Teaching Well Symposium 2026: Re-Humanizing Education

Keynote speaker: Professor Ronald Barnett

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London and a leading voice in the philosophy of higher education. His work on concepts such as criticality, supercomplexity, and the ecological university will set the stage for a rich discussion on what it means to re-humanize education in the 21st century.

Outline

In many countries and regions of the world, the idea that education is a process where human beings might realise their humanity is in difficulty. Variously, it has either not been present or is now being threatened, as the space for education is drawn in. Vectors at work include those of education becoming an arm of the economy, a valuing of STEM and a lessening of the humanities, a heavy focus on ‘skills’, and state-steering of systems ‘in the national interest’. The result is a disappearance of the horizon of humanity and being-human. Even the term ‘education’ is not much heard these days in the talk of skills, employability and work readiness.

However, no simple task of re-humanizing education awaits. Rather, the world is presenting grave challenges, including (but not only) those of the destruction of the natural environment and the emergence of AI, such that the idea of humanizing education takes on particular challenges. That prefix ‘re’ in ‘re-humanizing education’ has to do much heavy lifting, and point education in entirely new directions, both of realism and utopia. The idea of re-humanizing education can serve as a valuable provocation but serious research and scholarship, and practical and imaginative thinking are required if that idea is to promote educational strategies that are adequate for the challenged world of the mid-twenty-first century.

Biography

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at University College London Faculty of Education and Society, where he was a Pro-Director and Dean, and is the Emeritus President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society. He is a Fellow of the Academy for Social Sciences, the Society for Research into Higher Education, the Society for Educational Studies and the Higher Education Academy. He has produced around 40 books (many translated) and 200 papers and chapters, given 150 keynote talks in over 40 countries, and cited in the literature over 30,000 times. His edited books have included both co-edited and sole-authored volumes, and have attracted several book prizes. He has received an earned higher doctorate and an honorary doctorate and many national and international awards. He is a co-editor of two book series of major publishers and he currently supervises research students at the University of Bath.

Among his many current networks, he is Secretary of the newly-formed Global Forum for Re-Humanizing Education. He is often invited to participate in podcasts to share his thinking and ideas. His latest book is Realizing the Ecological University: Eight Ecosystems, Their Antagonisms and a Manifesto (Bloomsbury, September 2025).