ABSTRACT
This book is an exploration of social alternatives in the field of education, and argues for a new public education that we term ‘radical education and the common school’. This exploration is made urgent by the parlous state that we, as societies and as a species, are in: Edgar Morin’s ‘number one vital problem’. It is inspired by a rich legacy of educational thinkers and doers and it is motivated by three desires: to overthrow the dictatorship of no alternatives, to practise an emancipatory social science and to pursue real utopias. The language we use to express these desires is borrowed from two social thinkers to whom we have frequently turned for their ideas about possibilities of social transformation: the American Marxist sociologist, Erik Olin Wright and the Brazilian social theorist, legal scholar and politician, Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
