LECTURE 5
Education, Futurity and the Climate Emergency: Changing the Subject 

Speaker: Prof Stephen Ball  

Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Education,

University College London, Institute of Education  

The lecture will explore the complicated, contradictory and urgent relationship between education and the climate emergency. The disconnect between schooling and the environment will be addressed and the pedagogisation of ‘sustainablity education’ will be noted. He will argue that modern schools perpetuate and reproduce a pernicious form of humanism that serves to legitimate the exploitation of nature and an economy of extinction - that is the formation of an all too humanist, neoliberal subject. All of this underpins the ‘discounting of the future’. 

Over and against this he will assert the need for a different kind of education and a different kind of social subject – an ‘ecological subject’. Education, rather than school, must foster biophilic sensibilities and a post-human ethics that offers ‘new imaginative ways of understanding the relation between lives’ (MacCormack 2016) – our common fate and the inequalities of global warming. If this is possible then education might become a key point of articulation of individual meaning and experience – ways of living – and the social and environmental crises that threaten our survival as a species. We need to think seriously about what it means to be educated ‘differently’, collectively, frugally, autonomously, creatively (Vasudevan 2015).