Call for papers: FORUM 67.3 Autumn 2025
Posted on 23/04/2025
Contributions are invited for the Autumn 2025 number (Forum 67.3) for which the copy date is: Monday 14 July 2025.
‘What are the purposes of education?’ This is a question long asked and pondered, with a diverse range of answers – personal, societal and environmental. But it needs to be constantly re-visited, taking account of the conditions of the times. Today’s conditions are above all conditions of crisis, conditions that confront humankind with profound, existential dangers, making for what historian Adam Tooze calls ‘the world of the polycrisis’, in which ‘the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.’ The converging and often inter-connected crises include multiple environmental threats; proliferating wars and nuclear weaponry; the prospect of new pandemics; what has been termed the ‘crisis of care’; advances in science and technology outstripping the capacity of politics and ethics to understand and regulate; and the hegemonic neoliberal regime, with its disastrous consequences and its imminent decline (and current ‘morbid symptoms’). Confronted by such conditions, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in January 2025 decided to move the hands on its Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.
Yet despite this dire situation and the importance of the question, as the Forum Board has recently argued, ‘there has been very little public discussion of what education should be for.’ In the absence of such discussion, education remains focused on a narrow economic purpose of human capital development and preparation for joining a flexible workforce. Even the shock waves caused by Covid have failed to shift the extreme economisation of education, leading Jordi Collet-Sabé and Stephen Ball to observe that, post-pandemic, ‘[t]he economic relations and “benefits” of schooling are reasserted. Education has been relaunched as before with little thought as to how it currently contributes to our extinction or how it might possibly contribute to our continuation.’
We invite articles for the Autumn 2025 edition of Forum that reflect on the purposes of education in relation to the conditions of the times – and the possibilities for transformative change that the polycrisis opens up.. Articles may also relate their discussion of purposes to other issues, such as the role of the school in addressing these purposes (and where else relevant education can take place); the type of pedagogy such purposes require; and the relationship between ‘education’ and ‘care’.
FORUM welcomes writing which is heart-felt as well as thought-through. There’s no set length for a FORUM article. Although many weigh in at about 4000 words, many are shorter. Nor is there a set way of writing an article. We certainly welcome academic papers, but personal reflections, critically alert consideration of issues and experiences, and informed discursive writing are welcome too, as are texts written by more than one person. If you have an idea for an article, or would like to discuss the possibility of contributing, please email Patrick Yarker.
The deadline by which to send an article for the Autumn 2025 number of FORUM is Monday 14 July but please contact Patrick or Peter beforehand to let them know you are sending in a text. We look forward to hearing from you!
Patrick Yarker and Peter Moss
Forum: for promoting 3 to 19 comprehensive education
patyarker@aol.com
peter.moss@ucl.ac.uk