"This book, with its attention to literature and the visual arts as well as traditional non-fiction sources, provides a distinctive, wide-ranging exploration of utopia and education. Utopia is examined not as a model of social perfection but as an active, ongoing, imaginative educational process the building of better worlds"-- "Better Worlds: Education, Art, and Utopia hopes to make a distinctive contribution to the international literature on education and utopia by drawing on sources sometimes neglected by other scholars, by combining insights from different thinkers in new ways, and by taking a fresh look at educational theorists who are already well known. In a number of our chapters, we try to show that dystopia and utopia are intertwined, and that both have significance for educationists. With much talk of crises over recent years--of economic, ecological, humanitarian, and other kinds--the time is now right, we believe, for a recovery of utopian discourses that have always been present, and for new thinking on alternative modes of being and living in the 21st century"--