Alexander Means - Böcker

This book explores how teaching endures in the age of pervasive dread. It asks: How does teaching refuse and counter dread's grip? What new stories of teaching might be told beyond the culture of dread?Dread is the prevailing mood of this era. Dread is an affliction of minds, bodies, and social life. Climate chaos, spiraling inequality, loss of community, cynicism, and escalating attacks on public schools, universities, and educators are all contribute to pervasive dread. This book explores the persistence of teaching in this era of dread. The chapters examine the context of teaching in a time of dread and touch upon different valences of race and pedagogy, as well as pedagogy in relation to global crises of capitalism, technology, and ecology. Taken together, they explore how teaching endures over dread and examine how teaching might be rethought as a creative force for imagination over fatalism, reciprocity over exploitation, thought over fundamentalism, belonging over atomization, love over nihilism, mutuality over narcissism, care over hatred, joy over despair, democracy over fascism, and hope over dread.This thought-provoking volume will be a key resource for educators, scholars, artists, and activists alike. It was originally published as a special issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Mainstream economists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs claim that unfettered capitalism and digital technology can unlock a future of unbounded prosperity, create endless high paying jobs, and solve the world’s vast social and ecological problems. Realizing this future of abundance purportedly rests in the transformation of human potential into innovative human capital through new 21st century forms of education. In this new book Alex Means challenges this view. Stagnating economic growth and runaway inequality have emerged as the ‘normal’ condition of advanced capitalism. Simultaneously, there has been a worldwide educational expansion and a growing surplus of college-educated workers relative to their demand in the world economy. This surplus is complicated by an emerging digital revolution driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning that generates worker displacing innovations and immaterial forms of labor and valorization.Learning to Save the Future argues that rather than fostering mass intellectuality, educational development is being constrained by a value structure subordinated to 21st century capitalism and technology. Human capabilities from creativity, design, engineering, to communication are conceived narrowly as human capital, valued in terms of economic productivity and growth. Similarly, global problems such as the erosion of employment and climate change are conceived as educational problems to be addressed through business solutions and the digitalization of education. This thought-provoking account provides a cognitive map of this condition, offering alternatives through critical analyses of education and political economy, technology and labor, creativity and value, power and ecology.

Mainstream economists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs claim that unfettered capitalism and digital technology can unlock a future of unbounded prosperity, create endless high paying jobs, and solve the world’s vast social and ecological problems. Realizing this future of abundance purportedly rests in the transformation of human potential into innovative human capital through new 21st century forms of education. In this new book Alex Means challenges this view. Stagnating economic growth and runaway inequality have emerged as the ‘normal’ condition of advanced capitalism. Simultaneously, there has been a worldwide educational expansion and a growing surplus of college-educated workers relative to their demand in the world economy. This surplus is complicated by an emerging digital revolution driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning that generates worker displacing innovations and immaterial forms of labor and valorization.Learning to Save the Future argues that rather than fostering mass intellectuality, educational development is being constrained by a value structure subordinated to 21st century capitalism and technology. Human capabilities from creativity, design, engineering, to communication are conceived narrowly as human capital, valued in terms of economic productivity and growth. Similarly, global problems such as the erosion of employment and climate change are conceived as educational problems to be addressed through business solutions and the digitalization of education. This thought-provoking account provides a cognitive map of this condition, offering alternatives through critical analyses of education and political economy, technology and labor, creativity and value, power and ecology.