Critical praxis for critical times

This final chapter recalls the view of education that animates this volume: education to help people live well in a world worth living in. The authors outline some of the challenging historical, cultural, economic, environmental, social, and political conditions of our contemporary times. These are also challenges for education, which must be renewed to confront the challenges of our time. The authors use the theory of education outlined at the beginning of the chapter as a critical framework for finding ways to resist the bureaucratising and deprofessionalising tendencies of education systems locally, nationally, and globally, and to restore hope for forms of contemporary educational practice that can help people to live well in worlds worth living in – and for the practice architectures (conditions of possibility) that make critical educational praxis possible. The authors show that the work of the Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) international research network in the years 2008 to 2018 has included a variety of kinds of research that have contributed to the realisation of educational praxis – research by educators, research with educators, and research for educators. The chapter concludes by encouraging resilience and resistance in the face of an intensely pressurised system of education dominated by performativity, management and surveillance in our neoliberal times, and resources for a journey of hope in the task of realising education in the form of educational practices that in fact help children, young people and adults to live well in a world worth living in.