School’s Out Forever: a provocation for the future of education

Let’s get straight to the point: this lecture is an explicit challenge to the viability of modern schooling as an approach to education in the contemporary world. It is not a critique of individual schools or of individual teachers who have dedicated their lives to improving the outcomes for the young people they work with. It is, however, an explicit critique of the conditions under which this amazing work takes place.

Professor Patrick Alexander wants to encourage a discussion about how the virtuous dedication of teachers and students to the work of education might flourish even further if we are to entertain the provocation that school is fundamentally past its sell-by date as a means to the ends of education. This provocation necessarily requires a discussion about what we think the point of education is at this particularly interesting, exciting, and occasionally terrifying juncture in human history.

While recognising that schools can act as places of sanctuary and freedom for some children, Professor Alexander argues that the traditional model of schooling is already at least several decades out of step with the global society in which we live, if in fact it was ever completely fit for the purpose of human flourishing. By the end of the lecture he will put forward a series of provocations about how we might start to think differently about the futures of education beyond schooling.