Meeting the Challenges of Existential Threats through Educational Innovation: A Proposal for an Expanded Curriculum

Project summary

PURPOSE AND CONTENT

This edited volume makes a case for the importance of education responding to human-made threats of existence, such as climatechange, decline of the natural world, nuclear terrorism, pandemic disease, inequality and more. Existential threats, which has thepotential to cause damage of different degrees to the well-being of humankind, cannot solely be solved politically, they should also be solved educationally. Education should enlighten (not frighten) pupils and students of the existential threats that humankind is facing whilst focusing on how these threats can be addressed in the best possible way.  

The volume gathers up top scientists around ten existential threats. Each author is an expert in a particular existential threat discussed within the book. It is the first educational volume to provide a comprehensive and systematically analysis and review of what is known about different sorts of existential threats with educational implications and suggestions (based on the latest research) of what humankind as such needs to do in order to reduce and (if possible) prevent the existential threats. Is there a cause for concern? How serious are the threats? Can the threats be reduced and/or prevented? What needs to be done? These questions arepart of an educational enlightenment and a step towards an education perceived as protecting humankind from self-destruction. 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Preface and Acknowledgements

Prof. Dr. Herner Saeverot

 

Prologue: Education as Protecting Humankind from Self-Destruction

Prof. Dr. Herner Saeverot

 

Chapter 1 Addressing the Existential Threats of Climate Change

Dr. Jennifer Joy West, Dr. Helene Amundsen, Dr. Nathalie Schaller & Dr. Marianne Aasen (Norway) 

 

Chapter 2 Decline of the Natural World 

Dr. Louise McRae & Dr Monika Böhm(England)

 

Chapter 3 Overpopulation

Prof. Dr. Colin Butler (Australia)

 

Chapter 4 Infectious Disease 

Prof. Dr. Birgitte Freiesleben de Blasio (Norway)

 

Chapter 5 Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats

Dr. Halvor Kippe, Dr. Marius Dybwad & Dr. Stig Rune Sellevåg (Norway)

 

Chapter 6 Egoism

Prof. Dr. Gert Biesta (Ireland/ Netherlands)

 

Chapter 7 The Threats of Ideologies

Prof. Dr. Herner Saeverot and Prof. Dr. Glenn-Egil Torgersen (Norway)

 

Chapter 8 Truth, Truthfulness, and Truth-Telling

Prof. Dr. Michael A. Peters (China/ New Zealand)

 

Chapter 9 Artificial Intelligence

Ass. Prof. Dr. Marija Slavkovik (Norway) 

 

Chapter 10Inequality

Prof. Dr. Ron Thompson (England)

 

Epilogue: Education’s Most Urgent Question

Prof. Dr. Herner Saeverot