This book proposes some insights and ideas into how education might be humanized. The chapters inform, provoke, and guide further inquiries into imagining and actualizing human education. It presents the view that education should be primarily understood as human education, which offers universal good for the entire planet. It centres around the significant values that make life, in a holistic sense, meaningful, worthwhile, and socially just. It discusses the fundamental idea that human education is the key to peace, individual and social freedoms, social justice and harmony, fraternity and happiness all over the world, and how educational ideals and methods must be reconsidered to achieve this end.
This book originates from an international conference and round-table, “Human Education in the 3rd Millennium,” in July 2019 in Dharamsala, India.
R. Scott Webster is Associate Professor at the School of Education at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the coordinator for the Curriculum and Pedagogy Research group, and has interests in educational theory, philosophy of education, curriculum theory, pedagogy, critical thinking and spirituality. Scott has written and contributed to various articles, chapters, and books, including Educating for Meaningful Lives (2009), Understanding Curriculum: The Australian Perspective (2019), Theory and Philosophy in Educational Research (2018), Rethinking Reflection and Ethics for Teachers (2019), and Education as Confronting Self and Society (forthcoming).
Timo Airaksinen is Professor of Practical Philosophy (Emeritus), at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests focuses on 17th and 18th Century empiricist philosophy and natural theology, the philosophy of literature, virtue ethics, and social conflict theory. He has travelled worldwide and published widely, most recently the publication Vagaries of Desire (2019).
Poonam Batra is Professor of Education at the Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi, India. Poonam's main areas of professional focus include public policy in education, curriculum and pedagogy, the social psychology of education, teacher education, and gender studies. Poonam has co-authored several key education policy documents in India. Her recent research examines the imperatives of comparative education from a South Asian perspective, and the politics of school and teacher education reform. She is currently working as Co-Investigator on the Transforming Education Systems for Sustainable Development (TES4SD) Network Plus Project, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) of UK (United Kingdom) Research and Innovation.
Margarita Kozhevnikova is the coordinator of the international initiative 'Human Education in the 3rd Millennium'; head of the research laboratory for social and personal development at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, and leader of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Association Obrazovanie Cheloveka (Human Education). She is the author of The Horizons of a New Sociality in Education (Ed., chapters] (In Russian), Teaching. The Buddhist Tradition of Philosophy of Education (In Russian), ‘Desire in Buddhism and the Concept of "Child people” and "True adults”’ (Chapter in: Desire: The Concept and Its Practical Context), and editor of Teacher with Oneself (Ed., chapters) (In Russian) and Human education. Philosophy of Education: The Seminar (Ed., chapters), and over 70 papers.
