Across many contexts, education is being asked to do more – respond to polarization, secure societies, cultivate tolerance, prepare citizens, manage difference – while simultaneously being narrowed through technocratic curricula, surveillance practices and instrumental notions of learning. The contributions in this issue summon us to confront an uncomfortable truth: education today is not merely under pressure; it is increasingly being reconceptualized in ways that seem to undermine its democratic and ethical premises. What coheres the articles in this issue is not geography or methodology, but a shared insistence that curriculum and pedagogy are moral and political acts. Whether we are designing teacher education programmes, teaching controversial issues, monitoring students or reforming civics education, we are always making decisions about authority, agency and the kind of social order education legitimizes.
Yusef Waghid (Sun,) studied this question.