond Consensus: Facing Cross-Cultural Conflict as Radical Democratic Possibility; Chapter 7 Educating the Sexed Citizen: Irigaray and the Promise of a Humanity That Is Yet to Come; Chapter 8 Teachers Judging Without Scripts, or Thinking Cosmopolitan; Chapter 9 Epilogue: Toward an Imperfect Education;