The idea of education focuses on passing what is good in our world to the generations that arrive as newcomers. With the newcomers, the world is renewed (Arendt 1961): changed while preserving what is valuable in it. This view has recently been re-invigorated in the debate on instrumentality in education. In one instance, Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski (2017) evoke the notion of "love to the world" (as opposed to "hate," which they ascribe to critical pedagogy) as the foundation of post-critical education, focused on things of concern around which passionate teaching can unite students and teachers.

In this symposium, we juxtapose this way of seeing education with the global situation in which more and more children are displaced. In most cases, education for newcomers who are refugees and asylum seekers is planned with repatriation in mind (Dryden-Peterson & Reddick, 2017; Ferede, 2018). However, in the face of climatic catastrophe and prolific wars, repatriation frequently becomes impossible. If those children stay in receiving countries, "things of concern" of their new teachers may differ radically from those of their parents or themselves. How do we conceive of education for next generations in this context?

Next, as typically construed in trans-generational pedagogical narratives, is one who arrives later. In this symposium, we are exploring "nextness" in a broader sense, both in temporal and spatial terms. We want to stress that ”next” also arrives spatially, as "next to us", neighbour or alien. This perspective opens to broader ethical and political issues. What is education when its next generation – one to inherit the world -- is both temporal and spatial? When its newcomer children are not only arriving after us but are, at the same time, neighbors or aliens to us? What is it, then, that needs passing on, what can be passed on, and what is worth passing for the sake of "us”, or for "them," and for the world itself?

The symposium proposed to the Philosophy of Education Network will be organized in two sessions.

In Session 2, education is seen as marked by a generation gap. The radical foreignness of the child (and the immigrant child in particular) means that learning is bi-directional and that education as dealing with "the alien" becomes transformative for "the home" as well (Anna Kirova). More radically, we may see homelessness as the condition of children (not only immigrant ones) and adults in the world in which “there is no place to land" for anybody, which means that we have to constitute anew a shared world that we can call home again (Vlieghe & Zamojski). However, alienation has a radically concrete shape as well, as in case of those immigrants who have no right to claim their political rights. This is explored in the Ranciere’an perspective of disagreement as the condition of democracy (Tone Saevi). In this context, ethical decisions of teachers and school leaders working for the inclusion of newcomers in a Norwegian school are explored empirically (Eivid Larssen).

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