Against the backdrop of growing pessimism, anxiety, if not simply hopelessness in relation to the future, this symposium deals with an idea, or maybe a notion, that has been rendered obsolete, although it used to be a central goal of Modern education: progress. We follow Latour’s (2018) claim that this sentiment of hopelessness is the result of the contemporary experience that we have no longer a place to call our ‘land’, ’soil’, or ‘home’. Rather than being a singular phenomenon or condition, this experience is the result of a complex knot of diverse interrelated developments such as mass migration, extinction of species, pollution of the natural environment, climate change, rise of political populism, distrust in science (e.g., antivaccination movements), automatization of work, etc. What seems crucial, is that all these phenomena contribute to a corrosion of the solid, commonly shared, and – to a large extent – just unquestionable hope for the future that the West has inherited from Modernity. Together with such a grinding down of the Modern attitude towards the future, the – equally Modern – understanding of education in terms of addressing the potentials of the new generation in view of social, cultural, political, economic, etc. progress is put into question too. When the belief that an ever brighter and more rational, just and prosperous future runs the risk of disappearing into thin air, this has unavoidably implications for education, as it is difficult to conceive of it if not in terms of development and growth, but also emancipation and hope for the future; or, in shorthand: in terms of progress. Hence, it is required that we reconceive of education and how it is connected to the issue of progress and hope. Differently put: Is there any sense to educate, if there is no future? Or, what would it mean to educate beyond the scope of eternal growth, beyond the modern imaginary of progress?

The contributors to this symposium make preliminary attempts to explore this issue. The first contribution consist a rereading of Kant’s idea of orientation in thought with James’ radical empiricism offering an ontological plane for questioning the Modern idea of progress and culminating with the issue of future open possibilities. Precisely such a not destined time is the focus of the second contribution exploring the possible ways of redescribing the opposition between conservative and progressive education in terms of the ideas of “migrant cosmopolitanism”, kinopedagogy and a valorization of the ek-static character of time. The effort of disengaging the concept of education from its interlacing with that of progress reverberate on and culminate in a rethinking, in the last two papers, of two educational gestures: learning with artifices and studying with a teacher – both being reconceptualised in a way that aims at going beyond the logic of progress.

Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth. Politics, in the New Climatic Regime. Transl. C. Porter. Polity Press: Cambridge