Catastrophic Education: Saving the World with H. G. Wells

In this essay, I’d like to apply catastrophic speculation to education. While there is no world history that links a climatological event like the one in 535 A.D. to an educational catastrophe, there is perhaps the next best thing: a famous historian of the world who warned that if education around the world did not take another course, then catastrophe would be our fate. Writing arguably the first ever “world” history just after the closing days of the Great War, H. G. Wells speculated on the relationship between education and catastrophe—and engaged in public education as a way to avoid catastrophe. While in his fiction “catastrophe” was more like the fourth sense noted above (“A sudden disaster, wide-spread, very fatal, or signal”), in his non-fiction, as we shall see, it was more like the third sense (“An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things”). This essay unpacks these speculations by Wells as a warning from the past to the present about the geo-political role of education to our future. My own claim, something that I have written about on several occasions, is that education globally became “dark” in 2008 when the economic bubble burst. It is a darkness that continues through the present moment. Catastrophe gives us a way to see how the neoliberal educational failures of the present generation can and will impact the world for generations to come. Whereas Wells aimed to save the world from catastrophe through education, the present generation may not have the same opportunities. From the position of the Anthropocene, education may be too little too late to change the course of catastrophe—it may be that we just need to learn how live with catastrophe. But barring our biopolitical future as death drive, this essay aims to be a journey with Wells through catastrophic education: past, present, and future.