Education

Education is a key utopian category. Not only is it central to some of the most powerful articulations of utopian method and politics—most notably “the education of desire”—but it is also the principal institution within many visions of a utopian commonwealth. Education has two Latin roots (educere or “to lead out” and educare or “to mould”) and these are both at play (and sometimes in conflict) in the relationship between education and utopia. The present chapter explores this relationship from three broad and contrasting perspectives. The first discusses the nature and role of schooling within classical utopian texts; the second explores education as a mechanism for opening up utopian possibilities within the present; and the third considers the utopian dynamics of deschooling and alternative educational spaces, relating these back to the educational ideas of key utopian thinkers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the dialectical relationship between education and utopia; that the radical transformation of society requires a radically transformed educational practice but that a radically transformed educational practice requires a radically transformed society.