Transforming Education

[Cindy McMurray]

An Ethics Institute colloquy with Dr. Doug Selwyn and Dr. Jan Maher

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Institute for Ethics in Public Life

Noon over Zoom (link to follow)

Dr. Doug Selwyn has just published Center of All Possibilities:
Transforming Education for our Children’s Future (Peter Lang, 2022). An
Institute senior scholar and former member of SUNY Plattsburgh’s education
faculty, Selwyn has assembled essays by and interviews of 20 educators and
activists on the theme of ways we might best educate our next generations
of children. Selwyn asserts “one of the major challenges and
responsibilities of any society is to educate the next generation so that
the society can continue to sustain itself and, hopefully, enable all its
members to live healthy and rewarding lives. There has rarely been
agreement about what education would most serve the younger generation, and
there has been contention around many issues related to it: who should be
educated, who should teach and what requirements should attach to that, how
should the students (and system) be evaluated, who should pay for this
education, what should be part of that educational sequence, who should
make those decisions, and on what basis.” He argues “we are no closer to
resolving those questions today than we were one hundred years ago, and
with the recent right wing push to ban books, to limit the teaching of an
honest accounting of the country’s history, and the misguided attack on
critical race theory, education wars are closer to culture wars than they
have been in a long time. What is most clear, however, is that we can’t
afford to go back to “normal,” to how things were before the pandemic,
because we were failing to educate so many of our children and because we
are facing crises that will not wait for us to resolve our issues.”

Noted author and Institute senior scholar Dr. Jan Maher, who has
contributed a chapter to Center of All Possibilities, writes, “We are
leaving our children and their children to face a world of climate change,
gun violence, pandemics, political instability, a dizzying rate of
technological change, on the precipice of losing our democratic
institutions.” She asks, “What dispositions will serve them as they
navigate the uncertainty we are bequeathing them? Who should help them to
develop and learn? And can we find our way back to be among the world’s
strongest democracies as we confront this future?”

Colloquies at the Ethics Institute are open to all members of the SUNY
Plattsburgh community.

For further information, contact Dr. Jonathan Slater, director of the
Institute for Ethics in Public Life at slaterjr at plattsburgh.edu.

The work of the Ethics Institute is generously supported by gifts to the
Plattsburgh College Foundation.
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