1st Edition
Learning to Save the Future Rethinking Education and Work in an Era of Digital Capitalism
Preface and Acknowledgements
1. Solutionism:
Cancelling the Future
2. Economism:
Ethics and Ideology
3. Precarity:
The Ticking Time Bomb
4: Creativity:
Education and the Common
5: Digitization:
Algorithmic Learning Machines
6. Automation:
Displacement and Rupture
7. Futurity:
Capitalism and Mass Intellectuality
Index
Biography
Alexander Means
Learning to Save the Future is an elegant book that analyzes the logic of the new world of increasing complexity and interconnectivity that is digital capitalism to explore the future that depends upon the capacity of education. It is a bold vision that argues for an alternative set of values beyond a techno-economic determinism that revitalizes notions of emancipation, equality and human freedom. Alex Means has written a compelling book with wide appeal.
Michael A. Peters, Professor, Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, University of Waikato, New Zealand; Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Nervous about the future? You should be. Professor Means takes on the current dominant ideologies such as the faith that Silicon Valley and the creative class will rescue us from looming disasters resulting from technological and educational fixes that undermine our ability to think critically about the future. He deftly shows us how transforming education into a collaborative and just social process is central to avoiding a dystopian future and creating a world characterized by equality and democracy. A book to be read and reread for its many insights.
David Hursh, Professor, Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, USA"...the book is an important read for citizens concerned about democracy and the future of our world. Throughout the book, Means draws out the sometimes violent implications of educational solutionism, particularly how its moralization and individualization of racialized, gendered and classed structural inequities across a number of problem fields supports blaming marginalized groups for systemic inequities."
Chris Arthur, Postdigital Science and Education, 2019
