Education and Technological Unemployment

This book examines the challenge of accelerating automation, and argues that countering and adapting to this challenge requires new methodological, philosophical, scientific, sociological, economic, ethical, and political perspectives that fundamentally rethink the categories of work and education. What is required is political will and social vision to respond to the question: What is the role of education in a digital age characterized by potential mass technological unemployment?

Today’s technologies are beginning to cost more jobs than they create – and this trend will continue. There have been many proposed solutions to this problem, and they invariably involve an educational vision. Yet, in a world that simply doesn’t offer enough work for everyone, education is clearly not a panacea for technological unemployment.

This collection presents responses to this question from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to education studies, philosophy, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and economics.

Michael A. Peters is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor of Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He has held posts at the University of Waikato, the University of Glasgow and the University of Auckland, where he had a Personal Chair. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Educational Philosophy and Theory, The Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Brill), Open Review of Educational Research (T&F) and Knowledge Cultures (Addleton). He has written some ninety books, including Wittgenstein’s Education: ‘A picture held us captive’ (2018) and Post-Truth and Fake News (2018).
Petar Jandrić is a Professor at the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences. His previous academic affiliations include the Croatian Academic and Research Network, the University of Edinburgh, Glasgow School of Art, and the University of East London. Petar’s interests are at the post-disciplinary intersections between technologies, pedagogies and society, and his research methodologies of choice are inter-, trans-, and anti-disciplinarity. His latest books are Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (2017) and The Digital University: A Dialogue and Manifesto (2018). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Postdigital Science and Education (Springer).
Alexander J. Means is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy with Global Perspectives at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His latest books are Learning to Save the Future: Rethinking Education and Work in the Era Digital Capitalism (Routledge, 2018); and The Wiley Handbook of Global Education Reform (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). His research examines educational policy and organization in relation to political, economic, cultural, and social change. His work has been published in Critical Sociology, Journal of Education Policy, Critical Studies in Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory.