RADICAL HOPE AND TEACHING: LEARNING POLITICAL AGENCY FROM THE POLITICALLY DISENFRANCHISED

Abstract

Abstract If teaching is a political act, how can teachers hope to make a difference through their work? In this review essay, Julian Edgoose explores this question of hope in relation to three recent books: David Halpin’s Hope and Education, Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, and Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. Halpin describes how hope comes from our targeted efforts to connect our critical analysis of the present to a better, yet realistic, idea of the future. In contrast, Kozol (echoing Cornel West’s “tragicomic hope”) describes a hopefulness that sustains him despite and alongside his critical view of schools. Edgoose asks a further question: can one reasonably remain hopeful in the absence of that critical stance — in the absence of a sense that one can understand the situation one faces enough to know a way out? To Lear, this would be a case of “radical hope,” and Edgoose offers a second reading of Kozol through the lenses of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt to show what such radical hope might look like for teachers.