For an Educational Engagement with Crisis

Crisis is an all-embracing phenomenon. Once erupting, it is experienced on many levels and is often felt like no part of life is kept safe from it. When an individual, a group or society as a whole undergo a crisis, not only do they face hardships and threats to their very survival, stability and well-being but they also operate in unique epistemological conditions. While education in times of crisis is often tasked with recruiting students in the efforts to overcome it and with providing them emotional support, I argue that there is another important task that education is uniquely qualified for—operating from within the conditions of crisis and engaging with its epistemological difficulties to achieve better understanding. First, reading in historical and philosophical accounts of the concept, I discuss the ambiguities and contradictions characteristic of crisis, and I also show that some of these conceptual problems are immanent to crisis and cannot be completely solved. Next, I show the challenges that crises pose specifically before education as a practice that is commonly perceived as incremental and future-oriented, highlighting the mismatch between this conception of education and the basic characteristics of crisis. Lastly, I suggest preliminary guidelines for a redirection of educational responses to crises so that they address said epistemological unclarity—mutual research, critique of crisis-talk, and training the imagination, and apply them to the example of the crisis in Israel/Palestine following the events of 10/7/2023.