ABSTRACT
A further education college principal argued at a conference in 2002 that lifelong learning should enable us to ‘search for the hero inside ourselves’, quoting a song by M People that accompanied an advertisement about the freedom offered by a certain French car. But her vision of educational heroism was not about challenge, risk-taking and empowering others, or even the open road. Instead, teachers and students are heroic if they can confess their mutual vulnerability in the face of a scary future where ‘there are no experts’.
