ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter draws together the ideas explored in Sustainable and Democratic Education: Opening Spaces for Complexity, Subjectivity and the Future which argues for educational processes that have potential to enlarge the space of the possible rather than replicate what currently exists in the world. This requires a revisioning of education towards processes which do include learning about existing ideas but also encourage the opening of spaces for complexity, for the emergence of the new, including new subjectivities and for possibilities of unforeseen and unforeseeable futures. Such a revisioning of education, particularly education influenced and constrained by the emphasis in dominant Western (Eurocentric) philosophy on static framings of the world and a rational autonomous conception of subjectivity, is needed now more than ever before. In this era of the Anthropocene humans are damaging the world in long-lasting/permanent ways and Western hubris threatens human survival and that of myriad others in our shared planet.
In sustainable and democratic education adults and children reposition themselves as actors in the world. Through speaking and acting with others, both human and other-than-human, in first-being encounters, young people and adults have the potential to generate the power to start and be something new. This is a hopeful argument, but one which understands hope as an active process, a verb requiring effort and commitment.
