ABSTRACT
In my letter of invitation to the contributors in this book I wrote that Education and Hope in Troubled Times: Visions of Change for Our Children’s World would be a collection of essays by a number of the leading social and educational thinkers and commentators in this country. Its motivation, put succinctly, was to help articulate a new vision and purpose-and begin to set an alternative direction-for our children’s education at a time when, as I believe, there is an increasing delegitimation of the prevailing assumptions and orthodoxies that have shaped our public life over the past few years. There was, in addition, a deep hunger for the articulation of what Michael Lerner1 has called a new bottom line for education-one that focuses on the lives of our children as human beings who will assume the ethical, political and social responsibilities of our shared national and global communities.
