Re-claiming social purpose and adding values to the world around us

The Western obsession with productivity has brought the world to a crisis that we can escape only with a radical break from the headlong rush for “more, always more” in the financial realm as well as in science and technology. It is high time that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail. For we are threatened by the most serious dangers, which have the power to bring the human experiment to an end by making the planet uninhabitable. We are rather angry that we have to write about re-claiming social purpose and adding value to the world. It is, to say the least, distressing. It disrupts and challenges our beliefs in the emancipatory agenda of the educational project and it destabilises any ideas of having made some sort of contribution to “the better society”. It speaks to the fact that we may have failed, or at least not worked hard enough. Our whole sense of purpose has been to make a difference, to pursue social good, to add value not only to the world around us but to the people around us. A rather grandiose notion you may say. Possibly. But it has been the ethical and moral compass of our work. We share the moral outrage of Hessel (2011). Perhaps it is time for such outrage?